Conference in a Castle

It's already time for the first conference of the year. I think this is the earliest start I've ever had. I'm speaking this weekend at the Javagruppen Arskonference conference, conducted in the Hindsgavl castle in Denmark. I heard about this conference from colleagues last year -- they had a blast, so I'm looking forward to it. I'm doing 2 talks, both on Domain Specific Languages (Theory and Practice). This will be my first trip to Denmark so, given my love of traveling to new places, should prove to be a fun trip.

Can I Get Some Rails at this Boutique?

At the Newark No Fluff, Just Stuff show last year, someone from Java Boutique interviewed speakers during the course of the symposium. It was the end of the day and he was still missing some of the speakers, so he decided he would just interview us together. The hot topic of the conference was Ruby on Rails. Thus, myself and two of the people I respect most, Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland (from Relevance), talked for about 20 minutes about Ruby, Rails, and Java. The interview is just now out at the Java Boutique web site. It's sometimes interesting what you say when you are tired, hungry, and sitting next to 2 brilliant people. Upon reflection, I like the bit about the bicycle (which I made up on the spot and forgot until I re-read this interview).

Pervasive Search

One of my good friends has a great expression when he sees some really cool technology goodie that we'll get "Real Soon Now": "I want to live there!".

One of the touted features of the next version of Windows is pervasive search, or search at the operating system level. I was skeptical of the value of this feature. After all, we now have Google Desktop, right? I can search and find documents pretty quickly now.

However, what's missing from Google Desktop is the "pervasive" part. I didn't fully appreciate this missing element until I started using the Mac, because Mac OS X now has Spotlight, Apple's version of pervasive search. Spotlight has a little icon on the menubar to let you search for stuff, just like Google search. But the pervasive part is more useful to me. Check out the standard Mac save dialog:



Because search is embedded at the OS level, I can use search to save files instead of navigating my document hierarchy. When I save a file on the Mac now, I search for the folder in which I know it belongs, then I name the file. It's not like I fear or don't understand hierarchies in a file system. But why bother doing all that navigation? I know where I want to put it, and the OS should be smart enough to let me tell it without all the ceremony. That's pervasive search, and it has changed the way I use my computer. Now, I can't wait until my work OS catches up to what is one of my favorite features of my favorite OS.

Not that Spotlight is perfect yet. It's annoyingly slow, and it sometimes yields some false positives. That irritates me. But, the benefit outweighs the annoyance factor by a lot. And I doubt that the first version of pervasive search in Windows will work perfectly either. I view this as a "I want to live there" feature: I can't wait until I can stop navigating hierarchies most of the time.

Ok vs. Silence

The very origins of DOS and Windows tells you something about the way it works now. I remember reading that in the original piece of software that Microsoft was hired to write, BASIC for the original IBM PC, one of the most difficult tasks was to get the interpreter to fit into the memory they had available in the machine's ROM. We're talking very primitive hardware here, and quite the engineering feat to work within those constraints.

One of their decisions speaks volumes about the philosophy that suffuses much of Microsoft software today. Because memory was so tight, they couldn't afford the number of bytes to print the traditional "READY>" on the screen, so they chose "Ok>" instead. If any of you remember using the BASIC built-in to the original PC, you'll remember that "Ok>" prompt.

Why say anything at all? If resources were tight, why not just provide a simple prompt when everything is OK? Like ">"? This is exactly what the Unix guys did when they needed to be frugal with resources -- they invented the idea that "no news is good news".

Take this simple distinction, "Ok" vs. "Silence", and multiply it by millions of lines of code and decades of development. What you end up with is the most annoyingly chatty software you can imagine, Windows and Office. They constantly pester me about things I don't care about ("You have un-used icons on your desktop", "You're network cable is unplugged", "Let me go harvest clip-art from the Internet for you", etc.). An alternative is Mac OS X, which is sublimely quiet most of the time, and of course command-line Unix which is positively mute (until it needs to tell you something that you really need to know).

Obviously, chatty software annoys me (I've blogged about shortcuts to turn off some of the annoying balloons in Windows before). But I had never thought about why it is that way until I remembered that, when given the choice between silence and verbosity, Bill and Paul chose the latter.

