This past weekend I attended the No Fluff Just Stuff conference here in Atlanta.  If you're not familiar with NFJS, it's a traveling conference that hits most of the major markets here in the US.  It's held over weekends so as not to disrupt your daily job, and it covers topics in Java and Agility. 

I'd been to one NFJS a few years ago here in Atlanta and thought it was well worth it.  At that time, Bruce Tate was on the circuit. He was preaching (along with many of the other speakers at the time) about the bloat inherit in J2EE applications, and that Java developers should really be focusing their attention on lighter-weight J2EE alternatives such as Spring and Hibernate.  Mind you, this was long before either had become mainstream.  Having been a Rod Johnson disciple after reading his first book (the contents of which would eventually become Spring), I guess it's not surprising I enjoyed the conference so much.  Interestingly enough, Bruce, along with Stu Halloway and Justin Gehtland (who also spoke at that conference), are now big Ruby-On-Rails guys.

Now I've been doing .Net stuff almost exclusively for the last few years, so I had a slight reservation about attending this year's conference, given that I'm not doing Java day-to-day anymore and I wasn't sure how much would be relevant.  But given that I'm an independent consultant who should be up on such things, I thought it would be a good idea to at least re-familiarize myself with the goings on in the Java community. 

I really am technology agnostic, but I do find the language of Java to be extremely noisy, tedious, and verbose anymore, especially coming from C# 3.0.  Do you know how many language-level (not library-level) changes have gone into the JVM since 1.1.7?  Off the top of my head, I can remember:

• the new for loop (finally in 1.5!)
• the crappy implementation of generics
• annotations
• static imports
• enums
• varargs

That's not a whole lot (or really anything significant) for a language that is over 10 years old. 

And in case you are not following it, there is a huge debate in the Java world if/how closures should be implemented in the Java language.  Have you seen the candidates?  Good lord, they make the syntax for anonymous classes look simple!  Put me firmly in the camp of leaving Java the language itself good and well alone and concentrate your efforts on other languages that run on the JVM.

So given the stale nature of the Java language and the rise of my interest in dynamic languages, I figured this would be an excellent chance for me to explore Groovy and Grails.  I attended the sessions by Jeff Brown from G2One on both technologies the first day, and I was hooked right away on both.

Groovy compiles to native Java bytecode, and thus can be used interchangeably with standard Java classes (along with the innumerable number of Java frameworks out there).  Plus, it has strong support for the things I love in C# 3.0 - properties, extension methods, and closures.

Grails is rapid web application framework for Groovy similar to Rails.  It favors convention over configuration and uses a classic MVC architecture that allows for easy testability.  Under the hood, it uses best of breed Java technologies as plumbing infrastructure (e.g. Spring and Hibernate).  Just by creating a new project through scaffolding, it creates a nice project layout structure that provides a beautiful separation of concerns.  It really makes it easy for you to write unit tests (no more excuses!).  Basically, it creates a solid project architecture that would be roughly close to something a strong Java architect would formulate. 

I learned of a term from Scott Hanselman called "The Pit Of Success".  The concept is that you make it easy for developers to do the right thing and perform best practices.  Don't make them have to overcome the language or framework, but rather fall into success by default.  That's exactly what Grails does for you.

I stayed on the Groovy path the second day of the conference, attending sessions on meta-programming using Groovy.  Meta-programming in Groovy is quite powerful, which makes it damn easy to build DSLs.  One of the gems of the language is the simplicity in which you can create XML documents using a DSL in its XML builder.  If you've ever struggled over a unwieldy ant file (or jumped through hoops just to perform a simple "if" statement in the XML file), you really owe it to yourself to check out Gant.

My last day was my Neil Ford day.  I attended all four of Neil's sessions the last day.  The first two were on Agile project management and metrics while the last two on Ruby/JRuby.  Neil is a very entertaining speaker (and Atlanta resident the 10 days a year when he is not traveling).  Again, to reference Scott Hanselman, the joke is that Scott got hired on by Microsoft and now gets paid "to be Scott Hanselman".  I think Neil is exactly in the same camp.  He gets paid "to be Neil Ford".  Where do I get the gig "to be Chris Rauber"?

