Java Has The Flu

I attended the JavaOne show this week, after a 4 year gap. What a difference - who knew Java could be so boring? On the other hand, this is what it feels like to go to a show for a technology that has lost half of its market share in the last 4 years (at least when measured by O'Reilly book sales - not a particularly reliable source but better than no source at all). If you don't like that source, check out Andi Gutman's recent post that Java is losing the battle for the modern web.



Let me be clear here - at WaveMaker, we have hitched our wagon to Java and hope very much that JavaOne is showing us the ghost of Java present, not the ghost of Java to come.

Trade shows in general have been eviscerated by the flood of technical information on the web. But even in the new "I'm only here for the Tchotchkes" world of conference attendees, this was a surprisingly desultory affair.

Aisle after aisle was populated almost solely by people in ugly sports shirts wearing a vacant gaze that we all reserve for particularly humiliating situations. In fact, the only booth which seemed to have any mojo was the - you guessed it - schwag booth from Sun.

This morning, I found out what was wrong. I got one of those delightful ALL CAPS emails from JavaOne informing me that we had all been the subject of a viral attack by the dreaded Norovirus. So that was it!

There is something seriously wrong, not just with JavaOne, but with Java. After 10 years, Java remains an extremely complex development environment with nothing even approaching an easy learning curve. Microsoft has gleefully filled this vacuum, driving a vast J2EE to .Net migration at the low end of the market that nobody in the Java world seems willing to acknowledge.

The Sun promise to put Java runtimes everywhere is meaningless if nobody wants to develop for those runtimes. Adobe and Microsoft are doing a far better job making their tools simple enough for mere mortals and focusing on the presentation layer.

The news at the show was that Sun's front end technology, JavaFX, was *still* not ready. The world needs Sun to stand behind one of the 200+ Ajax frameworks already out there, not create yet another one. While we're at it, why can't they just put more effort into an Ajax toolkit they have already "partnered" with, like Dojo?

Here is my prescription for curing the Java Flu:

1. Fight for the low end: in modern warfare, death may come from above. In technology, death comes from below. Ten years from now, who will have more power over IT - web designers or core developers? If Microsoft and Adobe win the designers today, Java developers will be the Cobol developers of tomorrow.
   
2. Make Java easier: something is wrong when very useful but also very complex code frameworks like Spring are considered the "easy" way to do Java development. Java needs to be easy enough for your mother to build her web-based phone list with it. I'm talking Hypercard/Filemaker/Access easy.
3. Make Java prettier: just put a bullet in JavaFX and adopt something with momentum like Dojo or Ext. If you just can't stomach Javascript, then adopt GWT.
4. Make Java fun: can't do this without doing the first three items. For an example of one attempt to make Java easy, check out the WaveMaker download.
   

Remember when people built cool web apps with Java? When was the last time you heard about a cool web app that wasn't written in Rails or PHP? OK, people still build lots of cool stuff in Java, but the love is gone and its just a day job now.

Visual Ajax Webinar Thursday, April 17 at 12 PST

The next Visual Ajax User Group webinar and meeting will be next Thursday, April 17 at 12 PST. The speakers will be Scott Miles and Steve Orvell. Scott is the module owner for the Dojo Grid and Steve is a core contributor for the Dojo Grid. They will be talking about "Ajax Grids - Taming and Tooling The Widget Beast."

To attend the webinar, send an email to rsvp@visualajax.org

Our last meeting was a lively discussion led by Alex Russell on how to overcome the structural challenges of Ajax entitled, Saving Ourselves from the Unweb.

If you wish to attend in person, the meeting will be at the offices of WaveMaker Software, 301 Howard Street, 22nd Floor

Our next two meeting will feature Ajax experts from two ends of the mashup spectrum:

• May 15 - Stefan Andreasen, CTO, Kapow - Data Enabling the Ajax Mashup
• June 19 - Adam Sah, Architect, Google Gadgets - Ajax-enabled Google - Architecting Google Widgets/Gadgets and Ads

Please let us know if there is a topic or speaker you would like to see in an upcoming meeting by sending email to info@visualajax.org. For more information on the Visual Ajax User Group, click here.