Bearable Moments

Friends and family, when they discover that I've written several technical books, ask me if I ever plan to write a novel. My stock response to that is "No! -- Writing a novel would be much more difficult for me, because in technical writing you just describe stuff, whereas in a novel, you have to create an entire internally consistent universe from whole cloth.".

Which makes Christopher Judd's Bearable Moments such a remarkable achievement. I've known Chris for years, and he's written a couple of fine technical books (Pro Eclipse JST: Plug-ins for J2EE Development and Enterprise Java Development on a Budget: Leveraging Java Open Source Technologies. Now, he's written his first children's book, Bearable Moments. One of the most daunting tasks facing any writer (no matter what the genre) is understanding and empathizing with the intended audience. To me, that makes writing a children's book one of the toughest jobs a writer can face. Hat's off to Chris -- I hope his venture into non-technical publishing garners him the accolades he deserves.

Is Struts Over?

At ApacheCon last week, I finally met some developers for whom I have great respect: Ted Husted, Craig McClanahan, and one of the original authors of WebWork (unfortunately, I didn't get his name). It was nice to finally meet these guys, even if it was during a train wreck. About the wreck in a second, but first why I can talk about said wreck. I have no small insight into the web framework world -- I did after all write a book just over 2 years ago (Art of Java Web Development) featuring Struts (the King of the Castle at that time), Tapestry, and WebWork. I think my crystal ball wasn't bad for those 3 particular frameworks. I've been giving conference talks on framework comparisons since the book came out, as well as conducting some Birds of a Feather sessions on web frameworks. All this credentializes me in the web framework space.

I bring this up for 2 reasons. First, I think the original Struts succeeded in no small part because it was simple. If you knew how request-response worked, and you knew a few design patterns, you could figure out most of Struts in about a day. Meanwhile, the competition (Tapestry, Turbine, WebWork) were a bit more complex. This is back in the day when people weren't even sure you needed a web framework -- most people were just rolling their own. Along came Struts, which managed to hit the sweet spot of solving some problems without being too big or complex. If you spend some time with them, I think that WebWork and Tapestry are better conceived frameworks (with totally opposite approaches). Note that this was a million years before Ruby on Rails was even a glint in DHH's eyes.

The second reason I bring this up was because I found myself in a Birds of a Feather session on Struts at ApacheCon. And my distinct impression was that of moving deck chairs on the Titanic. The big news of late, of course, is the merging of WebWork into Struts. But, at the same time, the Shale extension of Struts is rolling right along. There was a great deal of discussion about how to manage to reconcile these two fundamentally different paths (action framework vs. component framework). And, unfortunately, all these efforts apparently will appear under the Struts name.

I understand the software geek drive to always reach higher and further. But I think you also need objective perspective about what you've created. Based on my observations, the Struts team has completely lost that perspective. My solution? Keep Struts right where it is, a nice simple web framework with very low barrier to entry. Go ahead and enhance WebWork (and call it WebWork), and go ahead and work on Shale (and call it Shale). Trying to make Struts into an integration platform with lots of complex moving parts kills the one thing that Struts truly has going for it: simplicity in the face of ever growing complexity in the web framework space. For the polar opposite of simplicity, see Faces, JavaServer.

Ruby for Java Developers at ApacheCon

About 6 months ago, I submitted several abstracts to ApacheCon, and two were chosen. The first was cross-language Regular Expressions, which is no big surprise, given my history with that topic. The other selection surprised me: Ruby for Java Developers. This is a talk I have prepared for No Fluff, Just Stuff, but never had a chance to deliver it (you don't get to do Ruby talks when at the same conference as Dave Thomas, nor would I want to). During the interim, Ruby has gathered even more steam, so I was anxious to give this talk and see what kind of interest was present. I talked to several people over lunch about Ruby, and everyone I talked to at the conference said they were interested my talk.

