Fire by the Fireside

Payback
JavaOne 2003 was a breakthrough event for me. Being my fifth JavaOne, I felt that it was time to start sharing my Java experience with other JavaOne attendees. So our group at ASIX, Inc. open sourced our framework for complex client-side Java development and created proposals for sessions and BOFs that we submitted for JavaOne 2003. The one session about our open source project JuiPiter was accepted as an alternate. So we came to JavaOne this year as backup speakers. This change of roles brought me to JavaOne with a new attitude. It was time to give back to JavaOne for all of the awesome content that it has provided to me over the years.

Fireside Explosion
With good intentions of asking my standard question, “When will the Java team start writing libraries to assist in business application development?”, I attended the pre-conference Fireside Chat. The Fireside Chat gives alumni the chance to converse with the builders of Java. I love meeting the folks behind Java at Sun, I feel that they are some of the nicest and most brilliant people on the planet. But even they can not solve all of our problems for us. As usual, the panel hinted at upcoming features and announcements and the audience asked the standard questions. The “What are you going to do for me?” attitude of the audience slowly brought me to a boil and I shot off some steam.

At the past four Fireside Chats I have asked the same question, “What is Sun doing to make building rich clients for business applications easier and better with Java than what was possible with PowerBuilder or Forte some years ago?”. Having never received a helpful answer, I continued to ask again year after year. Last year I realized that it was not Sun's problem to fix, it was mine! Our team had a problem and we needed to not only fix it for ourselves, but push it out as open source in hopes of fixing similar problems for others in the Java community.

Community
We say the Java community, but how many of us participate in it to make it a true community? I “Caught the Fire” at the Fireside chat this year and I am going to pass it on to you.

Instead of just walking away disgusted, I stood-up at the end of the Fireside chat and gave an impassioned speech. I realized later that I ripped off JFK as you could condense the speech to, “Ask not what Sun can do for you, but what you can do for the Java Community”.

The only way to push Java forward it to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. We must share useful code and techniques so that others can learn from and build upon our experience. If you build or have built a useful library or tool publish it in source or cookbook fashion. Only then can we pull ourselves out of the past and into the future with Java.

Get Fired Up
Danese Cooper, Sun's Open Source Diva, decided to give me a voice and set me up with this blog, see Catching Up
You will be hearing more from me soon, until then “Catch the Fire” by getting involved with java.net and pass on your experience to others.

Lance B. Young
Senior Java Architect
ASIX, Inc.