Raible Designs

Java 5 Sucks according to Clinton Begin

I stumbled upon Clinton Begin's blog this evening and found his only post about how much he hates Java 5:

Anyone who knows me has already knows that I'm no fan of Java 5. Honestly, since Java 5 was released, Java has dropped from 1st to 4th on my list of languages that I consider when starting a new application. It was such a disappointment to me, both because of the poor implementation of the new features, as well as the omission of some fairly basic features.
...
I'm looking to Ruby, Groovy and C# 3.0 before I look to Java. Not so much because those languages are better than Java 5, but more because Java 1.4 was better than Java 5. Java is going downhill at the hands of Sun and the JCP. Sad, sad, sad...

Clinton has some very good points in his rant. Unfortunately, I don't think anything is being done to fix them.

For those that don't know, Clinton is the inventor of iBATIS and one of the heros of the Java Community that took on .NET when they said had a version of the J2EE Petstore that was one-third the lines of code (LOCs) and 28 times faster. Most of the JPetStore links don't work anymore, but you can read the announcement on TSS.

Clinton is also one of those no-bullshit type of people I really enjoy hanging out with. I've had several beers with him at many conferences and have always enjoyed his perspective. However, there's something that smells about this rant of his. If he hates Java 5 so much, and loves Java 1.4, why doesn't iBATIS implement a 1.4 feature? An enhancement request to support for JDBC 3 Generated Keys in iBATIS has been open for almost 3 years! C'mon Clinton - it would've taken you less time to implement this than to write your rant.

Dynamic Language Shootout: Groovy vs. Jython vs. JRuby

Travis Jensen has an interesting post titled Our Dynamic Language Shootout:

...
For a variety of deployment reasons, we've decided that whatever we choose will be deployed on the JVM. As a result, this comparison is for the JVM versions of the languages, e.g. JRuby, Jython, and, of course, Groovy, which has no other deployment option. I want to also clarify that I have the most experience with Python and I really like the language. There is no doubt that the language influenced me in my evaluation, but I really tried to remain objective in spite of that.
...
As I did the evaluation, I tried to come up with a broad spectrum of important information. Others at my company gave feedback on the important characteristics. In the end, these are the features that we felt were most important: the interaction between Java and the selected language, the IDE support, the learning curve, existing web frameworks, and the existing community support for the JVM implementation of the language.

His conclusion: Groovy.

I don't think it should surprise you at this point that we chose Groovy. Even being openly biases towards Python first and Ruby second (hey, it's cooler :), I could not, in good conscience, choose either of them for melding into our existing environment.

If I were starting from scratch on a project, my choice would be very different. If I wanted to target the JVM, I would choose JRuby (at least until Jython 2.5 and Django are available); if I wasn't targeting the JVM, then it would be, for my Python, but I'd be equally comfortable choosing Ruby.

Well written Travis - I look forward to reading more about the new life you're breathing into your stilted development practices.

Awesome Weekend in Tahoe

This weekend in Tahoe was absolutely incredible. I've never skied in a place so beautiful. Not only were the views spectacular, but the weather was terrific. On Sunday, we skied in t-shirts while the thermometer read 58°F. While I love the powder and Colorado snow, there's nothing like Spring Skiing. If you ever get a chance to visit Lake Tahoe, I highly recommend you jump at the opportunity.

For more pictures, see Lake Tahoe 2008 on Flickr.

What are the best runs at Heavenly?

As mentioned previously, this weekend some college buddies and I will be heading to Lake Tahoe for a weekend of skiing, gambling and boozing (in no particular order). One guy has a free suite at Harrah's Lake Tahoe. I heard there's a gondola directly from the casino to the slopes of Heavenly. Is that true?

Let's assume it is true and I'll be skiing Heavenly all weekend. For those that've skied there - what are the best runs? I'm looking for bump runs, chutes, steep stuff and cruisers with a view. Thanks in advance for any advice.

WebORB: Have you ever heard of it?

A colleague sent me an e-mail today and asked me if I'd ever heard of WebORB today. Since I hadn't, I figured I'd write this post and see if any of you have heard of it? If so, what is it and what does it do? It it similar to Appcelerator, but server-side only? Or is it more like Granite DS?

