Peter Pilgrim :: Java Champion :: Enterprise Blog

Hi Everyone!

I am sorry if this has taken longer to announce than when I first tweeted it on Twitter on Sunday 25th August 2011.

I am organising the first Collective Sumer Camp UK, which inspired by my experience of attending the JavaPosse Round Up for three years in a row (2009, 2010, and 2011). The Round-Up is an open space technology conference created by The Java Posse, four experienced Java developers and designers, famous in the community, who have a regular podcast, and also long time technical book author and thinker, Bruce Eckel. The Round-Up is a normally a five day event and takes place in Crested Butte, Colorado. Very recently, the Round-Up expanded to Summer Programming Camp.

I had a lot of fun attending the Round-Ups, as you can see here and here. I thought and asked the question, why can we not doing something similar to the Round-Up here in the UK? Why not? Indeed.

Let us do it, instead of dreaming about it! Here is an audio-boo, which I recorded a few days ago, that has my essential ideas. I apologise here if it is a bit rambling or fast.

START SMALL

Let us go for the low-to-medium risk. We scope the requirements small in order to delivery the best result.

BRANDING

I have tentatively called it THE COLLECTIVE for a very good reason. I am personally no longer in the business of organising or running user groups. I am in the business of networking with other people, getting functional programming adopted in the industry, and welcome continuous learning. We are called THE COLLECTIVE of Java platform, who are about pushing it forward.

THEMES

The content of the open space conference is up to those who attend. However, I strongly feel that we should be learning and educating ourselves about Functional Java, Scala, Clojure, JRuby and Groovy.

SPLIT CONTENT

Because we only a full Saturday. I thought it would be best to split the day into two halves. In the morning we have the open space sessions, then we would break for lunch. In the afternoon, we can have programming exercise for the new JVM language and /or including functional Java. (I went to the London Clojure Dojo on Tuesday night, and it was really well run and a good experience. I should like to model these Dojos for the Saturday afternoon [Experts or advanced coaches / users should apply w/ interest!] ).

REGISTRATION AND SURVEY

You will find a Google Form to register your interest in The Collective Summer Camp. Thank you!

DATE AND TIME

The day of the Conference will be a Saturday either 30th July, 6th August or 13th August. It will be full day. See the registration and survey form.

PAID

The UK is going through the most dire and severe economic recessions at the moment. So I understand many of you, like me, do not have loads of money. The Collective Summer Camp UK ought be low cost. However, we cannot expect every single event to be a free ride. Someone or something has to be paid for their time and effort. Venue and location to be decided. The money goes to the organisation and any thing left over will go to food, pizza and soft drinks, and we can decide what to do with the rest of the money, like donate it charity or something.

HASHTAGS

#CollectiveSummerCampUK and includes #BeyondJava, #ScalaLang, #Clojure, #Groovy, etc .

Please retweet #CollectiveSummerCampUK and self-promote the event.

INCENTIVE

I need at least 25 people to register to make the event viable. Please your register interest for the event with the Google Form.

HELP

I need help to organise this event. Please enquire with your ideas today!

That is it for now. I am so pleased to come out of stealth-mode. The next bit will be to decide on venue, which most likely looks like most people like central London and that will drive the cost. Stay tuned. +PP+

Twitter: @peter_pilgrim or electronically at peter dot pilgrim at gmail dot com

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My week of Scala continues at the ACCU 2011 in Oxford. I will be here, incidentally, until Saturday lunchtime. At least that is the plan.

The Stream

First let me add some record of tweet to my presentation yesterday. You can also download my ACCU 2011 Introduction to Scala presentation direct from XeNoNiQUe. Otherwise play the Scribd version, at least that will work iOS devices including those tablets you all love to play with.

@ewan_milne: #accu2011 Proof that Scala is the future: RT @peter_pilgrim: Right then. My second day at #accu2012 can properly begin now.

