Dear Bruce,

First up, thanks for the book. Yes I’m saying thank-you about 8 years too late. ‘Thinking in Java‘ is what got me going in the language and in my mind is one of the best Java books written (sorry Tim). Giving it away free only cemented your reputation as the Bono of the Java world. OK, Bono without the Guitar, the Stetson and with a couple of overloaded constructors thrown in, but a man of stature nonetheless.

Secondly, I’ll forgive your flirtations with Python, on the basis that I’ve been having an affair myself with JRuby. I now understand the pain that you’ve been having at home, the endless repetitive arguments to get simple things done, and the temptation of a newer, younger, more flexible model.

So , I think you’re onto something here in your blogpost. I can feel the pain, the need to deliver Rich clients to users over the web. I think that Ruby / Google Web Toolkit / Struts 2 / Name your web toolkit has further to go than you may think , but eventually these ‘heroic efforts‘ (nice quote) will run out of steam. On the basis of your recommendation alone I’m willing to look at Adobe Flex, but I’m not sure if this is going to solve all the problems.

Now , a lot of us Java guys don’t like change (and as if you needed proof, just look at the comments on this O’Reilly blogpost on the Google API’s). All the same , we have a problem that gets worse every passing year. 6 Years ago we could have been sure that 90% of web sites were running Internet Explorer 4. Now we’ve got IE, Firefox, Safari (in all their different versions) as well as an explosion of mobile devices. The Windows Vista launch is only going to fragment things further with yet another platform to support.

No one web solution is going to display the same in all of these browsers. We’re not going to get a single solution from Microsoft / Sun / Adobe that everybody from developer to my Granny is going to install. So we’re going to have to take the ‘least bad’ route - something that looks great, but degrades gracefully to standard HTML on less capable devices. Excuse my ignorance, but I don’t know (yet) if Flex does this.

Yes Hybridizing open source Java is the starting point for the solution. Unfortunately we’ve a long way to go yet, and Flex is perhaps only inspiration along the way.

Yours sincerely

Paul

Hurry if you want to be included , only 980 spots left …. The only downside is that there is no summary with the photographs, so leave me a message here if you’re a Technology or Business blogger.

Update: Fun while it lasted, Tino has pulled the original post because of / despite of a complaint from Technorati.

RTE, The Idiot, Infactah, and Eirjobs are writing that Motorola all to cut it’s software jobs in Cork.

First of all, I’ve been in this sort of ‘waiting for the axe to fall‘ situation and it’s not nice. It’s not nice losing your job, and it’s not nice having to wait 6 months or so until the plant actually shuts down. It’s not nice wondering where the next mortgage payment is coming from.

In my case I was working for Dell in Dublin , when they decided to move their entire Public Sector Sales organisation to the UK (made commercial sense, couldn’t argue with the decision). The worst part was dragging yourself in to work to face your colleagues in an atmosphere of gloom - and this was when everyone was promised (and got) internal transfers.

The Irish Indo (Registration required) is reporting that this will send ‘shockwaves through the Irish software Industry‘. It’s big news , but we’ve been here before and we will be here again. Motorola axed most of it’s radio division in Swords in the late 90’s. Logica (also in the mobile Telecoms area) once employed close to 1000 in the IFSC in Dublin, but are now down to (barely) double digits.

Some anecdoes about the upside of both these major layoffs :

• A large part of the Motorola management Team ended up working in Navan for Case (the big red tractors). While tractors may not be as sexy as phones (leave a comment if you disagree), they were a key part in getting a new Startup into the area.
• Most of the Logica people found jobs , after a difficult interim period (this was the dot com crash after all). There now exists a ‘Logica Mafia’ that useful to tap into if want to connect to anybody in the Telecoms - Software development world.

The other interesting thing was the number of people who found jobs outside of the ‘traditional software industries. One team of ten people, had only 2 that were in software development 5 years later. The rest used their redundancy cheque to train as teachers, start their own business , travel to Australia and New Zealand …

Not a nice place to be lads. But it will get better.

Ruby has a lot of buzz around it. The idiots version of what Ruby is:

• It’s a programming language (like Java) that allows you to tell computers what to do.
• Used with the Rails framework , it allows you to churn out your latest Web 2 site faster than you can pitch it to your friendly VC.

InfoQ has a good link to a Free Ruby Book that has just become available. The author of the book (Jeremy) blogs here.

We have two main reasons why we’re interested in Ruby:

1. Java is great for scalable , Enterprise systems used by thousands of people. Sometimes we just want something quick and dirty to try out an idea.
2. If your idea proves successful , you want a migration path (i.e. not to have to throw away all your original work). Ruby gives you this as the way it is organised means it is less likely to fall into a heap (Object Orientated)
3. So Why not PHP (the way this blog, using wordpress, is built)?  Ruby has a companion tool called JRuby. This means that you can run Ruby code anywhere you can use Java. Anything that Java can do , Ruby can do as well.