The appointed time arrived, and I wasn't disappointed. They booked it in the large keynote room, and I had over 100 people for the talk. I had to rush a bit because I had too much material (I'm sure those of you who know me will be shocked by that), but the talk turned out really well. I ran up to and slightly into the afternoon coffee break, so I made the offer for people to stick around and ask questions after the talk. I had about 10 people come up and ask me about various aspects of Ruby, and everyone was interested and engaged.

I've been positioning myself both within ThoughtWorks and externally as a pragmatist on Ruby. I really like Ruby, but I'm not ready to sell the farm on more mainstream languages yet. Ruby has tremendous potential, but there are still hard problems to be solved in Ruby before it can storm the castle walls of Java and .NET. I fully believe that those problems will fall (and I think ThoughtWorks will solve many of them, just as we solved problems in Java and .NET). Of all the candidates for "Next Big Thing", Ruby is the clear, ahead of the pack contender.

Stalking Dr. Hawking

I don't really understand the weird fetishization of celebrity in the US. It seems that everyone wants to meet someone famous and get a piece of them. What's up with autographs? What does it mean that you got someone you admire to sign a piece of paper?

I understand the desire to meet and talk to the people I admire. But, going up to a famous person and being able to enter a real conversation with them is absolutely impossible. Because nuts stalk famous people, they must always be on their guard.

Because I feel this way, I have never approached anyone to shake their hand or get an autograph -- it's utterly meaningless. Besides, there are very few people in the world whos stature I would consider worthy of an autograph. I almost walked over one of them a couple of weeks ago.

During my last trip to San Francisco, my friend Terry and I went to Beethoven's opera Fidelio. Terry was calling home, so I was walking around the beautiful opera house. As I rounded a corner, I came upon a really elaborate wheel chair. I thought to myself "Wow, that's a really elaborate Stehen-Hawking-style wheel chair". Then I walked around the front and nearly bumped into...Stephen Hawking! I remembered reading that he was in town lecturing in San Jose while I was in San Francisco. Of course, even if I wanted to get something silly like an autograph, his advanced state of Lou Gerhig's disease would make it cumbersome. As much as I'm not star struck, it was a little amazing to be so close to such a great man. If ever there was someone worthy of adoration, I would vote for him long before the pop star of the week. I hope he enjoyed the opera!

A Year at the No Fluff Round Table

The last No Fluff, Just Stuff show of the year just wrapped up a few weeks ago in Denver. My travel schedule has been pretty brutal lately (in fact, I spent the week between No Fluff Dallas and No Fluff Denver at another conference in San Francisco), so in a way I'm glad that my weekend travel is winding down for the year (just one more conference for the rest of the year, ApacheCon). I was surprised, though, at how much I dreaded the end of the show in Denver. I've made real friends with speakers on the tour this year, and the propect of not seeing any of them for 3 or 4 months affected me more than I thought it would. When you do a series like this, you end up taking for granted many of the less obvious features, like when you will see your friends again. Then, the series is over for the year, and there is no upcoming event.

This has been a great year for me at No Fluff. I ended up doing 14 shows this year, several more than I had planned, but I'm certainly glad I did. I've blogged about the extraordinary level of attendees before, and they help make the weekend fly by. But the other thing that drives me from my home for a dozen+ weekends a year is the chance to get to hang out with the other speakers.

Back in the 1920's, a group of writers, actors, and other artists started gathering a few times a week at the Algonquin hotel restaurant. This group included Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx, among others (for a great movie that depicts this group and era, check out Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle). According to legend, the Algonquin Round table discussions were the wittiest in history because they had gathered the quickest wit in New York at that time, which was the best in the world. Here are a few samples:

Robert Sherwood, reviewing cowboy hero Tom Mix: "They say he rides as if he’s part of the horse, but they don’t say which part."

Dorothy Parker: "That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them."

George S. Kaufman: Once when asked by a press agent, "How do I get my leading lady’s name into your newspaper?" Kaufman replied, "Shoot her."

