(I have been calling the tour NoStuffJustFluff on this blog for quite sometime now, just to see if people would notice it. Nobody did. That ought to teach bloggers a lesson about sending secret embedded messages in their blogs.)
For the first time in a long time, I went into a JUG meeting not knowing anything about the technology being presented. And judging from the audience questions, neither did anybody else.
But before I get into the fun stuff, let me just get the positives out of the way.
It was a somewhat pleasant day in January, a little bit rainy, not too cold. As I mentioned earlier, more people showed up than usual. I have seen a few faces that I haven't seen at the JUG meetings for a year or so.
Brian Sletten gave a well prepared, engaging, opinionated, and meaty presentation. For a complete stranger to the technology and its way of thinking, I think Brian got the message out succinctly and clearly.
We have some enhanced bunch of giveaways: in addition to the IntelliJ IDEA 7 License that JetBrains has provided us, we also gave away three books, two on GWT and one on Integration Patterns.
Jay Zimmermann, the man behind the NFJS conferences, was on hand to promote the 2008 NFJS tour, which will be in St. Louis the weekend of March 7–9. Jay also gave away a free pass to the event to a lucky audience member (the aforementioned member whom I haven't seen for a year.) Jay also gave up another free pass to be given away at next month's JUG meeting, which will be held on not the second but the third Thursday, February 21, to not interfere with Valentine's Day celebrations.
I sparked a long discussion on closures in Java during the Q&A before the main presentation by simply asking "Have you read Bruce Eckel's latest blog?"
Not every member is aware of the controversy, and of those who are clued in and are willing to share their feelings on this matter, I see people on Neal Gafter's side and people on Josh Bloch's side. One new argument for the full fledged closure implementation is that that will "move the curve" towards the more advanced direction, and in doing so make Java the language and platform more valuable (and therefore our Java skills more valuable) to the current enterprise users of Java technology.
The wider audience members were not comfortable with the "Java is the new COBOL" claim and would like to see the Java language evolve further.
"What is it?" began Brian. "It's software that changed my life."
With an opening like that, I know the evening is going to be, uh, interesting.
Some more choice quotes (not exact quotes) from the evening:
"There was a three-year project that wouldn't scale. We went in, and solved their problem with NetKernel in six weeks. The customer was very happy."
"The computer industry is moving away from writing code and towards using formatted data over the past decades."
"Service orchestration is clearly the sweet spot of NetKernel. I have seen no better orchestration environment."
"NetKernel based projects needs surprisingly small amount of maintenance."
"You need to step away from objects, which are tightly coupled and brittle."
"Let me seed you with the ideas of NetKernel. You will have your epiphany sometime after you start using it."
"NetKernel applications are scalable and have no problems with heavy load because it uses a microkernel architecture that handles caching intelligently."
"Enterprises that adopt NetKernel technology see it as a competitive advantage."
With assertions like that, you bet the audiences are skeptical.
Here are some of their questions:
"How is this different from CGI?" I asked after the first demo, in which we saw a BeanShell script saved as a file on the server side, and a browser accessing the result of its calculations through an URL. The answer is that NetKernel does its magic on the server side after it intercepts the request.
"You can do that in Java too, with the Java 5 and Java 6 concurrency and executor framework." Kyle Cordes asked on seeing the NetKernel's
"Object orientation is a great way for me as a developer to organize my work. You are advocating that I give up object-orientation. What aspects of the new style of development with provide benefits that will compensate for the ones that I lose by giving up object-orientation?" asked Brian Gilstrap.
"With Web Services, the WSDL defines the contract. With the REST style architecture, where is the contract?" was Dean Farwell's question. Dean also asked for the potential future tools support: "With Java, I type foo dot, and my IDE tells me exactly what I can do. I don't want to go back to where developers will have to open multiple terminals and multiple vim session looking around for answers."
I just realized that this post is already too long.
If I keep on writing, I would have to go back to the beginning and change all "yesterday"'s into "the day before yesterday"'s.
Fortunately, Brian has promised to send the presentation slides to be posted onto the JUG website. I'll post the like here when it arrives.
Talking about the day before yesterday, Brian also mentioned after the presentation that he was at the Denver JUG on the prior day talking about REST. Matt Raible has a detailed report from that event.
And, coincidentally, the second speaker at that meeting, Norman Richards, will be our speaker for February. His topic? Seam.
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