@gmtng: just favorited your tweet: As promised My latest SlideShare upload : #ACCU2011 Introduction to Scala: An Object Functional Lang…

@AnthonySterling: RT @peter_pilgrim: @AnthonySterling Yes Slideshare conversion is broken. Download my "Intro to Scala" PDF directly http://is.gd/scalaintro

@alewark just favorited your tweet: As promised My latest SlideShare upload : #ACCU2011 Introduction to Scala: An Object Functional Lang… http://slidesha.re/hufsPG

@AnthonySterling: Aww, what a shame. It appears @peter_pilgrim’s "Introduction to #Scala" slides are borderline useless on @slideshare. http://is.gd/L77ouo

@jezhiggins just favorited your tweet: #accu2010 unfortunately slideshare messed up its view w/ the colours. Download my Intro to Scala PDF directly

@richardfearn just favorited your tweet: Audioboo: ACCU 2011 Introduction To Scala: We Past The Point of No-Return http://boo.fm/b329633 #accu2012 #scala #adoption #beyond #java

@richardfearn just favorited your tweet: #accu2010 unfortunately slideshare messed up its view w/ the colours. Download my Intro to Scala PDF directly

@pfriis just favorited your tweet: As promised My latest SlideShare upload : #ACCU2011 Introduction to Scala: An Object Functional Lang…

@patbaumgartner just favorited your tweet: As promised My latest SlideShare upload : #ACCU2011 Introduction to Scala: An Object Functional Lang…

Dear fellows know that you are knocking me out with this stream of consciousness.

Beyond The JVM Platform

I rediscovered a little gem of book by Bruce Tate, “Beyond Java: A Glimpse of the Future of Programming Languages” published September 2005 by O’Reilly. I bought a copy of this little gem, may be in 2006, it was only 180 pages long. Tate’s book pushed the benefits of Ruby the programming language, Rails the poster child of Ruby and continuation frameworks like Seaside for Smalltalk as being the future at the time. He gave a thorough assessment of Java’s history and achievements in the Internet. At around the tenth birthday of Java, I remember going to the most amazing JavaOne conference ever (2005), what a party that was. It was my second ever JavaOne conference and one where Sun Microsystems introduced the JavaCard on all of conference badges for the first time. Tate’s book in the autumn was a sobering come-down.

My overall conclusion after reading the book was that Java was going to be alright still. Although I did not understand then the functional influences from outside the platform like closures and high order methods, I took the book as a certain opinion, I never migrated to Ruby or Rails programming at all. I stayed with the Java software problem.

In 2005 the Java programming language had certain weaknesses in it, generics had just appeared there in Java SE 5 and the enhanced-for loop. All enterprises that I contracted for at the time, where stuck with J2EE 1.4 and application servers, Web Logic 7 –> 8, which had no official endorsement for Java 5. Businesses like investment banks where loath to upgrade to the next technology, because they were restrained by the commercial support and service layer agreements with the suppliers. This is still a familiar trend and circumstance in our industry.

As most of us know the path of Java programming language moved from the client-side to the server-side from 1998, when I first got involved with the Java platform, until 2005. Tate had this to say in his book:

“As the emphasis from Java shifted from client to server, enterprise integration became more important. Here, the partnership of IBM, Oracle, BEA, Borland and Sun, other paid huge dividends”

In 2011, we all know that Oracle swallowed up BEA in 2007 and then acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010. The number of enterprise players is now much smaller, and both IBM and Oracle collaborate on the OpenJDK project as well as being major Java EE suppliers. Java still has a large server-side community. It still is great solution for application server and enterprise development that is if you want to continue with the current solutions.