No Fluff has created a geek version of this same phenomenom: the speaker's dinner. On Saturday night, the speakers go somewhere and eat, and every one of those gatherings ends up being the most fascinating coversation you can imagine. All these brilliant guys, gathered to talk about what they've been thinking about all week that they can't discuss with their spouse. I've had more revelations over food during the last year than I probably had my entire life leading up to this year. So, while I'm glad to spend some time at home, I can't wait for the next gathering of the No Fluff Round Table next year -- I'm sure that we will all have several months worth of pent-up discussion just waiting.

One of the Cool Kids Now

After (literally) years of anticipation, it has finally happened: I'm one of the cool kids. I have a Mac. Yes, I bought a PowerBook a couple of weeks ago, in anticipation of the new book project I'm starting. Here is a picture of my new baby:



I almost did this about 4 months ago, until Apple announced the Intel partnership. That froze my decision, thinking that I could hold out until the Intel PowerBooks arrived. But, because of this project (which I will talk about more in a future post), I needed it sooner rather than later.


My finger was literally hovering over the green "Buy" button on the Apple web site, but my spidey sense told me not to click yet. The very next morning, I went to the site and was greeted with the "New Powerbooks" banner headline. Because I waited the extra day, I got the video card upgrade for free, a higher resolution display, and generally cheaper machine for the same configuration. I saved enough to pay for the extra 1 GB of memory from Crucial.


I've spent the last couple of weeks getting used to the Mac, and it's a joy. Unfortunately, I now travel with 2 laptops (the ThoughtWorks issued Dell Latitude 610, which I need for work, particularly .NET development) and the PowerBook for everything else. But, it's a small price to pay to hold my head up high when I'm hanging out with the other No Fluff, Just Stuff speakers (mostly Mac guys because they can). When I write Java, I'm living the dream: using IntelliJ on a PowerBook. At least for the short term, my hedonic adaptation is sated.

In Praise of JBoss at Work

I just finished Scott Davis and Tom Mars new book, JBoss at Work. He and his co-author do a brilliant job of taking a dauntingly large topic, an application server, and writing an engaging book about it. I particularly like their approach, which is very pragmatic: they take a web application that consists of static pages and gradually add more dynamic behavior, one step at a time. I think this is a particularly effective way of introducing a topic (I did the same thing with web frameworks in Art of Java Web Development because it addresses the whys as well as the hows).

My only complaint is one that Scott also laments: lack of testing code. But, I understand that the book would be much larger if they had incorporated testing. In that regard, they did the right thing: the book is about JBoss, not about testing in the J2EE space (a topic worthy of a large number of books all by itself). Kudos to Scott and Tom for a great book.

Art in San Francisco

I've blogged a lot about Borland International, to the point where even I'm sick of it! I've written about them so much because I had such a close relationship with the company in years past. But, as I've written, time has passed them by. Last week, I spoke at what is sure to be my last Borland Developer's Conference in San Francisco. I was there with a good friend (who was also attending the conference). I spoke at several sessions, but when not at the conference, we took advantage of what the city had to offer.

Monday we planned for the rest of the week. Then, on Tuesday, we went to a concert at The Fillmore (mostly just to see the venue). We saw Missy Higgins and Liz Phair, both of which were entertaining. Wednesday, we went to a matinee of the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Wednesday night, opera at San Francisco opera (Fidelio, Beethoven's only opera). On Thursday, we went to SF Museum of Modern Art (one of my favorite museums), then went to dinner with friends and went to a heavy metal concert at Slim's (Fu Manchu).

During the week, I also gave 4 talks and a 4 hour pre-conference tutorial, and I got some work done as well. Mostly what we didn't do was attend any of the other sessions! All in all, a great conference week.

No Fluff, Just Stuff Does .NET

About 18 months ago, I participated in an event that changed my life, although I didn't quite grasp the significance at the time: I spoke at my first No Fluff, Just Stuff conference in Austin, TX. My publisher, Manning, put me in touch with Jay Zimmerman, and we played phone tag for a few weeks. When I finally talked to him about speaking at that first show, he kept going on and on about "this show is more advanced than other conferences" and "I'm really dedicated to keep the quality sky high". Basically, the stuff I've heard over and over again from other conference organizers. I was no spring chicken at conference speaking. I had already presented more than 100 conference sessions all over the world. So, I thought "Yada, yada, more of the 'we're better than everyone else' blather."

