Erik Hatcher's Blog

June 2003 Archives

My (belated) JavaOne Summary

• Monday

  Immediately after arriving to my hotel, I was wisked away to the top-secret war room where many of us set up the first pieces of Javapedia.

  In the evening I had dinner with the jGuru folks, including Tom Burns, John Mitchell, Alex Chaffee, and Ian Mcfarland (along with some others, please forgive me for leaving you out - let me know who I missed). My friends Jonathan Simon and Cos Difazio were also there. Later in the evening we had another interesting guest join us.

• Tuesday

  We use a commercial O/R tool at work. I went by Damodar's Sys-Con radio interview and had a nice chat afterwards with him.

  I briefly met with my friends Paul Perrone and Tom Schwenk, co-authors of the new J2EE Developer's Handbook, which is one hefty piece of work!

  I went by the Java Technology Achievement Awards party, but was way under dressed so didn't stay long :).

• Wednesday

  I stopped by the bookstore to lend support to a fellow Manning author, Patrick Linskey, who was doing a Bitter EJB book signing.

  Later, I stopped by the JavaWorld booth to pick up the Editor's Choice Awards. I picked up the ones for Ant being the Most Useful Java Community-Developed Technology winner and our book as Best Java Book finalist.

  Finally, I did my own Sys-Con Radio interview, where you can clearly hear I need practice (the interview spot was very noisy, so I misunderstood the first question to be confirming my bio).

• Thursday

  Jonathan Simon and I had dinner with David Wheeler. It was nice to get some non-Java tech chat going to counter-balance the "j" overload of the week! David's Bricolage project is doing exceptionally well.

• Friday

  I visited the Muir Woods - darn big trees.

Open Source versus Commercial Software

After reading this blog, I was reminded of something I wanted to post last week. I came across a blog last week (I cannot remember where I found it - was it a java.net blog? or elsewhere? Post a link in the comments if you know which one I mean). The blog entry mentioned going to the CocoBase booth and asking them about how they compare to Hibernate and other technologies. So I tried it myself to see if I'd get the same results. The lady at the booth told me how bad open source was, how their support was better, and how I'd be in real trouble if I chose an open source O/R API. She's telling this to me - an Ant and XDoclet committer! Haha! So I had to let her have it a little and asked her to please tell me what features CocoBase had that were technically better than Hibernate. She said "you'll have to talk to one of our technical folks for that info". I left the booth shaking my head.

I'm sure most vendors are not this close minded, and I hope she does not represent her companies take on their product versus open-source. Her attitude certainly turned me off from digging into their product (and yes, we are actually actively shopping for new O/R solutions!). If your sales pitch is that open-source is bad, but you've got nothing better to offer, count me out.

Update: I Google'd up the blog entry I had seen last week and found it here. I've since gotten some interesting e-mail from THOUGHT, Inc. I've asked the person to post to this blog or allow me to paste the comments here. Watch this space!

Ain't Java great?!

• http://sex.net/
• http://sex.com/

Scripting language support

Follow up to the scripting languages JSR-223... I must emphasize my dissatisfaction with the web-only nature of the scripting language support initiative. One of the biggest issues I have with JSP is that it is intimately tied to the HTTP request and response. Velocity comes to the rescue (and I'm sure there are other alternatives - please add them to the comments below). Once upon a time the Velocity team even considered submitting it as a JSR.

To the JSR-223 team: please consider broadening the design to allow for scripting hooks in plain ol' J2SE - this will allow us to have a standard way to do things like the following:

• Send templated e-mails (something which we've used Velocity for)
• Generating static templated files, such as a static HTML view of my personal blog (again, I'm using Velocity currently).
• Custom code generators. Stuart Halloway has a code generation example using JSP in his wonderful book, and I suspect he did it this way to keep to pure out-of-the-box Java rather than introducing a third-party tool like Velocity. His example required he run the code generator in a web browser, and cut and paste the results to their final destination.
• I'd like to see more integration with scripting languages to control business rules, allowing run-time flexibility.
• And much more, I'm sure (leave your uses scripting within Java in the comments below)

Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v

I went to Joshua Bloch's and Neal Gafter's More Programming Puzzlers session. It was fantastic! I won't embarrass myself with how many of the ten puzzlers I got wrong. One piece of advice Bloch gave was to "copy-and-paste" declarations to avoid issues with mis-overridden methods like this:

    public class Name {
        public boolean equals(Name o) { ... }
        // hashCode omitted
    }

The error is that the equals method of Object is not really overridden because the signature should be public boolean equals(Object o).

