Sun Developer Days 2005

Today the Sun Developer Days here in Singapore has just been concluded. Quite an event, Treos has been raffled off, everyone got some Duke T-shirts. Of course not all seminars and conferences are perfect. There are some good and bad stuff that comes out from there.

To make a rundown of what came in that event let's start with the good stuff:

• The opening salvo of the event talks about nothing but Open Source, it's Open Source here and there. Matt Thompson, Sun's Director of Technology Outreach and Open Source Programs Office, I remembered(hope my memory serves me right) quoted him on saying "...for the Singapore IT industry to 'continue' to move [forward]...", Why? Is the Singapore IT industry moving otherwise? His radar is quite powerful. I would partly agree, maybe around 70%. Of course, offshore and institutionalized companies like IBM, Sun, SAP etc. that has operations here doesn't fall on the reverse direction. Practically all the speakers uttered the word "Open Source" with different levels of boldness or shall I say wake up calls. Yes, most of the local IT players are moving on the wrong direction.



• Again, it's about Open Source. It rules. Project Glassfish, Project Peabody, OpenSolaris are some of the highlights of this event. It's both open source Java SE(Mustang) and Java EE. And all the virtues of openness. Pretty frustrating when the speakers are attempting to get a consensus like "Who's using open source tools?", "Who's involved in open source?", "Who has a java.net user id?" etc. etc., from the look of their faces they seem to always get disappointing results. That's understandable, there will be some effort of pushing needed in this part of the world.



• SAP the Platinum sponsor, has long been an Open source advocate. Well that's nothing new.



• So it's open source and open source so forth. The Information Age is over, it's now the dawning of the Participation Age.



• Going to Netbeans 4.1, Matt Thompson admits that Eclipse has a huge leadership in the open source IDE arena. For the reason that during circa Netbeans 3 and JDK 1.3 Swing with all its beauty and madness has been lagging in performance. I will admit that Netbeans 4.1 is now much faster than the previous versions which is a great improvement. The integration with Sun Java System Application Server 8.1 also rocks, the Java EE demos are not your typical nonsense "Hello world" demos, And if you insist that AppFuse is awesome, you're making a huge joke on yourself.



• Going to NetBeans Mobility Pack, there's nothing like it elsewhere.



• So far, I think IntelliJ has to really open up. Or it will really be left behind.



• The speakers are great, they're all evangelists, of course, whatever that means



• The DTrace discussion is also interesting, as of now Linux does not implement this kind of instrumentation. The stack traces, core dumps and panics are more understandable than the typical barrage of memory addresses etc. etc.

Going to the sleep-inducing stuff:

• The JSF and Creator Studio, the yawnful JSF, It's good to have a nice "visual" way of doing things, personally, I still prefer to have full control of my codes, I still want to have the final decision on-the-fly where to put my validators, whether client-side or server-side, edit things with the IDE getting on the way, things like that. But all in all I will not give it a second look.



• Java Generics, personally I don't feel like using this. It's like being forced to learn English the George Bush way. Gives me a lot of eye strains during the length of the discussion, is that the reason they put a Latina babe to present this so there will be minimal eye strain?



• Java and .Net Interoperability, why bother? Being sensitive to the local needs? :)) I could say, Adapt or Die!



• Netbeans' JUnit is crude, needs some improvement, I sat down with Chuk Munn Lee about this and showed him how JUnit works with Eclipse and compared it with Netbeans. It's understandable that this feature is also a work in progress.



• Some clueless guests, BEA consultants which I knew by the face, may be they are now considering switching to Netbeans :)) , some asshat programmer from a state university who claims to know what he's talking about e.g. JSF rocks, Shale is going to change the world(Shale on him), Spring is just an MVC pattern(good thing I realized my shoes are made for walking), I wished he knew who he sits with. By the way, he gave me his business card.

But of course, it pays to pack two loaded guns instead of one. So today, it will be Eclipse for work, Netbeans for entertainment. How's that?