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Don't spend your money on my kids

Posted by daniel on May 17, 2005 at 10:21 AM EDT

Note to companies targeting developers

You can tell that tech is picking up somewhat because the swag at trade shows has been improving. This is a great place for me to pick up little things for my kids. They especially love the items that light up when you use them - pens, balls, yo yos, you name it. But I give these things to them and then I never see them again. I don't use or buy a product because of these items and I don't avoid a product with a booth not giving these away.

It's not that I want companies to stop giving stuff away, I would rather they consider the places that they are not spending their money where it might make sense to do so.

I was at our local JUG meeting last week and the presenter was about two slides in when he told us that the demo was coming but that it didn't really work well on his machine. He clearly dreaded the demo he was about to give because he spent an extraordinary amount of time on slides about APIs and sequence diagrams. It came time for the demo and. as he promised, it didn't work well on his machine. I'm trying not to specify who he was or what company he worked for because that really isn't the point. He had an application that launched and barely responded to the cursor moving on the screen.

The problem was in the video card for the laptop he was demoing on. He bravely pushed on to the second part of his talk. This was on another technology which, unfortunately could not be demoed on his machine. Now there is a good side and a bad side to that. We've all been wowed by slick demos which glossed over some serious issues in the underlying architecture. I'm ok with a developer demo with some warts but the demo should convey a sense of the technology being described.

Back of a napkin estimate: his salary, benefits, and travel budget for the year is somewhere in the $150K - $200K range. If he faces customers twice a week that's one hundred presentations a year. Buy him a two thousand dollar machine. Spend your marketing dollars on the people you are trying to market to and not on their kids.

Weblogs, Arun Gupta blogs about Indigo Duplex Bindings. He writes that they "enable a bi-directional communication between client and service endpoint. This entry explains, along with source code and generated code, how duplex binding can be achieved. I still do not understand complete magic though, yet!"

Mohamed Abdelaziz reports that JXME on CDC? maybe closer than you think. " In anticipation of JSR 218 reference implementations becoming available soon, the JXME protocol is being updated to provide JXTA edge functionality over CDC 1.1 and the foundation profile."

Kohsuke Kawaguche shares his experience working on Compiling MathML with JAXB 2.0. " This morning I saw that one of our beloved JAXB users :-) is having a trouble compiling MathML with JAXB 2.0. This is the record of my trouble-shooting this, in the hope that this will be useful to others who face similar issues in MathML or other schemas. "

In Also in Java Today , Jay at JavaRSS.com has written an article showing how he is using AJAX to make his site more dynamic. Test out the example by heading to his site and mousing over the links (some browsers worked better than others). In AJAX in Action he shows how to use AJAX to load a page dynamically when the user mouses over various parts of the page. This reduces load time as he no longer is preloading all of the descriptions in the event of a mouseover. HIs sequence diagram shows where the JavaScript code sits in relation to his JSP code.

Mr. Ed reports on his recent frustrations in interviewing for a job by listing all of the things that an interviewer could possibly do wrong in his post Interview with a Sociopath. Although most everyone responding agrees that he describes the situation accurately, they are split between those who think the practices do what they are intended to do and those who agree with the author that they are bad practices.

In Projects and Communities, do you wish Swing had an easy-to-use date picker, a tree-table, or an image panel? The JavaDesktop Community project SwingX adds these extensions to Swing, along with convenience components like in-place editing for JLists, translucency for JPanels, and an easier-to-use grouping scheme for JRadioButtons.

The Mac Java Community page links to some help from Scott Schram's weblog about Java Tiger on Mac Tiger: Endorsed Trouble, which describes a problem that can occur when the new J2SE 5.0 for Mac OS X updates shared archives, if you've put jar files in the lib/endorsed directory.

Sdp asks about Tree navigation in today's Forums. "I was wondering if there was a way for class generated by JAXB2 to find its parent in the data tree? I'm trying to write functions to find the target of an XPath reference. To resolve a relative path I need to be able to move both up and down the data tree created by the unmarshalling."

Bcbeck reports that he "spent many months working on the project to change the version number from 1.5 to 5.0 [..] We tried to find all the places where the version number was intended for end users to see and change those places. Then we tried to find all the places where the version number was parsed by other programs and leave those alone. While it has left us with this dual numbering situation which can be confusing in some cases, we felt the tradeoff with compatibility was worth it."

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Note to companies targeting developers
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