We’re also going down the free book route on Enterprise Web 2.0. Only it’s taking us a lot longer to get there. Currently the problem is a techie version of writers block.

Following a conversation with Thomas of Logic Intuition (blogs in English and French), we decided to put up a French Version of our Company website.

OK , we cheated and used Google Translate.

Now, I’ve spent about 11 years studying French (it’s part of my Degree) , including living there for about 3 years. I’ve sold computers over the phone in French in one job , so I must have been ok at one stage. The scary thing is the machine does a better job than I would. The main mistakes I can find are

• Top left of the screen , it’s translated ‘Home’ to ‘Around the house’
• It’s translated ‘Irish Blog Awards’ to ‘Irish Blog Compensation’.

Maybe Google knows something about what Damien has planned for the night than we do?

… or so Darren Barefoot wants to know.

We do it for the money, the wine and the rock and roll lifestyle.

Actually that’s a lie. We do it for shameless self publicity.

You’ve probably heard of Google Analytics - a free service that gives you
stats such as the charts below.

This chart shows the number of visitors (blue) and the number of pageviews (orange). Interesting that in 2 years blogging , the average of pages viewed has always been just under 2 pages per visitor).

This chart (again from Google Analytics) shows the visits by source. Bit of an usual one at the moment - I would tend to get about 10% of visits each from MSN and Yahoo (not showing at the moment).

– –

Google only updates it’s stats once a day. If you’re really addicted to seeing your stats (and you really need to get out more) then feedburner updates most of its stats on an hourly basis. Feedburner not only gives you web stats similar to Google (if you’re FeedFlare enabled), but it gives you the number of people who are also reading your site via a feed - the grey box on the top right of this blog.

Strangely , this feed history seems to have a life of it’s own. Most people read blogs Monday to Friday , so the numbers dip at the weekend

If you’re a hard core stats addict , you’ll also have MyBlogLog enabled. These give the photos on the left hand side of the blog (useful in themselves), more stats (very good for incoming / outgoing links) and a widget (see image below) that shows users the most popular outgoing links.

… Pat of roam4free is offering to give you a cut of his sales.

As spotted by EastMeath. And yes, they hate being called part of Drogheda.

This article in the New York Times (free registration) shows that news of our housing boom (both good and bad) has reached New York.

For various reasons I’ve moved from using Bloglines to Google Reader. Both (sites? products?) allow me to read the 200+ blogs that I follow on a regular basis. And Google Reader allows me to solve my Killer Zombie Blogs problem.
If you’re reading this on the web, these blogs are listed on the bottom right of the page. It’s an auto export from Bloglines, so anytime I add another blog to my reading list, it gets added to the Blogroll.

And there is the problem.

[Link to Google Reader]

The script that I use to do this on Bloglines won’t work with Google. So I’ll need to update it. Not a big problem (no more than an hours work), but it confirms the Web2 mantra - ‘Data is the Intel inside‘.

While I’m free to switch between Web2 sites and take my data with me, in practice , it’s not always quite as simple.

And yes, I used OPML to export from Bloglines into Google Reader. James Corbett would be proud of me.

Update: Surprisingly enough, it seem nobody has published a way of doing this (use items from Google Reader in Blogroll). I may get around to writing it myself sometime (don’t hold your breath). In the meantime, I can just export from Reader back to Bloglines.

Recently one or two people disagreed with what I had to say about the impact that the Google, Amazon (and other) API’s will have on Java. Considering the ratio of positive to negative comments (about 3 for and 30 violently against), I obviously need to express myself in a clearer way. The link to the original post is at the end of this article, read on before you consider flaming me.

So , deep breath , here goes.

Compare the the way you develop now , with the way you built software 10 years ago. Do you remember having to manage your own memory? Or the pain of trying to deploy your software on different machines without a JVM? Or the hassle of trying to write distributed software using Corba? Or using a text editor instead of the fine IDE’s (Eclipse, Netbeans or JDeveloper - take your choice) that we have today? Would you consider building your software without a tool like Ant or Maven?

(Shudder). Things have moved on ,and I am very glad they have. Likewise, the way we develop 10 years into the future will be very different. I don’t know what the future will look like, but here’s a simple guess.

The biggest trend today is the move from software running on your computer , to software being delivered over the web. I’m not talking about the buzzwords being thrown about regarding ‘Service Orientated Architecture’ or ‘Enterprise Service Bus’. I’m talking about simple API’s that are available for use over the web today. Like the API’s and products from Google - including their Documents and Spreadsheets, and their Authentication service.

‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler’ - Albert Einstein

‘You Ain’t Gonna Need it’ - Anon, XP Mantra

As a good Agile Developer you’d probably agree with these quotes. But what if the most simple way of doing things was not to develop in Java at all? Most people don’t build their own operating system - they use Linux, Windows or OS X instead. Most people don’t write their own Java Server - they use Tomcat, JBoss or your server of choice. The pattern is the same. A small, dedicated core of developers builds the product, and the rest of us say ‘thank you very much’ and use it to get things done.

This range of ‘off the shelf’ solutions is increasing all the time , even before the online services arrived on the scene. As a Java developer , you’ve said ‘thank you’ , downloaded the latest version and integrated it into your solution. The time you save means you deliver other cool features instead. Java is very good at this ‘download and integrate’ process - not only is it a key benefit of Object Orientated Software, but Java has the widest range of solutions available (if you don’t believe me , just check out Sourceforge).

Java can also let us build our solutions (either partly or fully) around the online API’s. Java has great networking and XML handling ability already. In time this will become as normal as the idea of using a JVM. Great - we use these API’s pretty much like we do libraries today, and we can continue developing pretty much as before, right?

Wrong.

Remember, what is the most simple way of doing things? What if the most simple way of doing things was not to use Java but to use a more simple language (like Ruby or PHP) instead? Until now there were a couple of advantages that Java had over these ’simple’ (and that’s a compliment) languages. When using online API’s these advantages disappear, or worse, become a liability.

• Scalability and Robustness. Enterprise Java is massively scalable (it’s one of the reasons for it’s complexity). But can even you outscale Google?
• Security. Enterprises haven’t (yet) learned to trust the security of online applications. This trust will be hard earned over time. But already you can make the argument that you data is safer with Google / Amazon / other service provider than on your average virus-ridden home PC.
• Language Ties. To use the Java libraries you needed a JVM somewhere in your solution. Once you had a JVM , you might as well write your own solution in Java. But when the product you are extending is hosted elsewhere, you are free to code in the (most simple) language of your choice.
• Always on. As long as you have a connection to the web, your programs can use the API’s. Scripting languages like Ruby and Python can claim to be even more portable. Not only can they run natively in most environments, they can also be deployed via a JVM if that is your choice (under the guise of JRuby and Jython)
• Features. Need a feature that you don’t have in your scripting language? Just borrow it from Java by running in the JVM. How can Java win a ‘features arms race’ against that?

So do we face a form of developer apartheid, where a ‘hard core’ of Java Experts develop web API’s that the rest of us use via scripts? Let me know what you think. Like the original blogpost said, it may not be the end of Java, but perhaps the end of Java as we know it.

Finally , I notice that Technorati (the search engine for blogs as popular as Google is on the rest of the web) is indexing this blog and picking up posts. I’ve complained in the past about Technorati’s lack of indexing , and had premature anticipation when they indexed it as a one off.

It’s currently picking up 939 links to this blog (ok, I’ve been blogging for more than 2 years , but when exactly did that happen?). While some of those are internal links , thanks to everybody who has linked here.

I’m still not sure if Technorati is picking up the outgoing links - can anybody confirm or deny this (from the ‘Dashboard’ view of your wordpress blog)

Update: 10 Minutes after writing this blog post , Technorati crashed. Is this a coincidence?

… so I think I’ve nominated everybody that I promised. If not, it’s late on Friday night and I’m on my Third glass of wine …

There are times when Web2, blogging , feedback from readers and the wisdom of crowds is great. And there are times that it’s extremely painful.

Like this Blogpost I wrote over on the O’Reilly site. Do Google Spreadsheets mean the end of Java?

I expected some people to disagree with me , but at least disagree for good reasons. The key point, that Web 2, it’s applications (of which Google spreadsheets is only ) and their API’s will fundamentally change the way we solve business problems using IT has been lost in the knee-jerk reaction.
Copy of the blog post here.

Seems that both Michele and Tom will be at the Irish Blog Awards (but not the Barcamp in Waterford this Saturday). Tom’s not happy with his hosting. Make that Tom is very unhappy with the hosting. Will it all end in a barroom brawl in the basement of the Alexendar hotel?
My own opinion is that all hosting contracts, like politics, end in tears. I’ve sympathy with Tom , having recently been in a similar situation. In my case , I have nobody to blame but myself:

• I should have backed up my files if they were that important to me.
• You get what you pay for. In my case , I was on shared hosting for next to nothing. I was unhappy , but not surprised when it fell over.

Overall , I can understand , but I’m slightly disappointed with Tom. He’s the closest thing we have to an ‘A-List blogger’. With that power comes responsibility - I wouldn’t diss a companies hard-won reputation (even though they may deserve it) without thinking over ‘what could I have done better’)
Note, I don’t host with Blackknight and have no connection to them.

Or to be more accurate ‘Google Spreadsheets mean the end of Java as we know it’.