If you have a desire to push the platform to new limits then the programming language and the current framework may not be enough for you. If you are looking to cloud enterprise solution is going to be hard to find a standard JSR at the moment, if you are looking to go the other way in user interface, mobile or desktop solution there is a multitude of ideas, API, library and frameworks that may fulfil the requirements. The point is that many innovations now are in happening in languages other than Java or that those solutions are wrapping a domain specification language in a host language around Java APIs. (Grails and Spring Bean configurations written Groovy around the Spring Dependency Injection model. Bill Venners ScalaTest is a Scala framework and fluent testing DSL that can be launched via JUnit / TestNG or Maven or Ant or your favourite IDE)

Tate in retrospect managed to predict a few outcomes in his 2005 book. One is the demise of Sun Microsystems. He wrote long before, Jonathan Schwarz changed the NASDAQ stock sticker from  SUNW to JAVA, and the chief executive’s own open blogging, that:

“Sun is not the company that it once was, placing Java’s future in doubt. I’m not saying that Java will disappear, but Sun might. It has lot of cash in the bank, but where is it going to make money? It’s being squeezed on the low-end by companies like Dell, and AMD. IBM is squeezing Sun from above. Sun’s software and services businesses have never really taken off. I think Sun is a ripe acquisition target.”

At the time, Tate was nervous about IBM acquiring the Java brand. He was correct in April 2009. IBM made an attempt to acquire the entire brand. Who knew? Luckily (or unluckily) Oracle acquired the brand. In my opinion Oracle may just have given the Java platform at least another decade of real commercial growth, may be even two. It is always an uncertain business to predict the future. However, in my opinion, which is shared by many others, the whole Java software platform should have a good steward.

In today’s ACCU 2011, there was a great session, which I attended, by Steve “The Doc” List, and he talked about roles in facilitator patterns and anti-patterns. In my view and I am sure you can agree that Oracle cannot be classed as a Benevolent Dictator, rather it is more Qualifier and Dominator. Oracle has started, for the good of the community, to acquire the roles of Articulate (The Java Spotlight podcast and Early Access for JavaFX 2.0) and Converger (IBM and Apple agree to participate on the OpenJDK project, JCP and JDK 7 and JDK 8 announcements pushed, Bruno Souza and Soujava as EC members) and Gladiator (JDK 7 and JDK 8 Java Specification Requests pushed forward, much to chagrin of Apache Software Foundation, Doug Lea, Tim Peierls).

Sun Microsystems did very belatedly attempt to return to client-side, with JavaFX Script 1.x, with the Re-Invigoration of the Desktop theme of JavaOne 2007. My incandescence is not quite red, but orange-amber as my feelings on how the emergence of JavaFX came about. I shall thus summarise: too little and too late; bigger pie than the estimate delivery; strategy and right-timing and there is still time for JavaFX 2.0 success with domain specification languages written in alternative JVM languages.

Tate also postulated the question: Why not just fix Java?

“That would easy if you could pinpoint the problems. If you thought the problems were in the language itself, you could just do some major surgery and offer a new version of Java. That’s easier said than done. Sun has been very careful to preserve backward compatibility at all costs.”

Sun was conservative in order to protect customers. I also agree that is a super strategy in comparison to the combatant approach taken by Microsoft. History has shown Microsoft will dictate over the experiences and requirements of its customers. We know best is the mantra. Microsoft wholesale deprecated SilverLight, changed Visual Basic from version 5 to 6 and then forced customer to change source code by changing the languages of C# 2.0 to 3.0 to 4.0.

There is another side to this, I think customers need to be told sometimes to upgrade or update its applications and systems. Even Microsoft itself attempted to put down Internet Explorer 6 with a massive multi-million dollar global advertising campaign a year ago, telling us to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. The issue for Microsoft is that it has earned the mistrust of millions of users as well as thousands of companies for just getting the product wrong. Windows Vista uptake was never as good in satisfaction, because of the troubles with driver incompatibilities, poor start-up times, and user experience expectations. In comparison to the upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, Windows Vista was a poor imitator. Albeit, Windows 7 is a much better operating system, there are still problems for businesses concerning drivers, hibernation and one sometimes still cannot deliberate and summarily kill any process on the machine. Microsoft has to it’s credit pushed the technological curve through zealotry. Sometimes you just have to do it, because the client will never upgrade and you can never get to the next level of evolution, and therefore it is time, sadly, for laggard enterprise to go take a hump. I am rather sure you can personally name a few concerns that are like that: just hanging on to the older stuff because it can and it will

Much of the knowledge we have now, was the same when Tate wrote:

“Many languages have trumped Java technically, but they still failed. Betamax, too, was technically better than VHS. The biggest factor of the equation is social. Without a credible community, there can be no success.”

