Grails - Perfect for College Students

My three co-authors are starting to put the finishing touches on our Groovy and Grails book, which is out in June. Today we had to design the cover letter (which goes on the back) that tells the audience what this book is about and who its intended for.

Well it struck me as I was helping to write the how perfect Grails is not only for advanced Java users but for extremely basic Java users. The FACT remains despite what many might tell you, Java is strong in the work place and growing even stronger. And there is very good reasons for this, the Java stack can do things that some of the smaller more flexible dynamic stacks just can't do. For example one of the systems I am helping to write right now contains an extreme amount of nightly processing, this system is managed for its starts, the amount of beans running at a time, etc. My point is ... Java is needed for the system.

So where does Grails play into all this? Learning Java is actually fairly easy. Using it properly a bit harder, understanding the components used for applications and how to set up and create a Web 2.0 framework MUCH harder. (this is one are that Java gets rightfully dinged) Its quite the effort and beginners WILL get lost. Enter Grails. It not only sets everything up for you, but makes it easy to run and deploy, you don't even need to configure a database.

But not only that. It uses Spring and Hibernate, tools many Java developers use in their daily work. Now while it wraps much of the pains of both, the general ideas will still be there. Not to mention the clear separation of MVC and Services exists as well. In the end what Grails will give you an easier route to learn more advance items, and when it comes time to use any other Java framework out there you will have an easier time ramping up than your peers. Not to mention you will be able to intelligently talk about Web 2.0 Java development in interviews.

JBoss World Day 1

Today is the first day of JBoss World, I survived the first three presentations and waiting for the keynote to be  complete to do some of the "socializing" / "networking" aspect of this conference. Has gone very well so far. The first session on JBoss Clustering was quite interesting. Also attended Big Lots session. I was not going to at first, but it is always interesting to see what others are doing in the technologies one works with. I also even met two people from the company I used to work at when I was in Georgia (I knew one of the guys but did not recognize him at first)

All in all good soo far. I do find it weird how many of their sessions someone duplicate (like Seam). I hope by the time they get to my session people are not thinking, you know i am tired of Seam now.

At any rate, will post more later.

Codemash Day #1

 Codemash has started and we are half way through the day. This morning I attended two Ruby talks (one on Facebook and the other on Flexmocks) that were both interesting.

The Facebook one really fascinated me, because their is soo much potential and money for those kind of applications. Not only that but tease to create an application that uses Facebook is much more trivial than I originally thought it'd be. I am quite frankly surprised their aren't more applications out there for it from big businesses. 

Well looking forward to the Grails presentation from my co-author at 3:30, then off to finish up my presentation for tomorrow.

Java 6 Preview Available for Leopard

The long awaited news of Java 6 on Leopard has finally been announced, albeit with little fan fare.

http://developer.apple.com/java/

They have released the preview version of it, meaning a final version should be coming soon. While I find this great news for those of us who do Java development on the Mac, and I find it even more intrigued by the fact that it makes special use of 64bit architecture. However, its that last part that worries me a bit. Apparently you HAVE to have a Core 2 Duo to use Java 6. So that means myself and two of my business partners Mac laptops will not be able to run Java 6. Now generally developers like to stay on the cutting edge at all times. But really, the Core duos are ONLY a year and a half old? That is NOT that old to have to upgrade.

So I guess we shall have to see how desperate the Java developers who use the Mac are. There was a slight alternative right now as well. Someone has ported the unix JDK6 to the Mac with almost complete functionality. (the URL of the site escapes me right now but I will post it when I find it)

Web Sites Getting LESS Browser Compatible?

Even when i first started developing websites in college (95 - 96) one of the biggest items was to make the site compatible for multiple browsers. Heck i was even developing the sites to be compatible with text based browsers like lynx. As this progressed you would even see sites get soo crazy to have completely different websites based on IE or Netscape (back then) (this was of course over kill)

However, that started to change, especially with intranet sites. At that point, companies didnt care they could control everything and started to only develop sites in IE.

I am starting to see this scary trend continue. At a client one of my friends was at he was forced to put out a site that was IE only. (wth). This is just baffling to me. Especially the fact that this is a heavily interactive site where they are to generate sales from. And not only that but they were trying to target younger computer savy audiences. You know those most likely to use firefox, opera, or safari NOT IE. Even with Netflix, this trend is continuing. Sure you can get movies online, assuming you only use windows + IE. Why is this?

Are web sites getting soooo complicated you can't develop them for multiple browsers? .. No .. the fact is there are sooo many tools out there to support cross browser productivity that this is by far not a reason. Time schedule? Eh this maybe an issue, but i don't believe so either.

The answer ... as one friend put concerning the netflix site, "lazy developers". Or i would expand, lazy unskilled developers. The reason i discount the time, is that for the most part MANY of these issues (maybe not as much with netflix) but other sites is the fact that if you follow best practices you are not going to have loads of browser compatibility issues. People need to start to demand more from their websites and not settle on mediocre development!!!

Year of Dynamic Java?

Every year brings with it new technologies, this year is of course is no different. One of the biggest changes I have seen this year though, which did not really hit till the end of the year, is some of the dynamic languages in Java, specifically Groovy.

Groovy has come a long way and with the 1.5 release over the weekend it their are new meta-programming capabilities and better support for DSLs. All of this is supposed to help the Grails framework. And if you have used both you will really see the Ruby influences mixed with Java standards. (their are of course many additions since this is a 1.5 release (from 1.0)).

The real power of course I see is with Groovy's 100% support in Grails (of course) and even JBoss Seam. Besides Seam just being a good tool to bridge the gap between JSF and EJB3 it has quite a bit of support for ease when doing jBPM (JBoss' business process management system which can use drools as part of its decision making process).

I think this next year will be interesting to see if, now that the java dynamic languages have reached good maturity, will Groovy really start to grow in the Java community. The NoFluffJustStuff tour has even branched off with a G2 (groovy and grails) tour as well.

At any rate, whether you are a java, ruby, or python developer ... the exponential spread in popularity over the last 2 - 3 years of using languages dynamic languages with a good DSL is great for the community. Let's see what 2008 brings.

Speaking at Two Presentations Coming Up

Well in the last couple weeks I had two of my abstracts accepted. The big one being at JBoss World, I am very excited to speak at my first big conference. The only thing a bit strange is they labeled it as a "Case Study", but when i submitted the abstract I did not apply for it as a "Case Study". Oh well I will just have to adjust my original presentation a bit to give it a "case study" feel.

In other strange conference excepting news, I submitted both Ruby and Java presentations to codemash. For the most part I am a Java developer, at least that is the bulk of my experience. Ironically none of my Java presetnations got accepted but my Rails one did. Regardless i am very excited, the Hobo presentation was one of the top two presentations I wanted to do. The other being an IoC comparison; however, I think having Dick Wall their giving a Google Guice presentation sunk my hopes at that.

Give me a holler if any of you are going to be out there

FYI - the URL of both conferences

http://www.codemash.org
http://www.jbossworld.com