But a funny thing happened in Austin: he was right! Suddenly, my ace game was barely adequate. I distinctly remember telling co-workers when I returned that I felt like a kid eating at the adult's table. Jay had (and has) managed to create an extraordinary gathering in every city he visits. I have perspective on this because I've been to lots of conferences. Maybe it's the weekend seclusion, or the longer than average sessions, or the high level of discourse in the session which spills into the hallways, the meals, and to everyone you meet. It's all those things, with one more keystone ingredient: the speakers. I am honored and humbled to be considered a part of this extraordinary group of individuals: the most brilliant minds in the industry, genuinely personable, gregarious, funny, and centered. Jay has created a work of genius, gathering this group to talk about technology 27 weekends a year.

Until now, unless you were a technology switch hitter, you had to be in the Java (or, increasingly, Ruby) crowd to even know that No Fluff, Just Stuff existed. Now, Jay is expanding this phenomenon to the .NET world. December 2nd begins a new era for .NET developers: you get your very own No Fluff, Just Stuff. Ted Neward is running this show, and it is his considerable burden to re-create the pure magic of No Fluff, Just Stuff in the .NET space. If anyone can pull it off, he can. A new group of speakers, a new set of cities, and a new chance to create a community revolving around the most unlikely of campfires: a computer platform. There are a few of us participating in both worlds (myself, Ted, Glenn Vanderburg, Stuart Halloway, and a few others). It will be our job to set the tone for the new speakers to create the same but different ambiance for a new crowd.

Every so often, an event happens that you simply cannot miss, and, for .NET developers, this is the Beatles in Shea Stadium, Elvis on Ed Sullivan, and Johnny Carson's last Tonight Show. The premiere. One weekend only. Denver, December 2-4, 2005. The first of many, many No Fluff, Just Stuff.NET shows. You have to see it to believe it.

Technology Snake Oil 7: Demoware

I think one of the reasons that RAD tools (including ASP.NET) made significant inroads was the demoability of their development. RAD tools allow you to click and drag your way to poorly designed applications with remarkable speed. Managers who go to product launches see lots of 15 minute demonstrations of building an enterprise application that talks to a database and allows pull-down lists in the columns of the grid, all built while the speaker is talking. I know because, in a former life, I used to do some of these demos on behalf of a vendor (and I'm still repenting).

Of course, every real developer knows that you can't do real development like that. In fact, most developers now (I hope, at least) know to create layered, modular applications so that they are maintainable, updateable, and a bunch of other "-ables". But this sea change hasn't permeated most managers yet. They still purchase development tools (on behalf of developers) based on 15 minute technology demonstrations. I firmly believe this is one of the reasons Sun created Java Studio Creator for JavaServer Faces. They were getting killed in demoware sessions against Microsoft's ASP.NET story. Now, Sun can compete with Microsoft on creating useless toy applications in front of a crowd. And they say there's no such thing as progress!
This hurts development on several levels. Real developers are frustrated because their managers develop unrealistic expectations for the rate of development. Managers are frustrated because they can't figure out what their developers are doing for the weeks and weeks it takes them to build what looks on the surface like the toy application they saw someone build in front of them. And both groups are irritated at each other.

I'm not against productivity tools (I'm not a "use-linux-and-Emacs-for-everything-everyone-else-is-a-wimp" kind of Stallman-esque developer. I use IDE's and appropriate tools, including some of the aforementioned RAD tools, although not in the manner suggested above. In fact, I have a tool fetish that I must constantly fight (you know, Emacs is pretty darn powerful in a lot of circumstances). I am against vendors who try to seduce managers and other non-techies with shiny objects that don't really deliver the promise of the snake oil they sell.

Technology Snake Oil Part 6: Drowning in Tools

In my last Technology Snake Oil posting (Part 5: The Integration Myth), I talked about the more and more comprehensive IDE's and the bundling together of more and more tools. I think that Microsoft Office and Visual Studio point to a disturbing, Borg-like trend. It doesn’t matter if none of the tools is the very best at what it does, as long as it works nicely with all the other tools in the suite.

