Not Just Java

I have some friends that run the online community GrupThink. I went and signed up for an alias and added a grup for posting programming cookbook questions and answers.  The Perl Cookbook was the most valuable book to me when I was learning Perl and I always look for content like that when picking up a new language.  I envision people posting questions and getting replies with code examples.  It could become a repository for multiple languages…or not…whatever.

I posted the first question asking how to write an infinite loop in BASIC.  My first 100% original program was this:

10 PRINT "KMart Sucks!"

20 GOTO 10

I used to type that in on the computers on the shelves and then walk around the store for awhile.  The monitors would be scrolling with the message and there was no way to stop it unless you knew how to break the interpreter or shut the machine off.  I caught employees several times shutting the machines off which made me very happy, it meant that I won.  I must have been like 10 years old when I was doing that stuff.  What a nerd.

Well, I finished the show and made it home.  On the last day, the crowd was mostly into the tech talks and not interested in the vendors so much.  I talked with a few of the people there, like the Azul guys.  I also talked with the IceFaces guys about maybe doing a demo together.  Appistry could be the back end hosting some business logic and they could be the front end gui.  It would be the merger of AJAX and grids.  That could be really cool.  The future of Java looks really fragmented.  There is no denying the influence of the Spring and Ruby communities in the enterprise software world.  SOA looks non-existant.  There are a ton of web frameworks now. I hope that shakes out a little.  Java is starting to show its age a bit.  People have been predicting the death of JEE for some time and judging by the shows I’ve been to I think it’s already happened.  Who’s writing new software for JEE?  Nobody, as far as I can see.  Its all about Spring/Hibernate apps with AJAX front ends.  Some variations exist here and there, but that’s pretty much the de facto.

After the show was over, I managed to hike around Barcelona for a couple of days before coming home.  I saw some great sights but I started wishing I knew more Spanish.  I went to have lunch in a small place that looked tourist-friendly.  They were off the beaten path, but it looked like thier menu was translated into English so I thought I was safe.  But when I sat down and asked the waitress, "Habla Ingles?"  She replied, "No, cero."  Which means, "You stupid American tourist, there’s no way I’m going to make this easy for you."  So I then decided to try to describe a sandwich by miming two pieces of bread with my hands and saying, "Pan con carne?"  She said, "No," and showed me a hand written spanish menu with 5 items on the top and 5 items on the bottom.  I recognized "spaghetti" so I pointed at that.  Then she wanted me to pick something from the bottom list also and said something about "carne" so I figured it was the meat course or something.  I pointed blindly at something on the list and hoped for the best.  She went to the next table and sat down with them, I heard them repeat the two things I ordered and laugh.  That’s always a good sign when you’re in a foreign country.  But it turned out I just ordered a sausage. It was pretty good.

All in all, I’d say Barcelona is a great place to visit.  I’d highly recommend it.  It was no coincidence though that the first night I was back home we went to CheeburgerCheeburger and I ordered a quarter pound burger with a milkshake.

-jasen