The Groovy community is a great example of this social aspect and interaction. Paul King in Australia has reported that he personally has helped more businesses in get up to speed in Groovy and Grails in over 100 projects. The idea of introducing Groovy in small tasks in the beginning and letting developers do experiments in projects in areas that do not affect the critical-path of business, like administration, building a web site to back an database table, or tidying up a build operation allowed developers to gain confidence. It would be and should be the same for Scala adoption. Start small, gain trust and confidence. Keep going on.

“Unless it is a disruptive technology, it has hard to see the next major programming language coming from a commercial vendor. There is just too much fear and distrust among the major players.”

Tate is this case has been proven largely and fuzzily true. You need to learn Java the programming language if you going to program an Android mobile phone or tablet. Google never introduced a new programming language for Android. They could have or some people might have said that they should have. However they wanted knowledge transfer and easy access to the market mind share of the engineers, the 9-10 millions Java knowledgeable people on the planet: developers, designers and architects. It is a number game after all. You only need less than one percent to look at your new operating system / mobile solution probably to be affective. They rather assimilated the programming language of Java like the Borg and transcribed language’s semantics and syntax into their own Dalvik executable instructions.

Customer business can be laggard about holding on applications written in Java the programming language. These enterprises should know that some of the real innovation is attracting the best engineers to look beyond the language. There are examples of projects in Scala, JRuby, Groovy and Clojure etc that show how we can better write software of the future.

Tate had some metrics for Java’s successor, namely:

• Dynamic typing for better productivity
• Rapid feedback loop
• User interface focus to provide, rich environment for building user interfaces
• Dynamic class model, ability to discover and change the parts of a class at runtime
• True OOP provide a conceptually pure implementation object oriented programming with no primitives and a single root for all objects
• Consistent and neat – the language should code that’s clean and maintainable
• Continuations – the language should enable important higher abstractions like continuations

Scala the object-functional multi-paradigm programming language, in the year 2011, meets Tate’s requirements from 2005, except for dynamic typing and adaptable class model. Scala instead is statically typed and therefore is safe and performant as much as possible to writing an equivalent application in the Java programming language. Scala does not provide dynamic classes, it has traits (mix-ins) and composition.

Scala also has a doorway into the funky new world of functional programming. Tate had not the foresight in 2005 to see that the under-utilisation of CPU cores is now expected to cause the industry major concern in this decade. He is also could not see the wider burgeoning interest in domain specific languages and writing control abstractions for library users.

Even if Scala is not the next Java successor, there is suddenly a great interest in interoperability of languages on the Java Virtual Machine. How on earth are we going allow these languages to call each other methods or routines, or even now compile and build together? How can also ensure that these language, the dynamically typed one, are going to be performant across multiple CPU cores?

We are going to find out however, it is not a question of if and but when, because the major innovators are pushing the platform forward. Suddenly every engineer or rather elite engineer or those that consider themselves to be in the elite cliqué are wanting to be  language designers. The class and the form of these language designers will tell in time, I suspect if you starting now you have an awful long way to learn to be good one. If you think are then probably I am writing to a child prodigy or somebody help me out here. Designing a language is hard enough, designing the next great successor language to Java is an even tougher task.

I trust in Professor Martin Odersky in his scalable language idea as a probable answer and other languages are welcome as well. As I said in my talk on Wednesday morning, we are going to be drinking a lot of coffee beans and the rollercoaster ride in the object / functional space is going to be rough, we need a good captain and sailors, and seat belts. No matter whatever will happen, I have two predictions for the Java eco-systems.

• The interest and adoption of alternative JVM languages will increase in pace, as long as Java the programming language is constrained backward compatibility and the innovators in the other languages keep pushing the envelope ahead of Java.

• The amount of new ground-breaking applications written from scratch purely in the Java programming language starts to decline from this year (2011) onwards. In other words if there are truly great killer applications / application frameworks written in Java from this point onwards, they will cater also for alternative JVM language too.

