 |
Active disrespect
Posted by daniel on July 29, 2004 at 08:07 AM | Comments (9)
During his OSCon keynote yesterday, Tim O'Reilly posted a graph of book sales in each technology category. O'Reilly pointed out that Java books were on top. No reaction from the crowd. Then he pointed out that their sales have been declining. The crowd applauded.
The night before, author Paul Graham said that there is only one good hacker who programs in Java. He paused for the applause and then added, outside of Sun there are none.
I know that this is a self-selecting group, but the Java community hosts many open source projects. The message seemed to be, no matter what you do you're still not one of us if your code is written in Java. In a panel discussion on this issue, Tim O'Reilly made the observation that "Sun often doesn't get the credit because they hold back just enough that people throw rocks at them. They've done 99% of the work that would make people happy. " At JavaOne last month Rob Gingell asked for clarification on what it means to "open source". He observed that there's no point in doing all the work to do what Sun thinks is open sourcing Java, to find out that that isn't what the community considers open source.
Danese Cooper provides her notes from the OSCon panel
in today's
Weblogs. If you were there, feel free to supplement her report, The Java debate at OSCon.
Daniel Brookshier celebrates Graduation Day in the Education and Learning Comunity. He recognizes the Cooperative Visual Environment and the Tspell project.
N. Alex Rupp reports that the recent release of Drools contains a change that has made Drools JSR-94 compliant and an order of magnitude faster.
In Also in Java Today , Andrew J. Bradfield has written a tip on "using Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) to register Web services for application-level consumption. The author provides detailed code samples and an extension API based on the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration for Java (UDDI4J) API" in his developerWorks article Develop a UDDI Java application for Web services registered within a UDDI registry.
Raghu Donepudi begins his devX article by asserting " Though Swing appeased some developers with its look-and-feel, the interfaces one could build with it still lacked the right look and its performance did not meet the requirements of large-scale, industrial-strength applications." SWT Creates Fast, Native-looking GUIs for Your Java Apps begins as a partisan look at SWT and ends with a quick catalog of the available components.
In today's
Forums, Ron Hitchens kicks of Item 23
Check parameters for validity. "Common sense," he says. "But how often have you seen code that doesn't sanity check its parameters? Do you validate the parameters of all the public methods you write?"
Marc responds to adding too much structure too early because you prefer interfaces to abstract classes. He writes " I once worked at a place where many of the objects were defined like this: PersonInterface, AbstractPerson, PersonImpl. If you're not writing a public API and have access to all the places where the abstract class is used, does it really matter that much? Is it that hard to introduce an interface later? "
As for function pointers, Ashley Herring writes "Method invocation through interfaces is not always possible and a 'function pointer' design is required. For instance, for controller logic in MVC code you may want to route certain action events in the view to certain methods in the controller."
In Projects and Communities, The Safari search plug-in currently works with Eclipse version 2.1.3 and will soon be available in version 3.0. Now, without leaving the IDE, the developer can type in the keywords in the Safari search window and execute a search on the Safari library.
Java-Source.Net is a new directory of open source java software with categories such as CMS applications, Portals, Workflow Engines, Web Frameworks, PDF Libraries, and Code Coverage.
In today's java.net News Headlines
:
Registered users can submit news items for the java.net News Page using
our news submission
form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site. You can also subscribe to
thejava.net
News RSS feed.
Current and upcoming
Java Events
:
Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission
form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being
posted to the site.
Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the
Java
Today RSS feed. Also, once this page
is no longer featured as the front page of
java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.
Bookmark blog post:  del.icio.us  Digg  DZone  Furl  Reddit
Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment
-
Disrespect or Fear?
I have the pleasure to know many open source hackers, and in my experience, many are ardently pro-Linux, and really enjoy playing with the low-level details.
I suspect Java represents an affront to their sensibilities in two arenae:
1. Java is geared toward higher-level development, an excellent and runtime library is already provided, in which modification is frowned upon, under the principle of WORA.
1. Java minimizes the importance of the operating system. Now Java hackers can write for Linux, (and even Mac) without 'paying their dues'.
I believe it's a culture clash, and unfortunately I think only one viewpoint will survive; at the expense of the other. I'd place my bet on Java though, as it's never been easy to stop the march of progress.
Posted by: cajo on July 29, 2004 at 02:24 AM
-
reluctantly choosing Java
One of my students recently blogged our reasons for choosing Java over Python for a web application. In a nutshell, we all prefer Python as a language, but for a variety of reasons, none of the Python web app frameworks (or object/relational mapping layers) are anywhere near as mature, well-documented, or stable as Tapestry, Hibernate, and equivalent Java offerings. We therefore (reluctantly) went with Java.
Her posting is at http://pyre.third-bit.com/hippoblog/archives/000058.html.
