I went to JavaOne in SF today. Just an exhibitors pass mind you, for which I still had to part with $150. That's a pretty penny - three times more than I've paid for an exhibit only pass for any show before, think about it $150 just so that a bunch of companies could have the privilege to sell to me, and perhaps shovel some free schwag my way. Well for many years JavaOne didn't even have an exhibit only pass - you literally couldn't get in unless you stumped up $2k or more for a full conference pass. That hasn't been true for several years now though.
I'm pretty sure my first trip to JavaOne was in 1995 - their registration form seemed to indicate they had a JavaOne in '94 but I'm not really sure that could be true - was Java even out then? The Mosaic browser was barely up to 1.0 by then, if that and I don't recall hearing anything about Java until '95 and if you had to really twist my arm I might say I didn't go to JavaOne until '96, but perhaps I'm mistaken. Suffice to say I've been to a lot of them in my time - for three years at least as an exhibitor - and last year may have been the first I didn't manage to get there in some form or other.
Lets just say I'm feeling a little sad. The exhibit hall was quiet, with lots of wide open spaces in the middle and around the edges. If you took out the huge stands for a whole bunch of mobile phone companies like Nokia, Motorola and BenQ then you could comfortably have fit all the exhibits in well under a half of the hall. Its true that the usually massive and distributed Sun stand was jammed into a tiny space, I expect they kept it small to save money, but all in all I was really underwhelmed.
Considering about half of the exhibit area was taken up by the aforementioned mobile operators and related mobile offerings there really wasn't that much to write home about. IBM, huge proponent of all things Java had a very uninspired and uninteresting stand, I couldn't find anyone to tell me about their J9 VM. Sun had even let Microsoft have a stand - one of the bigger ones too - they were plugging technologies to assist in migration from Sun to .NET. Nothing very interesting but they gave me a free book, perhaps because I showed them my Microsoft "Geek" T-shirt I was wearing, a friend who works there gave it to me last year and you know what, I wear it proudly.
Looking around the rest of the exhibits I really didn't see anything that caught my eye as really cool. Perhaps we've got to the stage where Java has touched everything it can and nothing is surprising or innovative any more. Or maybe Java is truely on the way out... reached its peak and now starting a long journey into obscurity. And I do mean long, because believe if Sun does complete its open source plans for the language then Java will still be in use when I'm well into retirement. Although I'm by no means the first and last to suggest such a thing, I only recently caught myself actually believing it might be true. This was a consequence of checking the search popularity of "Java" on Google's new
Google Trend feature. Since its peak in late 2003 Java searches have dropped by over a third. Maybe everyone knows where to find out about Java now, or maybe they are searching for something else?
If anything the main theme of JavaOne was actually more related to this fuzzy wee beast know as "Web 2.0", that catch monika for "the next cool thing". Which is kind of ironic because really Java doesn't do that much for Web 2.0. Sure there's some Java based tools that let you generate AJAX apps, and finally work to update the Java APIs web based APIs to support it since servlets don't really address its paradigm. To me, what is even more ironic is that this recent web 2.0 blaze of glory is really all about what the original Java applet technology was all about - doing more with the web than just boring static HTML.
Of course Sun's big, expensive, protracted and ultimately bad fight with Microsoft pretty much killed off applets. Now almost no one uses them because like that bastard child of applets, Flash, no one really wants to download yet another plugin to eat up their CPU and flash irritating on their screen.
In my dream, applets would have been first class citizens in the web world by now and take over all those hacky JavaScript scripts we have to deal with. Applets could be loaded and stay loaded between web pages, and do all the groovy dynamic HTML/XML manipulations that JavaScript, the web equivalents of BASIC, now does.
Truth be told that I've kind of made my peace with JavaScript, but like C++ it really just sucks as a development language because writing portable, reusable and extendable libraries in JavaScript is hard - so hard that few ever manage to do it. And because everything JavaScript goes away between each page load they leave a lot to be desired. Perhaps that is what all the ho-hah about web 2.0 is now - finally we can get full HTML based app with a singe page load WITHOUT using pesky frames. But lets face it, when it comes down to it, JavaScript is still a developers nightmare - just give me good old Java with a tight binding back into the DOM and I'd be more than happy.
In fact truth be told, if I had my way the browser would just be an applet container and HTML would merely be a convenient and simple presentation technology for all those (like me) who either don't know, or dont care to write a "real" user interface.
Anyway, I know the next great hope is supposed to be Ruby - I haven't actually looked at it more than momentarily. I somehow doubt it could ever replace all the millions of man years thrown into Java technologies in the last ten years or so. So far I've only really heard anyone get very excited about it in terms of building web applications - something I don't actually care that much about. For everything else there is Java, C and maybe C++ if you're feeling really sick and twisted. Actually I think C++ is fast on its was to attaining LISP like status for use only on "seriously heavy (or obscure) stuff" because so many of those C++ coders are from the Microsoft world and switching over to that oh so very much like Java language, C#.
What do I think of C#? If you must ask me I would say if there was to be a fight between Sun and C# and both were made OpenSource then I really wouldn't care which one. They are so similar in terms of syntax and capabilites it seems to matter not which you use unless you're obsessed with security sandbox issues (a comparison of which I have yet to study). Lets just say that very few Java programmers have a really strong understanding of Java security or how to use it (least of all me) and use Java with enough other technologies with more sieve like security features that it renders Java's strengths less than critical. I mean last time you heard about data being leaked from a company or website was it because of inherenet Java/PHP/.NET platform weaknesses? No it was almost always due to so dumb application weakness, a rogue employee, a lost laptop or just totally weak (I mean weeeeeek) passwords. Doh!
Well, that's enough ranting - the empty halls of JavaOne certainly set it off, but the rest was my pent up angst about where software development is going in the next few years. Lets hope that Ruby on Rails and its ilk aren't about to lead us back around in another huge circle reinventing the wheel just because its fun. Forward progress is good mmmmkay?
