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A couple of weeks ago, I gave an interview to Armel Nene, Off The Chain podcast

The interview is available as on YouTube visually, as Armel recorded with Zoom. If you are an audiophile then the interview is on SoundCloud too.

We had a great conversation on my views about Full Stack engineering including a history of Java techology and my personsal experience with learning programming languages. I dip into Java EE and enterprise Java and the way the community was structured circa 2005/2006. We had a good dive to the future of Jakarta EE and its competition with Spring Boot. I was asked about how much DevOps should an engineer typically know.

If you viewed this interview, it probably could have say that I tanked JavaServer Faces. I think that JSF was a great technology for the time. I was productive using JSF writing my second book Digital Java EE 7 way back in 2014/2015. However, it has been superseded by Angular and React frontend technologies. Now I have more experience from Angular 8/9 than React, sadly.

My beef with JSF is that Intellij IDEA consistently fails to reload resources XHTML or rubberduck HTML during a running JVM session. So I no longer recommend JSF to clients. I can compare my interactions with code-edit / reload page / inspect / refactor and then repeat and clearly this was fast with even the Scala / Play Framework. You would just save a HTML / web asset or a Scala file and the whole thing would eventually reload. Anything that defeats the code-edit / build / (re-)deploy WAR / inspect / refactor and repeat is a winner. Redeploying WAR files (exploded or single) is such a pain in the Java EE (nay Jakarta EE) worlds. Sorry. It just is. So no offence to JSF.

Also it was in this podcast that I hinted on my existing work on a developing non-technical online video course (I just announced this new video course today as an EARLY ACCESS / COMING SOON). I told Armel that I would not writting any more books succeeding Java EE 7 (Jakarta EE) for the foreseeable future. The future for me is deeper consultancy, statement of work related ways of working and producing online learning content, at least, that is my current belief.

Peter Pilgrim
September 2020