Brett McLaughlin's Blog

Virtual Machine Archives

Ho Hum Java

I was into Java before it even hit 1.0. Back then, it was a clumsy language, but cool in all sorts of ways that C++ and assembler weren't. Writing a networked game took a few hours, rather than three weeks of all-night coding. And even though it was slow (man, it was slow), it was new, and cool, and sexy...

Then there were the Java 1.2 days, when somehow a simple HashMap was the greatest thing on the planet. I don't remember why I was so excited about those things--but J2EE and servlets and (ack!) JSPs and all sorts of interesting things were happening. Still very cool to be a Java guy. Books sold like wildfire, and life was grand.

I even remember 1.3. Proxies... it revolutionized the JBoss world, even though they had their own custom implementation. And 1.3 was fast. Exciting times. J2EE was bloated, but interesting, servlets were still cool, and people were starting to realize that scriptlets in pages are not good things. Still, cool to be a Java guy.

1.4... geez, I barely remember it. Boring. And 1.5? Yeah, it's interesting, and cool, and has all sorts of new things. I get all that--heck, I wrote the first Tiger book. But these were language features. Despite my earlier interest in Collections and proxies, where are the amazing things like servlets? Yeah, I know--there are portlets, there are things like Eclipse... I get all that.

But there's just something sort of boring about the Java space right now. Don't get me wrong--it's still my language of choice. It's still what I go for when I need something done, and I still have something like 3 or 4 Java books for every one of my other programming language books. But... it's not sexy anymore. It's like that hot girl in high school you knew, and then ran into the other day at Kroger, and thought... "Wow. What happened? I mean, she's still good-looking, but not like I remember!" Probably a sort of poor analogy, but it's the best one I've got.

So what's the deal? I mean, there is still juice around Java. I think of things like Groovy, which are cool (although I'm not the biggest fan of another scripting language)--but that's not really Java. It's sort of ancillary, right? And portlets look sort of cool... but nothing like servlets. (I'm sure I'm going to get all sorts of comments about how this project or that project is indeed super-cool.)

But, it's just not exciting. I'm written two books this year, and only one about Java. And I'll probably write two or three next year, and I bet only one will about Java. It's just not as cool--just not as fun. Someone, please, for God's sake, bring back Java Joy ;-) Give me the equivalent of a Head First book (and what it did for publishing) in the technology space. I need something mind-blowing...

By the way... I think gaming and JOGL and the like may be the cool kids. But they're still like 6 to 12 months out for mainstream.

Java a fad? Nope. But it sort of feels like it right now. And--really--who wants to be the last kid on the block still playing hula hoop?

Switched... then switched back... and then switched again

OK, I admit it. I'm a bit of a trend-happy person, at least in the computer world. When all the buzz around Mac OS X took off last year, I got pretty excited and jumped in full-steam. It helped that I was editing the first Java and Mac OS X title for O'Reilly (Mac OS X for Java Geeks), and so I took off for bluer... er... grayer... skies.

This was all pretty good; however, for the record, I was spending almost all my time on editing, adminstrative tasks, and the like. I point that out because it meant that I wasn't spending a ton of time in the command-line, and I was writing myself. Additionally, I wasn't using what turns out to be one my key applications - Logos, a pretty heavy-duty Bible software that I'm in for at least several hours a week. Further, I was playing with my audio toys (I run a ProTools rig), and graphics stuff like Photoshop and InDesign. So, to be fair, I was an ideal Mac user.

This all sounds good, until I started to return to some of those more common usage patterns. I began to be annoyed at having to use my poor lone PC desktop just to do Bible study, and suddenly ProTools took a backseat to programming and writing, tasks that I just wasn't comfortable on the Mac with. So, about 4 months ago, I got annoyed at the Option key, tired of missing my Alt+Tab, and generally fed up with the pulsing blue of Aqua. For reasons that are still odd to me, I decided to go with the other blue--Bill Gates' variety, often found with white text and an offending memory address on it.

For awhile, I was happy again; my old keyboard shortcuts worked, I could work with editors and authors with ease, and even found some nice spam and related hacks to avoid Inbox clogs; thanks to the authors of Windows XP Hacks for almost all of this. The occasional work in InDesign or Photoshop was done on my Mac OS X desktop, and generally, life seemed good.

Then, last week, I went out to California to an O'Reilly editors meeting. Nothing big there, right? Well, that's what I thought. Halfway through the week, I got a call from a buddy I did some freelance design for, and he needed some documents changed pronto. Of course, they were in InDesign, which I didn't have on my PC laptop, and of course I hadn't bothered to pack up my OS X desktop for an editors meeting (sic). That quickly got annoying... at the same time, I was needing to use secure FTP to throw some files on an O'Reilly server. Of course, you can't simply type 'sftp' in a Windows command prompt (or 'ssh', or 'ls', or... well, you get the idea). So now, I'm really steamed. Then, I spent over an hour trying to get a 1.4.x JDK working on my laptop, because the stupid installer didn't want to cooperate with my anti-spam program. UGGHHH!

In short, I had to have everything on one machine, had to have back my Unix-style command-line, and didn't care what it took to get there. As I weighed PC vs. Mac, Mac vs. PC, it didn't hurt to see that it cost well over $1000 to get my Mac OS X Adobe programs in a PC version... when I'd already paid for them on the Mac last year. Add to that the fact that you can't run Mac programs on a PC well, but that VirtualPC lets you easily run PC programs on a Mac, and I was sold.

Endgame: Three days later, I'm back on my TiBook, complete with tons of slick toys (thanks again to the Hacks guys: Mac OS X Hacks. I'm installing Windows XP on Virtual PC now, have already done work on a new book, edited old books, gotten my mail to show up color-coded again, and even took out my Unix tools for dinner and a movie. Needless to say, I can't imagine why I ever went to Windows in the first place. We'll see what I'm doing in six months, but it looks like the biggest change for me right now is upgrading to Panther, and the OS can stay put :-)

Happy in Waco, Brett ;-)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.