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My Java SIG Talk

William Grosso @ January 10, 2009

On January 6, I gave a talk at SDForum’s Java SIG.

It was a little bit of an unusual talk for me. Prior to this talk, I hadn’t spoken at a Java event in for a little over three years. My attention, to put it mildly, has been elsewhere. But, even though I don’t pay much attention, I love Java. It’s a nice language and it’s a great platform. In fact, I’ll put that in a pull-quote, in bold:

Java is, by far, the best general-purpose platform for software development currently available. 1

But, even with that, the most ardent fan of Java has to admit two things:

  • A large part of being the world’s best general-purpose platform for software development involves repeatedly improving the core — better libraries, faster JVM’s, amazingly robust backwards compatibility, making sure things like OSGI work and that provisioning is both easy to do and automatable, etcetera etcetera etcetera. While important, highly valuable, and hard to do right, this sort of thing can also be deadly dull. And it’s far too easy to take the grace and stability of the platform for granted.
  • Every deep sea-change in how we write software happens elsewhere first. For example, Ruby on Rails signified the rise of “convention over configuration” and a renewed focus on DSLs2 . And Cloud Computing hit first, and has hit hardest, for the more dynamic languages.

And so a large part of my “cutting edge technology attention” has been on other languages and platforms3.

Which is why I’ve been truly excited recently by the increasing adoption of Groovy and Grails. These are great steps forward for the Java platform: they take the lessons learned elsewhere and bring them into the Java fold in an amazingly nice way.

And that’s really what I talked about.

  1. Whether we need a general purpose platform for software development is another question entirely. I think the answer is yes, but am not entirely certain.↩
  2. See also: Fowler’s Language Workbench article.↩
  3. I founded the Silicon Valley Ruby conference, and co-founded SDForum’s Cloud Computing Conference↩

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