The problem we have in the development world is that we are drowning in tools. The “bit rot” problem in Windows is well known. The more software you install, the more likely there will be conflicts between components, the slower it gets, and the flakiness level rises. I reached an interesting milestone recently. I had the opportunity to build my development laptop completely from scratch (no ghost images, everything installed in pristine state from CD's). Anticipating this momentous occasion, I compiled a list of all the tools that I thought I couldn't live without. Many of these tools are very special purpose (like WinMerge), many of them are open source, but they are all tools that I use, maybe not daily, but at least sometimes. Once I got everything installed, I started getting the kind of flaky behavior symptomatic of a bit-rotted Windows machine. I had reached a milestone: my basic working set is incompatible with Windows.

This led me to pare way down on the tools I use. Every tool has to defend its life, and make the cut to survive. I gave up some stand-alone editors (I have a text editor fetish, and formerly had a bunch of them, each for one or two things they did really well). Most of those chores have moved over to Emacs now. OK, and Notepadd++. And Crimson Editor. But that's it! I promise! I’ve been actively trying to cut down my working set.

Developers love software, and tend to accumulate a lot of it. In the pathological case, developers can spend more time installing, uninstalling, and trying to get integrations working between tools that they have no time left for productive work. I have to fight this tendency in myself to try new tools, because each one represents a shiny new object that will, according to its web site, be faster, lighter, more aerodynamic, and brighter, a floor wax and a dessert topping. Using an over-worn analogy, we have an entire wood working shop filled with expensive, gasoline powered, multi-purpose saw/drill/lathe/turnip twaddlers.

Instead of monolithic tools, we need very cohesive, modular tools. The Unix guys got it exactly right – create simple command line tools that follow a few conventions (like all input and output it unadorned text). They created independent, cohesive modules of behavior. Once you understand how these modules work, you can chain them together to achieve what you want. They even built in integration tools, like xargs (which lets you massage the unadorned text output from one program into the expected format of another). Without question, someone who understands how these tools work is more productive (with fewer headaches) than someone struggling to use a behemoth like Software Delivery Optimization. Why are the command line tools better? You can script them in nice clean ways, and let the computer do work for you. One of the unfortunate trends with graphical environments is the dumbing down of power users. If you watch how power users in the Unix world work vs. typical power users in the Windows world, the Windows guys (on average) are working a lot harder, performing a lot more repetitive tasks. We need a woodworking shop filled with simple hand tools, not more electricity and kerosene. Throw yourself a life preserver; download cygwin today.

LOP Weekend

This last weekend was the No Fluff, Just Stuff Atlanta Symposium. Because he had to go back to Dallas, Dave Thomas wasn't available to do the keynote address on Friday night. So, Jay the conference organizer asked me to fill in, with a scaled down version of my Language Oriented Programming talk. I was already scheduled to do the two-part version of this talk (Part 1: Theory, Part 2: Practice) back to back on Sunday. This was turning out to be a LOP weekend! I took the theory portion of the talk and removed a lot of the hard-core technical details (no one at a keynote wants to see page after page of code, especially grammars for custom languages). The keynote went pretty well, with no major gaffes. The flow wasn't as good as I would have liked it (the talk at the time I gave it was almost 8 hours old, but it's a topic I've been talking about all year).

I was afraid that everyone would be sick of this topic by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around. However, I had a good group for both parts of the talk. Several people asked me during the day if it made sense to come to the second one if they didn't come to the first, and I assured them that it was OK. The first part of the talk was up against one of Keith Donald's Spring talks, which is tough competition this year at No Fluff. The first part of the talk replicates the material in the keynote, but at a much higher level of detail. The second part of the talk is designed to be more practical. I show some interaction with JetBrains Meta-Programming System, but mostly the 2nd part encourages discussion about the viability and future of LOP. We had a great discussion, including problem domains that match LOP early adoption and what developers are already doing in this space. One of the more active attendees works for a really, really big company here in Atlanta, and he stated that LOP is currently number 4 on their list of hot technology trends to watch (no, I didn't ask what the other 3 were). He was an evangelist within his company for this evolution, so that's why he was so involved in the discussions around it all weekend.