[Read More]

Leasons learned from using Seam

Yesterday, I noticed the Seam Developers released a new seamframework.org site. It's great to see a web framework team eating their own dog food. Of course, if all open source framework developers were paid full-time to work on their respective project, we'd likely see more of this.

My favorite part of the new site is the Forums, which has an Atom Feed you can use to monitor topics posted. This morning, I noticed a topic from Daniel Hinojosa titled ANN: amazinggates.com is alive with Seam & lessons learned. In this topic, Daniel lists a number of lessons he learned from working with Seam.

The one thing I noticed about Daniel's "Amazing Gates" site is it seems extremely fast. Do you think this is because of Seam or did he follow the rules for high performance websites?

Added a Tag Cloud

I added a tag cloud to this site tonight. Thanks to Rich Sharple's Hacking Roller : Tag Clouds, it was pretty easy. It's currently located in the bottom-right corner. Here's a glance at this site's most popular tags:

acegi appfuse denver grails gwt hibernate ibatis java jsf maven maven2 myfaces rails roller skiing spring springmvc stripes struts struts2 tapestry tomcat travel webframeworks wicket

Enjoy!

The New Javalobby Sucks?

I didn't say it, Jesse Sightler did. Even though he didn't say "it sucks" explicitly, that's what I read in his post:

Is it just me, or has the new Javalobby proven to be a significant step backwards? The old site was a Slashdot style discussion system with a pace very appropriate to the pace of news flowing from the Java community. The light emphasis on announcements was welcome, and useful while at the same time not being overstated.

The new site feels a lot like TheServerSide.Com from a few years ago. They've gone to a system where the frontpage is updated frequently (many times per day) and the content there is seldom interesting enough to attract any significant discussion. Unfortunately, this means that the overwhelming number of articles on the frontpage appear dry and uninteresting. I don't think I've really read anything there since the switch to the new format.

For the sake of the site, I do hope they figure out their mistake here. There is no shame in turning this into worsethanfailurethedailywtf all over again (hopefully you get that reference).

I like the new site because I visit it more than the old one. Of course, that could be a direct result of me posting there. If I could change one thing, I'd like to see a java.blogs-style aggregator of all zones (then I'd turn off the .NET and Kids Code Zones).

Do you agree with Jesse? Should Javalobby change back to the old-way of using forums?

I believe the reason for the change was because DZone has become so much more popular than Javalobby. I think they're hoping to capitalize on that brand name and extend it to other communities. Look at the following graph from Alexa for proof. More traffic = more $$ from advertisers.

Maven now supports attributes in pom.xml?!

In December 2005, I asked Is it possible to make pom.xml simpler?.

    <dependency> 
      <groupId>springframework</groupId> 
      <artifactId>spring</artifactId> 
      <version>1.2.6</version> 
    </dependency> 

<dep:artifact name="org/springframework/spring" version="1.2.6"/>

<dependency groupId="org.springframework" artifactId="spring" version="1.2.6"/>

At that time, the general response was "That's how Maven works. It's a matter of taste. You'll get used to it." It's been two years and sure, I'm used to it, but I'd still rather write less XML. That's why I was particularly pleased to see Brett Porter's write Maven now supports condensed POMs using attributes:

<dependency>
  <groupId>junit</groupId>
  <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
  <version>3.8.1</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>easymock</groupId>
  <artifactId>easymock</artifactId>
  <version>1.2_Java1.3</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
...

<dependency groupId="junit" artifactId="junit" version="3.8.1" scope="test"/>
<dependency groupId="easymock" artifactId="easymock" version="1.2_Java1.3" scope="test"/>
...

Now that wasn't so hard was it?

Web Application Frameworks based on Real-World Popularity

I received an interesting (spam?) comment on my What Web Application framework should you use? entry today:

A useful resource to compare Java web frameworks (Spring, Tapestry, Struts, OpenLaszlo,...) and also PHP, Python, Ruby web frameworks:

http://www.therightsoft.com/softwaretechnologies/webframeworks

If you go to the site, you'll see they have a hierarchical list of web application frameworks based on real-word popularity. First of all, I'm unsure of what "real-word" popularity is.

Let's assume this is a typo and it should be "real-world" popularity. Where is the credible source for this data? Where is the link to this credible source? I like the list, its sortability and filterability, but there's no evidence that it's true. Care to elaborate on your sources [email protected]?