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

Well, day two picked up a little.  I attended some fun sessions and the crowd seemed to warm up a bit.  My favorate session was the GWT presentation.  Brian Johnson gave a talk and explained the basic premise behind the toolkit.  I was really into it and I am definitely going to download it and see what I can do.  I didn’t realize that it’s actually open source. That is rare for Google, so I am impressed.  The other neat talk was by Ola Bini on JRuby.  I liked seeing the Ruby syntax invoking Java objects. That was really cool.  It made me start thinking about how lambda reduction and aspects are really the same thing.  I should pitch that idea to the Spring contingent tomorrow and see what they say.

Last night for dinner we took the local metro subway to the waterfront and ate at a place called 7portes. It was awesome!   We had paella and it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life.  The salad was good, the wine was good and the main course was amazing.  The music was funny though - they had a piano player who was playing American hits from the 80s like Richard Marx, which was a little weird.  But other than that, it was cool.  The metro was pretty neat. You can get all over town once you learn to read the color-coded signs.  So, this weekend, I’m going to visit several museums and go to the beach. I can’t wait!

-jasen

We are doing the European TSS show and I thought it would be fun to do some daily posts like I did for JavaOne.  I have noticed some interesting cultural differences between European techies and us Americans.  First of all, they don’t care about slinkys as much here.  We couldn’t keep our free slinkys on the table at JavaOne, here people always look at them and keep walking.  We have given some away, but people always laugh at them like they’re ridiculous.  A couple British people take them, but they always ask first which is also uncommon.  So to summarize:

1) Americans:  love slinkys, will try to trick you to get one for free, aren’t bringing them home for kids (that’s a lie they want it for their office to play with)

2) British:  partially amused by slinkys, will apologize for thinking of taking one, bringing them home to make fun of Americans

3) Germans:  think slinkys are foolish, will stare at you silently if you offer them one, may take one home to show kinder (children) how silly Americans are

4) All other Europeans:  think slinkys are part of our product, don’t realize they are toys, may take one home to beef up their car’s suspension

As for Appistry’s software however, there is a lot of interest, especially by GigaSpaces employees.  (I know they monitor use of their company name on blogs so this is a meta-joke to see if I can get their CEO to come say "Hi" to me.)  But seriously the crowd is full of architects and developers and they like to discuss how to scale Java appllications on commodity hardware.  They always ask great questions that show that they are engaged and are thinking about our solution.  From that perspective all the countires are on the same page, they don’t like complexity and expense.  Offering a simple easy to use product that cuts processing costs by an order of magnitude makes sense no matter where you’re from.

-jasen