This is my last day as the intrepid reporter at Java One. The press room, which had become my home away from home, was closed. Instead of snarfing up the baked goods and looking for the secret stash of booze, I chatted with lots of interesting folks in the halls of Moscone, attended a couple of sessions, and pondered what it all meant.
The morning keynote was the
traditional toy show, presented by James Gosling, with a show-and-tell of
nifty Java software and even niftier hardware that is driven by Java,
spanning the range from a meat scale with a Swing UI to an unmanned
helicopter that takes spectacular terrain images. You can watch it here.
By the way, Sun is generously making the audio/video available at no charge to anyone. The general sessions are on the web now, and the technical presentations, including voice over, will be available in a couple of weeks. If you need access to the slides immediately, run
wget -r --user=Developer --password=JavaOne07 'http://www28.cplan.com/cc158/sessions_catalog.jsp?ilc=158-1&ilg=english&isort=&isort_type=&is=yes&icriteria1=+&icriteria2=+&icriteria7=&icriteria9=&icriteria8=&icriteria3='
on Ubuntu. (Elliotte Harold said it's --http-user and --http-password on Mac OS X. If you don't have either of these fine operating systems, use Cygwin.) Thanks to Neal Gafter for pointing out that my Groovy script can simply be replaced by the -r flag. (They say they'll turn the slide access off tonight, so either get it now or wait two weeks).
I went to the session that promised a three-way comparison of Rails, Grails, and JSF+JPA with NetBeans. I had high hopes for this session when we picked it. (I was on the selection committee—the first time that Sun had outside people participate in the selection process.) Unfortunately, I was not all that impressed with the actual presentation. We all know that Rails and Grails produce a basic CRUD application, and NetBeans can do the same thing. After all, how hard can it be to query the database for tables and make a bunch of CRUD screens? And, more to the point, so what? My users don't want an app that can update a database table. Can I easily transmute that CRUD application into the application that I really want, with login, a menu to the side, navigation trails, etc. etc.? The presenter didn't address that issue at all. Instead, he gave some performance data for the CRUD application.
Afterwards, I had a long discussion with Pavel Buzek of NetBeans about the pain points of using JSF. Here is my list:
Still, I see a lot of value in the components. I just can't get myself excited about loops that generate tr and td tags, which seems to be the level of sophistication that I get in Rails, Grails, or Phobos.
Pavel pointed out that Rails developers swear by the incremental coding cycle. They bring up a basic app, add a feature, test it immediately, add another feature, test it, all without ever restarting the server. I was dubious—after all, how long can it take to restart the server? But then it hit me. It isn't the startup time of the server. It is the mouse clicks that it takes to get back to the point of testing. Log in, visit a bunch of screens until you get back to the screen that you are working on. Ok, I do hate doing that over and over. I am not quite sure what it means to incrementally change an app that has stuff stored in a working session, but maybe it'll work out ok in most cases. I noticed that I can actually change an app while I debug it, but I never tried that either because I didn't want to think too hard what that meant. I'll have to reconsider.
We talked about Creator and why programmers didn't embrace it in large numbers. I felt trapped into a particular coding style that makes it really hard to move your app into another environment. It isn't a bad style, but it is idiosyncratic. Maybe if there was a JSF standard somewhat like the emerging JSR 296 for Swing, I'd buy into it. At any rate, it looks like the good parts of Creator are making their way into NetBeans.
Finally, I felt this was my chance to kvetch about my single biggest peeve with NetBeans: No workspaces. I have a dozen different Eclipse workspaces (for books, open source, college courses, etc.). Each has a separate set of coding conventions and libraries. Some of them contain a single project, others contain hundreds. (The Core Java and Core JSF workspaces have a project for every sample program.) Of course, a corporate developer doesn't care so much, but consultants, book writers, professors, etc. surely do, and they are in a position to convince lots of folks to give NetBeans a try. If you want workspaces in NetBeans, add a comment to this blog, and I'll make sure to let them know :-)
Martin Odersky gave a very nice introduction into Scala. I was sorry to see how poorly it was attended. Here is a language with a fresh perspective on so many things that are an issue with Java: Good generics, closures, modules for programming in the large, domain specific languages. Check it out and be amazed at the work of true professionals in language design. When Gosling designed Java, I felt that we got the best thinking on practical language design at the time (ok, except for synchronized and labeled breaks—perfection eludes even the demigods). Scala brings back that feeling, and it makes other languages that should not be named (such as Groovy) look rather amateurish.
BTW, Martin referenced Guy Steele's classic (1998) talk Growing a Language. If you have never read it, check it out—it is great fun, unlike some of the other links that I suggested solely to appear smart.
On the way out, I ran into Brian Goetz, Josh Bloch, and Neal Gafter; these are people who are much smarter than me, and they are paying attention to Scala.
We had an animated discussion about closures, annotations, and properties in the hallway. Something is likely to happen with all of these in some future version of Java, but it looks as if that might be Java 8 rather than Java 7. I think that's ok. It is better to get some experimental results and not rush into changes that one later regrets. Neal thinks that it is possible to fix up the biggest issues with Java generics by supporting reification. That would be a relief. He went on to give his closures presentation which I had already seen at SJSU, so I went home for a much needed nap.
Here is my take on the 12th Java One. It wasn't the most exciting Java One ever. The very first Java One was stunning. It was also a bit creepy. The show was run in parallel with the venerable Software Development conference. The SD exhibit hall was the usual freewheeling bunch of booths, but all Java One booths had the same yellow/red/blue color scheme, just like you'd imagine a trade show in North Korea.
The shows that introduced Java 2/EJB and Java 5/EJB 3 were very exciting because there were such big platform changes. The shows that focused on Java ME were particularly unremarkable—this may be my parochial US perspective where the telco oligopolies won't let you deliver your apps.
This show was somewhere in between. Four things impressed me:
1. The sleeper announcement was the completion of the open sourcing of Java. This is a hugely important event that we will all appreciate when, twenty years hence, we will still be laboring on in Java when other proprietary systems have come and gone.
2. Tooling has come of age. It takes the NetBeans and Eclipse folks months, not years, to bring us plugins for Ruby, Swing UI frameworks, etc. etc. We yawn when we see another NetBeans demo. There was a time when we all longingly looked at Microsoft's Visual Studio, but those days are gone.
3. We have not reached the end of history with language design. Having lots of scripting languages is not the answer.
4. The most important event in my
mind was Sun's renewed commitment to the desktop. Look at David Bock's interview
with Bob Brewin. It is now apparent to the top brass at Sun that there
are serious issues, both with a dated look and feel and with internet
delivery. Java FX Script is a great step forward for look and feel, but
there remains an awful lot of mundane engineering work to get rid of
freezing browsers, incomprehensible certificates, and the dreaded spinning
coffee cup. I truly hope that Sun will follow through and fix these
problems the old fashioned way, with blood,
toil, tears, and sweat.
Finally, I learned that reporting is hard. It is taking me a long time to write these blogs. The folks who write real newspaper articles every day, with all facts checked, on deadline, deserve great respect. I am glad to relinquish my title of intrepid reporter until the next Java One and go back to coding, teaching, and book writing.