For now I bid you adieu.

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It is Wednesday 13th April 2011 and I am here at the ACCU 2011 Conference again in Oxford, England. It is great to back. The last time I was in Oxford for ACCU 2008, I gave a talk on JavaFX 1.1. This morning, I presented An Introduction to Scala: The Object Functional Programming Language. The responses have been very good so far:

@devpg: Listing to ‘Introduction to Scala’ at #accu2011 reminds me to use it in a project

@rachelcdavies: @peter_pilgrim enjoyed your talk. I’m new to Scala and this was just right for me. #accu2011

@TimPizey: Installing Scala after lightening introduction by Peter Pilgrim at #ACCU2011

@matty_jwilliam: @peter_pilgrim great talk today. Tonight has been all scala (and beer) #accu2011

@gasproni: @matty_jwilliams: @peter_pilgrim great talk today. Tonight has been all scala (and beer) #accu2011

@TimPizey: Day 1: java > 1.4 is a mess and is going to get worse, move to Scala or other JVM language as soon as you can. #ACCU2011

@russel_winder: All the JDK8 stuff is already in Groovy and Scala. #accu2011 #groovy

@ewan_milne: #accu2011 Intro to Scala – here’s the Fibonacci algorithm!

@lisacrispin: RT @peter_pilgrim As promised My latest SlideShare upload : #ACCU2011 Introduction to Scala: An Object Functional Lang… http://slidesha.re/hufsPG

The attendance was fairly good. There was no pressure then: Rachel Davies (agile coach), Kevlin Henney (consultant and top speaker) and Ewan Milne (ACCU Chair) were in attendance. The competition was Scott Meyers (C++0×10) and Jutta Eckstein (Agile software development). My Scala talk did not do too badly with this quality of simultaneously talks and their respective speakers.

I was pleased with the face-to-face feedback as well. Kevlin Henney was impressed by the description of the Scala type reference engine. Ewan liked it too. Delegates Michael from England and Khalid from Pakistan/Norway enjoyed the overall presentation for being just enough technical detail to be inspired to try Scala.

Here is my entire slide deck as promised on Slide Share:

You can download my PDF slides directly from XeNoNiQUe. I attempted to share with SlideShare web site however the conversion process they used washed all the nice beautiful colours on my slide deck. Boo!

Enjoy

(I welcome feedback of any sort. If you want this talk for your business, especially in London then hook me up)

This is My Week of Scala. You get out of the task exactly the proportion of result that you put into the plan. Next episode I will have more aggressive discussion on Beyond Java and stab at the history of how we got here.

Post addendum 1

Dinner was great. I joined fellow ACCU 2011 speakers, Schalk Cronje, Steven “Doc” List and Lisa Crispin for a short stroll to the nearby Plough pub, which is about 10 minutes walk from the Barcelo Hotel. The ACCU brings a different crowd. I was the first time I met Steven “The Doc” and Lisa. Steven ( Thoughtworks) had this great idea for Source Mastery Quest for gaining true experience and skills through crowd sourcing and peer recommendation and certification. Lisa talked about her experience in software development in Austin, Texas in the early 1980’s where everybody wrote the same code in the exactly the same style. Being an Agile tester she reminisced the old way was what we should be doing now in software development.  Shalke (McAfee) I had met before at ACCU 2008 and other conferences, he tends not to do so much C++ development now these days. I think it is great to networking with new people, swap business cards and share ideas. The best ideas are those sometimes we have in those corridor moments, or conversation over a beer or glass of wine.

Post addendum 2

I managed not to sleep again. Woke up at 2:30AM because my iPhone buzzed. Oh yes. I had put in to a schedule “Richard Bair at the Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group”.  Eight hours behind in time zone. I did watch the UStream.TV feed of the talk. JavaFX 2.0 is coming along nicely, the binding API worked very well. I can see this was true through the live coding demonstration on Richard’s MacBook Pro, and I have a good feeling about the new JavaFX Bean property models. The layout API is where action is needed next, because in the early access I have found it less understandable in comparison to the JavaFX Script 1.x releases. I am quite sure the FX SDK team are working hard on it as I type. Shout out to Stephen Chin and Jonathan Giles.Tweet

The market is dead. The brief flurry of activity in January and February is at an end. There is truly not a lot going on out there.

