tbatchelli.org

I won’t comment on my ability to keep this blog up to date. It’s pretty shameless.

I am at JavaOne these days. I’d say it has been disappointing so far, at least in the Java the language front. If you like scripting languages (as i do) then this is probably one of the most exciting JavaOne ever. No much word on EJB, JEE, Spring, etc… Quite a bit about JRuby, Rails and my favorite: Groovy.

Groovy is now in quite a mature state. Of course it is not Ruby, nor it wants to be. But I am really happy to see that finally people are considering using scripting languages in servers (I’
ve gotta say, Spring makes it very easy to use Groovy). Groovy is also ideal for writing unit tests and integration tests… But then, what about JRuby? Well, it rocks too! But so far it is not that integrated in Java, not like Groovy. But JRuby has a lot of potential, and the Netbeans support for it is pretty amazing. For when similar support for Groovy???

Lots of Ajax too. Lots of rich Internet applications. So more scripting languages, this time JavaScript. Ajax and Web 2.0 seem to be a nightmare when it comes to security though!

In any case, I bought a lot of books on Ruby, Rails, Ajax and Innovation. None on Java.

Java is dead from the language perspective. It won’t evolve that much. It’s pretty good as it is now and the trend seems to be to use scripting languages on the JVM when expressiveness and fast coding is needed. When speed is needed, Java seems a pretty obvious choice; unless you go to the “share nothing” architecture of Rails of course.

Tomorrow we’ll see James Gosling’s gig… see what he has to say