Think about this. Who pays your wages Mr Java-Developer-who-has-just-had-a-couple-of-years-at-the-top-of-the-pile? Clients, or if you’re in a larger organisation , the business folks (i.e.’internal’ clients). Do you think any of them care about Java? Do any of them know what Java is? All they want is to get things done, quickly , and with as few mistakes as possible.

These business people would be happy to run their organisations on Spreadsheets. Do you remember the cartoon where Dilbert convinced the pointy haired boss that he could fly the plane using Excel? There’s more than a element of truth to this. I know of at least one US Fortune 100 company that (until recently) conducted most of it’s operations on little more than Microsoft Office and duct-tape. It worked, not very well, but it worked.

Until now , the next line would be ‘Excel (or any other type of Spreadsheet) is not secure / scalable / sharable / not web friendly’. That was until Google launched their Docs and Speadsheets. It’s an online version of Office with some spreadsheet functionality. Play with it a bit and you’ll see that there’s plenty missing. But this being Google , I’m willing to put good money on

• (a) new features rolled out (think steamroller) and
• (b) These Spreadsheets being massivly scalable / secure / sharable.

This being Google, there is also an API (developer page here). It’s got massive holes in it (e.g. you can’t yet use it to create a new spreadsheet). But when Microsoft bring out their version of online spreadsheets (and they will) not only will they clone the Google API (to get market share), they’ll need to go one further and introduce new features / remove the usage restrictions in order to compete.

So, secure, scalable, sharble online spreadsheets are here to stay. So lets take a look at Mr. (or Ms.) Pointy haired boss thinking about their new project:

1. Hmm, I think we need to be able to gather which health plans our employees are enrolled in.
2. OK, I’ll throw together a spreadsheet to show people what I want
3. Before I’ll give to our friendly Java developer and let him ‘do’ a website from it.
   Soon I’ll just share this on Google.
4. Great , Loads of people are now using it, I’ll just the (Ruby / PHP / Insert other language here) guy to add one or two extra features.
5. Most Excellent. Why don’t we spin this off as a Web 2 company and sell it to EBay??

There you have it, Massively scalable , Highly secure websites (see Google Authentication API), without needing to know anything about EJB, JMX , JBoss, JDBC or any of the hard won knowledge that us Enterprise Java Developers have built up over the last 7-8 years. I’m exaggerating, but not much.

What do you think? Is Enterprise Java dead, or is Web 2 just another boost and a slightly different way of doing things for us Java people?

Other Java Posts from Technology in Plain English

Some other notes:

• Java is read once , run almost anywhere. The ‘Almost’ is because (for various technical reasons) the difficulty in getting reasonably priced web hosting. Have your tried getting some recently - impossible to find , or at least impossible to find at the prices PHP and Ruby guys can get theirs?
• Tim O’Reilly with was right with the notion of Web 2.0 and the network as a computer. We’ve also written about the notion of online software being at a tipping point.

This article was originally published on the O’Reilly books OnJava Website.

Update: Gavin is up for this (see comments). Will Damien say yes?
(Kick this post)
Had a bit of inspiration about the Irish Blog Awards involving Kick.ie.
Anyway, the idea is this. After the nominations for the Irish Blog Awards are finished, it goes through a first round of voting to shortlist the 5 top nominations in each category. It struck me that (something like) kick.ie would be an ideal mechanism to do this.

In my ignorance this appears easy : just have a new kick.ie subsite (like has been done before e.g. dotnetkicks.com) and allow people to vote (kick) a site but not add new links. Kick.ie only allows one kick per site. Top 5 scores in each category make the shortlist.

What’s in it for both sites?

• Kick.ie get a lot of new traffic.
• Awards.ie/blogwards get an easier /slicker way to manage the shortlist.

So , Damien/ Gavin , Any thoughts / comments / suggestions?

Just to be clear , I have no connection with either site, apart from being 1 sponsor (as FirstPartners.net) of the Irish blog awards, and a user of Kick.ie.

I’ll this as an experiment. I’ve just enabled MyBlogLog on this site (thanks to Tom’s site for the idea). For those viewers in black and white / rss, it displays the pictures of current readers on the left hand side of this page. It also gives ‘most visited’ link information (nothing showing at the moment, this will build up over time.)

While I’m not a great fan of ‘too many widgets or clutter’ (even Michele has inadvertently dropped some of his) so we’ll give it a spin and see what people think.

Technorati Profile

Technorati Profile

Anybody know of a way of getting rid of the zombie blogs from your (bloglines) reading list? Yep, zombie blogs from people who haven’t written in the last couple of months , but still show up on my blogroll (if you’re reading this on the web instead of RSS, they’re also on the bottom right of the page).

It probably involves exporting the information (as OPML), but getting the ‘last posted date’ isn’t obvious.