I seem to have attracted some haters out there. Because I have been pushing Beyond Java, looking at innovation beyond Java the programming language, many folk seem to be upset about this. The next time you see me, please feel free, if you want to cross the street and walk on the other side of the road. I see you though. Of course I can see you creeping and scurrying in the dark alleys of tech town. I simply do not have time for minds full of hate. However you have a right to choose hate for your heart. It is sad, but true.

Here is the news: Innovation will be happening whether you like it or not. You may not be agreeable to it, or it might actually believe that Beyond Java is too risky for you or you cannot afford it now. This moving feast is happening and it is on the road. Tough.

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I have just had massive blow out. I seem to be fighting and arguing all the time now with close people near me. I feel ratty even talking to acquaintances. A turning point has been reach, and I honestly do not what on earth to do next about it.

It would appear that investment banks are extremely confused on what their long strategy is to do with Java and even Beyond Java:

1. The sheer unpredictably of interviewer requirements, unpredictably of technical, social, team make up, and process whether it is agile or non-agile
2. All interviewers are different because all client are different; this is understood and they all have different personalities; however common rapport is increasingly hard to achieve in the mix there
3. Difficulty of getting to the conclusion of a potential engagement; the perfect match is proving harder to achieve 
4. Lack of foresight in clients in that they really want. It seems that they only interested ever in a fix for the pain right here right now – they are unwilling to look at changing the application architecture; infrastructure; underlying algorithms behind the scene
5. Expect wizards to turn up and perform a spell of magic – and clear all ills. We still do not if there is a special technical skill that is out there (a silver bullet) if there is such a thing.
6. The state of the job market software engineering in financial services / investment bank in City of London is unknown. Is it good or bad? Everyone seems to have a conflicting view.

With case (5) I could have said several years ago. “Ah! The missing skillset of knowledge is Java Servlets or Struts or JSF or EJB or even Spring Framework”, then I could have done something about it. In 2011 the answer is “Well, Hellfire, save matches, fuck a duck and see what hatches!” and my own little addendum to Steven Tyler’s [American Idol Judge] surprised vocal curse-rhyme is, “Hail Jesus and Mary! Spread your legs, buttocks and latches. Give me good sex, herpes and whatever catches”. In other words if there is a magic inspired Java technology X that one needs to get an engagement in 2011, then it is news to me.

The deep worry of (5) is, I believe that it is further evidence of Java ecosystem fragmentation and disparate wealth and spread of technologies. On the one hand I would be over joyed if the clients now let start looking Beyond Java on the JVM, but they are unanimously sticking with Java the programming language, sticking purely to it, becoming the late majority and progressing to a laggard category.

These dogs [bitches] are holding back the innovation and early adopter categories (including me, myself and I; and also add you, yourself and you). We know that the backward compatibility guarantees is the constraint on the Java programming language. You and I can see that this rubber band stretching between laggards and early adopters has to break at some time soon as the client themselves are demand more of the applications that run on the Java software platform. We can no longer be held to ransom for application strongly tied up to legacy WebSphere application server 4/5, WebLogic Server 8 or steadfast only runs on a JDK 1.4.2. The clients must know that they have to upgrade their application, give up these legacy environments, reinvest for future ROI, refactor for sustainable architecture, in order to ultimately be competitive in their technology model, which is by now proportional to the performance their business model.

In case (4) I see a lot of job specifications for things like Java performance and multiple thread programing / concurrency expertise.

The candidate must have extensive Java knowledge and must be experienced in writing streamlined (memory and CPU efficient) code. Additionally, they must have a very good understanding of Java multi-threading and Java performance tuning.

This suggests to my mind, client are facing a lot of issues about pain now, fire-fighting and fixing the problem short-term. It just does not suggest fixing performance in a long-term strategic way through innovation and changing the architecture or searching for a better algorithm or collapsing layers appears to be non-thought here. Not up for discussing. Nada.

