Edward Ort's Blog: March 2007 Archive

I'm here with more than 500 other attendees at the 5th annual TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas. It's an easy trip from my house to the Venetian Hotel where the Symposium is happening. Yes, just like Penn and Teller, Wayne Newton, and a large number of exotic dancers who work at our many fine "Gentleman's Clubs," I live and work in Las Vegas. Coming to an event like TheServerSide Symposium gives me an opportunity to rub elbows with real live enterprise developers -- the men and women in the trenches trying to turn entity beans, JSF components, and Ajax into web sites that do something useful.

Even the welcoming session for this event led by Joseph Ottinger, Editor-in-chief of TheServerSide.com, and Nitin Bharti, Editorial Director, gave me some interesting insights. They took an instant audience poll of a few things related to the audience's use of enterprise tools and technologies. A keypad was available in front of each person in the audience to vote. One question was "What tools do you use most?" The choices included Sun Studio, NetBeans, IBM Rational Application, Eclipse, and some others. It wasn't surprising to me that Eclipse won the vote. But what surprised me was by how much. Eclipse had more than twice as many votes as the other choices. I realize that NetBeans is gaining vis-a-vis Eclipse in mindshare and usage, but at least for this audience Eclipse is still king. Another question was "What tasks have you begun investigating?" Here the choices included Java EE 5, Java SE 5, Solaris DTtrace, and some others. AJAX got the biggest vote here with Java EE 5 and Java SE 5 running second and third.

I liked this instant polling approach. This is something that might be worthwhile to do at the JavaOne Conference.

Tools You Can't Live Without and the Soviet Bread Line

Posted by edort on March 24, 2007 at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is my second blog entry from the ServerSide Java Symposium. In my first blog I ended with the statement that I've already learned a few things and hope to learn a lot more. Well I did. What I learned over the next few hours was that if you're going to do Ajax applications, you better have good tools. I also learned that channeling almost 600 people through two lunch buffet lines makes for a pretty long wait to get food.

O.K. O.K., the second of those items seems pretty grouchy. Actually I did pick up some interesting things, some of which came in a technical talk, enticing titled " Ajax and JavaScript: Down and Dirty." What I expected here was a heavy duty technical talk -- delving deep into code. Indeed there were some code examples, but I found the talk high level enough to come way with some general notions about how to effectively develop Ajax applications.

The speaker for this session was Justin Gehtland. Justin is the co-founder of a consultancy called Relevance, the author of several books, an in-demand speaker, and also the developer of an open-source development framework called Streamlined.

Justin mentioned a number of things that were particularly interesting to me. Some of them are:

90% of all Ajax applications started out as standard HTML applications.
Under the hood, Ajax is just a web request that doesn't force a page to refresh itself.
There are two radically different concerns that you need to have when you develop an Ajax application: what the client looks like and what you put across the wire.
If you're an Ajax developer there are a set of tools you can't afford not to have.

Yup -- he used the dreaded double negative in that statement, but Gehtland made an excellent point. If you don't have the right tools for developing Ajax apps, you're not going to do Ajax apps -- at least not well or quickly. Gehtland said that Firefox is a must-have tool (at least for him) " because it has the best 'toys' for developers." Gehtland said that IE is catching up, but other tools such as Safari are nowhere close. And what are those toys? Gehtland listed these:

Firebug. This tool allows you to see what messages get sent to the server and what the server sends back. Gehtland said that this is a very important feature because sometimes in testing you get no results so you really need to see what's going on under the covers. Firebug also has a JavaScript debugger and an HTML inspector. Gehtland said "If I didn't have Firebug I'd just give up."
Cross check. This is an open-source toolkit that has an emulation environment for every major browser. Gehtland pointed out that the biggest problem in testing JavaScript code is that no two runtime environments for JavaScript are alike. Cross check solves that problem because of its emulators.
Web developer toolbar. This toolbar provides a variety of neat functions such as editing CSS in place and validating HTML.

Gehtland also spent a good amount of time in this talk covering the three things that can be sent back across the wire in response to a JavaScript request: HTML, structured data such as JSON, and JavaScript. He also discussed when to use each of these approaches and why.

Build Open Source, Make Money

Posted by edort on March 23, 2007 at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's Day 2 of TheServerSide Java Symposium. I attended two good technical sessions this morning -- one on the Tango project and the other on Project Dynamic Faces. The interoperability marriage of the "House of Microsoft" and the "House of Sun" (wow, I just had a flashback to a great oldies tune called "The House of the Rising Sun") as exemplified by the work in Project Tango is quite interesting. So too is the marriage of Ajax and JSF represented by Project Dynamic Faces. Those two marriages are depthy enough to each warrant their own pithy blogs. But I won't do that here. I encourage you to find out more about the Tango project on the Tango Project page. Or go to Arun Gupta's blog. Arun was the presenter for the Tango session, formally titled "JAX-WS and WSIT Tangoing with .NET." The prime mover in Project Dynamic Faces is Ed Burns -- who gave a talk titled "Enterprise Grade Ajax and JSF." You can find out about Dynamic Faces on the JSF Extensions page. Or see Ed Burns's blog.

What I'd like to talk about here is an excellent (I thought) lunchtime panel discussion that focused on the business side of open source.

See SPOT Run

Posted by edort on March 22, 2007 at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Karen Tegan Padir is Sun's Vice President of Enterprise Java Platforms. I've never heard her speak before today. That's a shame because I found her to be an engaging and enthusiastic speaker. In an interesting anecdote Karen underscored how far we've come in the Internet age. She recalled how excited she was when she first got the ability at Digital Equipment Corporation to send emails. Ready to test this new and wonderful feature she sent an email to her father who was a sales executive at DEC. A short time later she got a call from her father saying that he got the email and was replying -- by phone!

Karen focused a lot of her talk on Sun's strong strides toward openness and its long term commitment to standardization. She noted that last year Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz announced that everything Sun develops will be open source. I've been very close to some of those open source efforts such as the GlassFish community that's delivered the open source GlassFish Application Server. I'm also aware of the Open JDK community that is working on an open source implementation of the JDK. But I wasn't aware of some of the other open source projects that have been initiated by Sun. Karen mentioned a number of these:

Open Solaris. A community collaborating on open source Solaris technologies.
Open DS. An community building an open source directory service.
Open SSO. A community working on an open source implementation of single sign on.
Portal Open Source. A community building an open source Portal Server implementation.

You can find out more about these projects on java.net.

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