techno.blog("Dion")

Is JavaOne 2004 going to be SunOne, like last year? I was really dissapointed to see almost exclusively Sun (and partner) speakers at the 2003 show. It was the worst show yet in my opinion. It has lost almost all of the technical base, and developers are going to other shows to get that fix.

I thought that 2004 may be different, as I had heard that “things will be different”. However, yesterday I heard from a bunch of people who got rejection letters, for talks which were very interesting. This leads me to believe that:

a) Sun has got absolutely amazing talks scheduled, so they were just unlucky.
b) Sun has picked crappy talks based on marketing, like last year.

I pray it is a). If not, then you will see me a TheServerSide Symposium’s and No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium’s

Jean-Marie Dautelle is also wary: JavaOne – Sun marketing tool?

Cedric talks about his desire to have real properties in Java, and points to Groovy’s Plain Old Groovy Objects which gives us the syntactical sugar.

I definitely agree with him, and also really like the named parameters that you see in the Groovy examples:

import java.util.Date
class Customer {
// properties
Integer id
String name
Date dob    // sample code
static void main(args) {
customer = new Customer(id:1, name:"Gromit", dob:new Date())
println("Hello ${customer.name}")
}
}

I have always liked named parameters, as I have seen many bugs due to methods such as: doFoo(String acct1, String acct2). Here we have no way to know if someone is passing in the right info (other than via Unit tests).

This comes up a lot more when you use primitives as arguments, and some people try to get around the problem by always using encapsulated representations… but that just doesn’t work all the time, and is an overuse of OO.

Groovy is just looking nicer and nicer.

Groovy Beans page

No longer can people say that “Aspect Oriented” methods do not work. It has been proven that they do:

I loved reading the dilbert that shot into my inbox this morning:

Cross cutting management concerns. Fantastic! Imagine being the “review” aspect manager. All you do is setup and run employee reviews, 8 hours a day :)

I actually think that some companies do aspect-management don’t they? I know of a few companies that have “vendor closers” where their entire job is to get the BEST deal out of a vendor. You can only imagine the type of person that wants to do THAT all day :/