Comments would be welcome.
Posted by: gvwilson on July 29, 2004 at 06:45 AM
-
Two artifically separated communities, rather than one
Java is not particularly sexy, as academic programming languages go, but as a platform, it's quite useful thanks to a massive amount of open source code written for it. The trouble is that that the nice open source written in Java is separated from the nice open source code not written in Java by the requirement of a non-open source runtime environment. That makes it useless for many people outside the 'java-only' camp.
Artificial separation creates frustration. That frustration makes some people oversee the amount of good work Sun is doing on other fronts (OOo, GNOME, ...), and the steps that are happening with respect to liberalizing the Java(TM) platform itself (TCK scholarship, JCP 2.6, ...).
The way Microsoft promotes .net, and actively works with .net implementors, shows that Microsoft has realized how the two open-source communities are separated, and one is up for grabs. Microsoft would like to keep them that way, and turn Java into another legacy platform.
I think Sun deserves some respect for all their good work, and a bit of slack for their ocassionally irritating PR[1]. Given enough time, I'm confident Sun will decide to contribute to bringing the two open source communities together, rather then contribute to keeping them separate. It may even make business sense one day.
cheers,
dalibor topic
[1] The current 'Sun Microsystems vs. the Red Hat Social Movement' campaign, for example.
Posted by: robilad on July 29, 2004 at 08:03 AM
-
Java's image problem
In my opinion the problem is simple enough -- Java has been too successfully branded as an entreprise language. A new Cobol. Useful, productive, with large and good libraries; but sexy as a brick.
Add to that the performance stigma (whether Java has performance problems now or not doesn't matter; it used to have them, that's all that counts), the idiosyncratic and clumsy look and feel of Java desktop applications, and the way Sun's alienated the open source ideologists by refusing to give them Java.
Note that C++ has, for a large part, that very same stigma. Most open source hacks are still done in C or Perl...
To raise the level a bit... What does it matter if Java's the geeks' language of choice or not? Java's primarily an entreprise language; it's here to stay. But it's only a tool. I don't feel the need to be adored by geeks because of what I do to, at the end of the day, put bread on my table in a not unpleasant way.
If "they" don't like "us", it's their loss. End of story.
S.
Posted by: schambon on July 29, 2004 at 06:44 PM
-
Disrespect or Fear?
That's certainly part of it.
A larger part I think is a religious zeal to diss everything that doesn't fall under their own limited definition of "free" (meaning GPL).
Basically, according to the zealouts, if it's not strict GPL it is an abomination.
Posted by: jwenting on July 29, 2004 at 06:48 PM
-
Disrespect or Fear?
I totally disagree.
As a small-time Linux kernel hacker and full-time Java developer, the one thing that frustrates me to no end is the one-way communication channel with Sun. It's like I'm waiting for the wizard in the high tower hiding behind anonymous/fake accounts to find some cycles to deal with us peasants down below.
F.E. The autocasting mechanism has bugs that casts int to Float. The JWS security system has been totally broken between 1.5.0beta2 and 1.5.0beta3 (up to build 59). IMHO all of the mechanisms available to even report on these issues are completely broken.
If there is a clash, it's a communication issue. With Linux, I can _email_ the right folks and the problem will be fixed. It's the deliberate barriers Sun places in the way that lose information and prevent communication that are the most painful problems.
Posted by: markswanson on July 29, 2004 at 11:07 PM
-
It's not a bug, unless there is a category for it
Kafkaesque is the term that springs to mind. I've tried submitting a bug/RFE that Bug Parade is broken due to the transparency issues you cite. It can be found on the forums but not on Bug Parade itself. Evidently there is a policy to reject any bug/RFE that request a better process.
So, under the current process can only be changed from within, since requests to make it better are rejected as a matter of policy. The most frustrating part is that opening the porcess further wouldn't strip any intellectual property rights from Sun. It would only allow them to produce better results more quickly for less money.
Posted by: coxcu on August 01, 2004 at 12:35 PM
-
Not quite what he said...
Actually, Paul Graham said that of all the hackers he knows only one uses Java, and that of all the hackers he knows outside of Sun none use Java. The he knows is rather key, since another key point of his talk was that you can't really tell if a person is a good hacker unless you work with them. Since Paul is a Lisp hacker, it's unlikely that he's worked with all that many Java people, so the fact that he doesn't know any really good Java hackers isn't all that surprising.
So yes, Paul doesn't like Java very much, no surprise there, but he's not really saying "there are no good hackers who use Java", like you seem to imply.
Posted by: rooneg on August 02, 2004 at 03:49 AM
-
Does jaxr specification support UDDI VERSION 3 specifications, if not when will it be available?
Posted by: hezbai on March 20, 2006 at 11:09 PM
|
java.net RSS Feeds
