Kito D. Mann's Blog

April 2006 Archives

JavaOne BOF: Evolving a Web Application Architecture

This year, I'm pleased to be hosting another BOF session at JavaOne in San Francisco next month (May 16-19). The BOF (#2311) is entitled "Evolution of a Web Application Architecture". Here's the abstract:

This session explores the evolution of JSFCentral.com, a community site focused on JavaServer™ Faces technology. The session explores the development of the site, focusing on specific trade-offs and design choices. It follows the evolution of the site's architecture through four distinct stages: 1. A pure HTML site published via XML and XSLT 2. A JavaServer Pages™ (JSP™) technology site generated through XML and XSLT 3. A combination JavaServer Faces technology and pure JSP technology generated through XML and XSLT 4. A portlet-based site using JSF and portal features

Specific challenges, such as maintaining site stability and URLs are covered.

This BOF will consist of a presentation interspersed with suggestions gained from the development experience. It will end with an open discussion of different approaches for evolving architectures.

Of course, JSF Central isn't currently running inside of a portal quite yet. But we're working on it :-).

At any rate, the session will be held on May 17th in room Metro 1, and starts at 9:30pm. Last year, I had a late BOF that was jam-packed (everyone couldn't fit in). I'm not convinced it'll be quite as full this year, but if you're at JavaOne and you're interested, please stop by!

Job Stats, Indeed

So, I recently ran across an excellent job search site called Indeed.com. It's one of these hip new vertical search engines, with a focus on jobs, of course. One of Indeed's best features is its Job Trends graph. Type in a search term, and you get a graph of the percentage of matching job posts since March 1st of last year. Indeed can even compare multiple terms on the same graph.

Since I'm pretty heavily immersed in the world of Java web frameworks, I had to run the following query:

((jsf and java) or "javaserver faces" or "java server faces"), ruby on rails, tapestry and java, webwork

(Since JSF also stands for "Joint Strike Fighter", you have to qualify it :-)).

Here are the results:

So, what does this tell us? JSF is doing pretty well, thank you much. And Ruby on Rails? It's growing extremely fast. Note that just about any graph will show a dip at the beginning of the year.

So, what about Struts and JSF?

((jsf and java) or "javaserver faces" or "java server faces"), struts

Inertia is a powerful thing.

And what about all of these other frameworks like Wicket and Rife:

wicket and java, rife and java

It's a different order of magnitude, but it's interesting to see that there are jobs that actually mention Wicket and Rife.

What's important to note is that job postings often contain multiple terms. For example, if you search for rife and java today, the same job shows up from three different sources with the JSP, JSF, Struts, Spring, Tiles, and Rife all included as "Java based technologies".

So, let's compare this to "java", and just pretend that the postings aren't about the coffee or the island:

Note that we're now getting into the single digits -- finally. And what about other languages?

java, c#, c++, perl, visual basic

Let's look at a few languages with smaller percentages:

delphi, ruby, python

It's too bad Borland killed off Delphi (figuratively).

Fun stuff, indeed.

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