Not Just Java

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

I just read an interesting thread over at Panic from Fuzzy’s blog.  Here is the thread…

My favorite commenter Cameron Purdy of Tangosol/Oracle engaged in a friendly exchange with Fuzzy about the economics of releasing software as open source rather than keeping it closed and charging for licenses.  I am a big open source advocate and I proudly wear my OpenBSD shirt in public.  However I have never worked for an open source software company.  I don’t think that many people do actually.

Appistry is not an open source company, although we love open source software and are very careful not to lock in our customers.  I was very impressed with our CEO, Kevin Haar, when he advocated for adding even more features to our product to make it easy for customers to remain decoupled from any of our proprietary APIs.  However, we still charge money for our product and we don’t publish the source code.  But does charging money make us evil?  I don’t think so or I wouldn’t work here.  Fuzzy is clearly a strong open source advocate, but if you follow his argument to the extreme does that mean software should always be free?  Cameron points out that the amount of revenue made at a service company is much lower than a product company.  So are we here in the good old USA now supposed to give everything away because Apache and JBoss do?

I don’t know the answer, I only know that I like writing software for a living, and as long as companies like BEA and IBM are charging for their software and making millions then why can’t everybody else try?  One of Fuzzy’s points was standards, I totally get that.  Being a software architect, I have been careful to leverage standards whenever possible.  But if a product doesn’t lock you in architecturally and has years of intellectual property built up to help solve a problem, why can’t you charge for it?

I don’t think the whole software community wants to work as consultants during the day just so they can code open source apps at night.  There will always be a product market as long as the product 1) works and 2) makes sense economically.  I know full well that as our technology becomes more broad there will be a call to build an open source platform that is similar.  That’s fine, even JBoss doesn’ t have 100% market share.  And it never will, service companies cannot scale to the necessary size so a vacuum will always exist for product companies that can afford to support customers because of their license revenue.  So the waxing and waning of products and OSS will come and go.  But there will always be free software and there will always be commercial software.  That’s just the rules of the game now.

Or not.  If I was any good at making predictions about software I would have bought Microsoft stock back in the early nineties.  What can I say, I thought Windows 3.11 sucked.

-j