It seem all to soon to be like a Hollywood action movie scene: Just load the fucker and fix it so the actor can keeping shooting bullets from my rifle, whilst not thinking of day when rifles are replaced with ray-guns. (One can therefore forget talking to prospective client about Scala adoption or looking at radically different solution á la Clojure)

With case (2) this is human interaction sociological issue, the quality of interviewers seems to less than desirable IMHO. If the other side of the fence has different fixed ideas about software development rather you appear to do, then we are sunk in a face-to-face. And low and below if the organisation has dysfunctional view of Agility, then the wheels will come off …

With case (5) asking the candidate or the contract for wider flexibility suggest that the client has a lack of clarity in the first place. It is this idea of, in a British way, or wanting to dot the I-s and crossed the T-s, ticking all the boxes from A to K, in order to get SIGN OFF from the manager’s manager that is a deeply flawed and ultimately troubling. Yes one can say the job market behaves in the Keynesian model of economy, it is a seller’s markets now, but who the fuck is a ultimate master of Java, C# and C++, Perl, Python, Swing, Spring Framework, ASP, Hibernate, Core Java, JPA,Scripting Languages, Web and programming language and framework simultaneously and not already working for the software deity G.0.D? I would like to know who these mythical people are and meet them today; and I suspect so would you.

With case (6) it is hard to get the real truth of the information of engagements these days, when one is involved fighting in a war. The war is the talent search game and recruitment of good programmers. The amount of misinformation is as dangerous as finding right information. The trouble is discerning if your information is valid and good, the signal-to-noise ratio is not good today.

I am deeply worried about the future prospects. Currently my own money and budget have limits, but there are not infinite. I can postulate, blog and express my enthusiast about a Beyond Java (on the JVM platform) universe as much as humanly possible, I can talk a good game (á la Paul Gascoigne) on Java technology and the platform, as I have done it before. I am human and have limits though, and I am beginning wonder genuinely what those are at the moment …

My tech lead rant is over … Stupid, silly and uninspired … unsure what value there is there … software pride weak … we don’t reach … we don’t join arms … ah we as software developers take it up the ass as per usual …

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Recently, I have been thinking about Java and Moving Beyond Java. I ruminated aloud in a couple of Audioboos and so here are a summarised listable version of these thoughts and ideas.

Listen to AudioBoo: Moving Beyond Java on the JVM: To Be Or Not To Be

Listen to AudioBoo: Investment Banks Moving Beyond Java? I Don’ Think So

Java

• The Mother Language – Lingua franca of the Java Virtual Machine platform
• Java SE 7
• Java SE 8
• Work related. Programming language is risk-averse, it changes slowly and carefully. Oracle steward ensure that it is safe. Business owners and web site owners will be able hire or contract.
• A de-facto programming language for new learners, students of computer science
• Die-hard stalwarts can stick with Java the programming language, because eventually some of the benefits of the other languages could make it into Java ecosystem as frameworks and libraries
• Performance-related Java programming: There is a native-like programming approach for writing Java applications like they do C++ / Speed performance

Beyond Java on the JVM

• Neil Ford, Ted Newark and Myself are examples of external luminaries (the forces) that are telling you why you should be thinking about moving beyond Java
• Continued learning
• Reduction of Boilerplate (Almost all)
• Declarative programming (JavaFX Script)
• Ease-of-Development
• Dynamic typing (Groovy)
• Scripting language approach
• Closures (Almost all)
• Control abstractions (Scala)
• Improved concurrency models parallel algorithms, actor, CSP and software transactional memory
• Better simple abstract data types (case classes and objects in Scala)
• Better language support for immutable object (@Immutable in Groovy)
• Better annotations (Groovy has loads)
• Some languages support an object functional approach (Scala, Groovy, Fantom)
• Other object functional languages may support Higher order functions (Scala, Clojure)

General behaviour, psychology within the movement of herds "staying up to date and getting good".The decision is yours in 2011

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