One last comment to make on NFJS.  One thing I like about Java conferences in general and No Fluff Just Stuff in particular is that they don't seem to favor "technology" over "methodology".  NFJS has a strong Agile underpinning, and offers a number of session on practicing Agile methodologies.  Where it did offer technology sessions, it seemed that it targeted as how a particular technology implements Agile.  For example, I mentioned in a previous post how Sun announced JavaFX at JavaOne this year (again).  This was a mere two weeks before the NFJS conference.  Yet there was hardly any mention of JavaFX at NFJS.  If this were a .Net conference, nearly half the sessions would be about this new technology.  Now, you could make the argument that JavaFX isn't really all that appealing to everyday Java developers, and truth to be told, you wouldn't get much argument from me.  But I thought it was very interesting nonetheless.

The bottom line - if NJFS comes to your town, I would highly recommend checking it out.  They really seem interested in providing top-notch speakers and giving you your money's worth in a conference. 

Now ... anybody looking to hire a Groovy consultant???

Friday, May 23, 2008 12:08:33 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Conferences | Java

In a stunning move at this year's JavaOne conference, Sun announced the upcoming release of JavaFX, its framework for building Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).  Stunning, you see, because they announced the same thing at *last year's* JavaOne conference.

I read the headline and thought to myself, "Hmm ... this must be some mistake."  But, no, it was not.  Apparently, 2007 was *not* the year of Java on the desktop, and we are forced to endure Sun's desperation pleas of, "All is well!!!" for one more year.  Now, they enter an increasingly crowded field of RIA frameworks, with Flash firmly entrenched and Silverlight gaining momentum.

Java has never had a strong success story when it comes to building GUI applications, despite the ironic fact that the initial vision of Java was that its strength would be on the client-side due to its "write once, run anywhere" cross-platform JVM.  The thought being you could write one client application and distribute that application across Windows, Mac, Linux, etc...  Well, that vision has never materialized.  Swing applications were cumbersome, buggy, resource intensive, slow (with horrendous start-up times), and let's face it, just down right ugly.  Users wanted native-looking apps, and Swing was like a herd of pink flamingos poised conspicuously in the desktop front yard.

Swing has come a long way since its initial inception, but unfortunately for Sun, they haven't been able to shake users' initial perceptions.  In another ironic fact, perhaps the weaknesses of building rich UIs in Java led to its unbelievable success in the late 1990s/early 2000s as a server-side language and for developing web-based applications.  The browser turned out to be a better cross-platform GUI than Swing, plus it required no installation or deployment concerns.

Now, here we are in 2008, and Java is looking a little long in the tooth, even for building web-based applications.  Steve Jobs famously declared Java as being dead (i.e. your act is about as fresh as a Foghat concert) as his reasoning for not including it in the iPhone.  I wouldn't go that far.  Java is so entrenched (especially in Fortune 500 companies) that I'd venture to say that it's going to outlive me.  Ha!  Take that, Steve Jobs!  But as far as building next-generation UIs, as a developer I am left scratching my head as to why the world needs a Java-based RIA so late in the game when Java has never had success in that space in the first place.

Let's hope in 2009, the JavaOne crowd is not left asking, "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" as Sun announces, "JavaFX - this time we *really* mean it!".

Thursday, May 08, 2008 9:36:44 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Conferences | Java | Silverlight

I just received this from Scott Hanselman's twitter feed (where he is attending the Microsoft MVP conference):

twitter: shanselman: "The UpdatePanel is like crack." - #mvp08

Wednesday, April 16, 2008 12:37:53 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  .Net | Ajax | ASP.Net | Conferences | Humor

I am always amazed to find so many people who are willing to give up a full day on Saturday to gather together for a geekfest code camp.  A special thanks goes out to the sponsors and organizers for putting this all together.  I am sure it is an absolute labor of love, because I can't believe how much time they must put into this event to make it so successful.

As an added bonus, I won a free pass to the devscovery conference put on by the folks at Wintellect.  Hoo-ray for me.  The conference looks pretty cool, but since hotel and airfare are *not* included, I am reminded of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry offers George "free" Super Bowl tickets - "So in order to use these, I gotta spend like fifteen-hundred bucks.  This is a bill for fifteen-hundred dollars."

Tuesday, April 01, 2008 1:08:10 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  .Net | ASP.Net | Conferences | Silverlight

Just wanted to post a friendly reminder that the Atlanta Code Camp will be taking place at Devry Tech in Decatur next Saturday (3/29).  If you haven't done so already, register for the event to make sure you get a spot.

If you are going, the City of Decatur is sponsoring an electronics recycling event that very same day at Decatur High School.  The high school is just over a mile away from Devry.  I strongly encourage you to bring any outdated, left-over, unused, or otherwise useless old electronic equipment you have lying around for recycling.

Click on the map below for directions from Devry to Decatur HS.

Saturday, March 22, 2008 12:11:57 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  .Net | Conferences