One of the best things about discussing a topic like LOP at No Fluff conferences is the number of people that you meet that are already doing this. The general level of the audience at No Fluff continues to amaze. For something new like LOP, No Fluff provides a valuable traveling road show to meet and greet the folks who represent islands of cutting edge technology (who generally are just looking for a kindred spirit for discussions). Last year, one of the attendees commented that the best thing about No Fluff is that he could talk about work and everyone around him knew what he was talking about!

Chattanooga Choo Choo

I'm traveling north to Chattanooga, TN, tonight to speak at the
Chattanooga Java Users Group meeting. This is interesting because the
trip from Atlanta to Chattanooga takes me back through my home town of
Dalton, GA. I was contacted a few months by an alumni from Dalton
Junior College (where I got my associates degree is physics) who
recognized me from an article or something and asked me to speak at
CJUG. So, instead of getting on a plane to speak at a JUG, I'm driving
for 2 hours.

This will be an interesting blast from the past for me. Chattanooga is
only about 20 miles north of Dalton, so I spent a lot of time there
growing up. One of my summer jobs was in Chattanooga. And, it gives me
a chance to stop by and see family on the way back. Today will be a
misty, rose colored memories kind of day for me. Oh, and then I have
to talk about JavaServer Faces! A harsh plummet back to reality!

Slashdotted!

A strange thing happened over the last couple of days. Without much fanfare (even the Developer Works guys didn't tell me), my article on the Developer Works site about the Ruby Developer's Toolkit for Eclipse was published. No big deal, I've had several articles published there. Then I started getting emails about it yesterday, some from people I hadn't talked to in a long time. Hmmmm, I guess Developer Works has more subscribers than I thought. Then, someone told me: the article has been Slashdotted! Wooo-hooo! My first Slashdotting. That's why everyone knew about it. It's kind of a geek rite of passage. Now, I just need to be Biled...

Ruby for Java Developers

Ruby for Java Developers

My article on the Ruby Developer's Kit has just been published by the IBM Developer Works site. The RDT is not a full-blown IDE for Ruby yet, but it does have excellent support for debugging Ruby code, which is a huge win for me. I've debugged some pretty hairy Ruby code in it (including code that does automation in Windows) and have been very happy.

See, I'm trying to find a way to bind the Java and Ruby communities together. Can't we all just get along?

Missing the Point

One more post from the Entwickler Conference, where the Borland faithful gather in Germany. I sat though the technical keynotes, and they preach two things: Rapid Application Development tools and Big Design Up Front with requirements gathering tools (CaliberRM) and UML (Together). I know a lot of vendors are still beating these horses, and Borland is no different. Delphi now includes a EJB-like framework for persistence and workflow called ECO, which makes heavy use of tooling and inheritance. It doesn't use any of the interesting techniques used widely in the Java world (like dependency injection). Looking at ECO gives me Java flashbacks from 3 or 4 years ago. Anyway, the big finale of the technical keynote (which showed that they have created very good products in their categories), David I (Borland evangelist) showed a video of a 5th grader using Delphi and ECO to build a Teachers -> Classes -> Grades application with persistent and a generated front end in 9 minutes. The obvious message: you can build simple things Really Fast with our tools. Or maybe it was "Build Crappy Software Faster!"

Is that the right message to send out to the world? Is raw developer productivity for mindlessly simple applications buying us anything? The only people impressed by this type of demo-ware are non-technical managers, who have budgets. "Wow, if a 9 year old can build an application in 9 minutes, just think our developers will be building our entire corporate infrastructure! We must buy this tool!". I've posted my thoughts on RAD before. It is disappointing to see a company with so many sharp people pushing 2 aspects of software development that I think counter productive.

Not everyone in Borland feels this way. I'm corresponding with several Borlanders about how they can support agility in their Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools. The tide is turning. I am not naive enough to think that they should just ditch their product base because of what is still just opinion. I just hate to see what I consider poisonous messages to developers and their managers.