The Zen of Web 2.0 - Webinar with Alex Russell - March 20 at 12PST

The first Visual Ajax User Group webinar will be next Thursday, March 20 at 12 PST. The speaker will be Alex Russell, co-author of the Dojo toolkit. He will be talking about "The Zen of Web 2.0 - How to Make Web App Development Effortless."

To sign up, send an email to rsvp@visualajax.org

The meeting will be at the offices of WaveMaker Software, 301 Howard Street, 22nd Floor, but space is limited and we are nearing capacity. There is plenty of room on the webinar though :-)

We also wanted to solicit input on future meetings. The next two meetings have been scheduled as follows:

• April 17 - Scott Miles, Dojo Grid Creator- Tooling the Ajax Grid
• May 15 - Stefan Andreasen, CTO, Kapow - Visualizing the Mashup

We do not yet have speakers for the remaining meetings for the year. Here are some of the people we think it would be interesting to have speak:

• Jack Slocum, CEO, Ext
• Daya Baran, WebGuild
• John Brennan, Adobe
• Kevin Hakman, Tibco General Interface
• Paul Colton, Aptana
• Adam Sah, Google Gadgets

Who do you think we should invite? Please leave your suggestions in the comments.

Why is there Air - Bill Cosby versus Kevin Lynch

I know I'm dating myself, but Bill Cosby had a pretty funny routine where a PE Teacher explains that the purpose of air is to pump up basketballs and volleyballs.

Now Adobe has launched their Air product (with a matching Kevin Lynch NY Times article, and GigaOm fan dance) to allow platform to allow browser apps to escape from their little Firefox and IE prisons and flit gaily across the desktop like "real" apps.

Now what exactly are the benefits here? According to the NY Times article:

1. I can click an icon on my desktop instead of a bookmark in my browser. Yawn.
   
2. I can run an application without the browser border. Snore.
   
3. I can run an application offline. Now this is cool, but hardly new, following earlier moves by Google Gears, Dojo Offline and Mozilla Prism

Excuse me, but I prefer Bill's definition of why we need air.

As I have written, Air, Flex and Silverlight are"back to the future" approaches for Rich Internet Applications that would have us believe that the future of the web lies in a proprietary animation engine (Flash) or an ancient and proprietary fat client architecture (Silverlight).

At WaveMaker, we believe open-source toolkits like Dojo are the best enterprise Ajax choice a more flexible, open-source browser choice. To be fair, we in the Ajax community still have a lot of work to do to be truly ready to take on giants like Adobe and Microsoft - but that's where the power of the community can make a difference.

Speaking of community, you can come find out more about the the Dojo toolkit at the upcoming Visual Ajax User Group meeting. On Thursday, March 20 from 12-1:30 PST, Alex Russell, one of the co-creators of Dojo, will be talking about the Zen of Dojo - how to make Dojo development effortless for beginner and expert alike. Come in person or sign up for the webinar by sending email to rsvp@visualajax.org.

Alex Russell on the Zen of Dojo - SF 3/20

Alex Russell, one of the co-creators of Dojo, will be presenting to the Bay Area Visual Ajax Group on Thursday, March 20 from 12-1:30. The Visual Ajax User Group blog is here.

Alex (his blog is here) will be talking about the Zen of Dojo - how to make Ajax development effortless for beginner and expert alike using the Dojo toolkit. He will also discuss how he sees Ajax and Dojo tooling evolving.

The meeting will be at WaveMaker, 301 Howard Street (at Beale), 22nd Floor (BART stop Embarcadero). For more information, or to reserve a space, send an email to:
visualajax@googlegroups.com

Thumbs up: Ajax Takes A Step Forward with Dojo 1.0

The grandfather of Ajax toolkits, Dojo, just celebrated its 1.0 release. The announcement was covered by the creators of Dojo on the Sitepen blog, as well as on the Ajaxian website. With over 58 different Ajax and Rich Internet Application frameworks to choose from today, the Ajax community has been too fragmented to get serious adoption at the enterprise level.

Dojo 1.0 may not be the ultimate winner of the Ajax wars, but it sure sets a high bar for any toolkit that wants to beat it as a viable RIA toolkit for the enterprise. I wrote more of my thoughts about what it will take for Ajax to be enterprise ready here.