I think the advice of copy-and-paste really should be more along the lines of "use great tools". In IntelliJ IDEA, for example, I'd simply hit Ctrl-o, select the equals method under Object, and press return - voila, method signature created automatically. In fact, several mistakes that were pointed out in this presentation could be avoided with the right tools.

Day Two Key"notes" - Take it up to Eleven

The comedy by Don McMillan was great!

It was announced that HP and Dell will be shipping Java on new PC's. Its about time. Being a Mac "switcher", I really appreciate having all the tools readily available. Another interesting HP tidbit is that IntelliJ is hyping that the web services team at HP standardized on IDEA. I stopped by the jetBrains booth yesterday and just said "THANK YOU!" and told the sales guy there that I wanted his job, because it can't be hard to sell a product that sells itself like that.

JSR 223 was new to me. I was excited until I went to look up the details and see that its for the web/servlet arena only. Huh? Shouldn't this be available in J2SE as well so that Ruby, Python, JavaScript, etc get tighter support within Java? Tim O'Reilly gave a great talk about it, making the analogy to The Mechanical Turk. Great analogy, except for the whole web-only nature of this JSR.

Project Rave, aka Visual Studio, looked slick and long overdue - although I cringe thinking of using wizards to create Java code and then being stuck having to rip out most of it to get it to do what I really want (flashbacks to my MS programming days).

Demos breaking - while its happened to me, its embarrassing and really a bad thing that should not happen. I understand it happens, but we need to work for things working right the first time. Seems a counter-intuitive thought to test driven development, perhaps - but there are never second chances for a first impression. Perhaps I should elaborate on this thinking a bit more in another entry.

Compatibility and Standards is being hyped pervasively. This seems to be emphasizing Sun keeping control of Java (rather than the underground wishes of it being open-sourced). I'm certainly open-source savvy, but I also agree with Sun's stance on Java and keeping it "controlled". This is not an oppressive control - its a nurturing control. And with java.net it should be clear that Sun has good intentions.

And finally, Gosling launched t-shirts into the audience with a trebuchet!

Tai Chi in the Park

I got an earlier start to JavaOne this morning and found that the nice park by Moscone is a haven for tai chi / qigong training in the morning. Nice! Tomorrow morning I will be out there at day break to join in. Anyone care to join me?

Being healthy while coding is key!

Taking a REST

Paraphasing, this is the quote that stuck out from this presentation: REST architectures tend to be resilient to changes.

I must admit to being much more fond of the REST side of things. URL's matter to me. I'm mainly speaking about URL's that users see - they should be elegant and meaningful. For computer to computer URL's and Web Services, its a different story.

I can't get there from here

So, last night I decide to plan my first day at JavaOne. I pull out the thin Conference Schedule and Program Guide Addendum. Excellent - it has a calendar for Tuesday's sessions schedule, nicely formatted. The word "REST" pops out at me - thats a session (TS-3163) I want to attend. But it'd be nice to see who the speaker is and the abstract of the talk. Being the semi-clever guy that I am, I whip out the Program Guide to look up more details. I thought for sure I'd be able to just scan alphabetically through the guide and find that session number. Huh? No such luck. I go back to the schedule book and find a cross-reference which has the alphabetical/numerical ordered list which provides a Topic Number. Ummm.... ok.... now I have a topic number (Five) for this session. Back to the Program Guide to find the topic "Five". You would think that with a topic number and a session number that this would be enough information to find the info I desired. Not so fast.... within the topic Five area of the Program Guide, the sessions are alphabetized by the session title (which I just noticed while writing this rant). Sheesh.

Please, just give me a single piece of paper that has the full session schedule complete with speaker name, room location, and a brief abstract.

JavaOne Bloggin'

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