But I have a soft spot for Sun. My first proper programming job involved writing C/C++ (and using Cfront – remember that?) on a Sun-3 workstation, and various versions were part of my working life for some time. I loved the solid feel of these machines. Remember the optical mouse that only worked on those special, shiny metal mats?

Between then and now, my only links to Sun have been through OpenOffice and Java. I played with Java quite early on, abandoned it in favour of Microsoft .NET, but have recently (and happily) returned to it. For the last couple of years I’ve been an enthusiastic user of NetBeans – I do hope Oracle recognizes just how good NetBeans is.  I have also tried OpenSolaris: ZFS is simply awe-inspiring, and very nearly enough on its own to make me run OpenSolaris, though truthfully I don’t think I need ZFS, and Windows remains simply more convenient and usable for everyday.

I’ve used OpenOffice for a long, long time.  I know Writer pretty well, warts and all. You need to ignore some of the cosmetic shortcomings, persevere with it and appreciate its fundamental strengths; things which I think make Writer better than Word. Occasionally I use OOo Writer to help colleagues debug and rescue Word documents which have evolved uncontrollable formatting: it amuses me to be using a free tool to clean-up after a rather expensive one.  I really hope Oracle will resource and manage the OpenOffice program properly. With the right additional effort, they have a potential Office-beater.

But the crown-jewels are Java itself, and the NetBeans IDE.  Everyone is trying to second-guess what Oracle will do with Java: I don’t have anything to add.  But I really want to add my voice to those hoping Oracle will recognize just how good NetBeans has become, not just as the best Java IDE out there, but also a first-class platform for building rich-clients.

After watching this I located Chet’s blog, and found his hugely entertaining send-up of our industry preoccupation with methodology.  I think we have a new candidate taxonomy of the software process landscape!  Conference Driven Development reminded me of some Microsoft technologies I recall hearing about – people were building plans on top of some of this stuff before we’d even left the PDC…

I don’t have time to play with Update N or to try Java FX Script just now.  FX Script interests me mainly because of the nice binding environment it promises, but JRuby will probably get my attention before FX mainly because I can put it to use on real problems more quickly.

As usual, someone else has already written it: Dare’s piece on this announcement reflects my views exactly.  Since I’ve been playing with Java lately (see previous post) I’ve become used to the idea that I can jump straight into the source for almost anything, certainly for the JDK libs.

Still, most of us I’m sure would agree that this is a Good Thing, both in purely practical terms for working programmers, and on another level, more evidence that Microsoft is beginning to ‘get’ some of the things the other side of the industry managed to ‘get’ long ago.

There’s another way the developer will surely benefit: being able to read through the real code is the best way to appreciate and absorb the good design principles enshrined in (most of) the .NET Framework libraries.  The principles which guided the team are described in the excellent Framework Design Guidelines book by Cwalina and Abrams, a book I’d recommend even to folk who don’t use the Microsoft platform.  True, you can use Reflector to reverse the libraries, but the original source will presumably retain comments, which may reveal subtleties around intent, choices and so on.

I’ve been looking at the Java and SOA landscape again (I expect to write more on this) and came across this interview with John Davies of Iona. I’m pointing to this video (link is above this text)  not because it’s a particularly colourful performance (forgive me Mr. Davies) but because it’s worth listening to what he has to say.

This is all about high-volume bank transactions which handle complex data structures (he talks mainly about Swift), exchanged and processed in XML messages. The architectures they are using for this are all based on Java ESB/SEDA platforms, on top of which Iona adds its Artix Data Services to handle metadata management and transformation services.

First, it’s notable that they are building on established open-source projects – Iona has a very strong investment in open-source solutions – using Apache ActiveMQ as the basis of their FUSE enterprise messaging product.

That’s all very interesting, in an industry-direction sort of a way, but it was something else (technical!) that really caught my eye (or ear): John Davies talked about the database bottleneck for these high-volume transactional systems: the messages being persisted are XML (hierarchical data) and they simply cannot accept the overhead of an ORM layer and mapping these to tables, so they’re using a completely different approach, saving them as immutable BLOBs, indexing appropriately. New versions of the same message are simply stored as new objects, the original is not touched. Combine this with a massively parallel service layer and distributed store (he talks about running Gigaspaces on Azul – some 700-odd cores!) and you have a very interesting proposition.

It’s in a follow-up comment on the ServerSide page where he expands a little on the problem of efficiently storing immutable, hierarchical objects and points to Subversion as one good way to accomplish this and handle versioning, where performance isn’t an issue. But he also mentions ZFS, a new filesystem being developed by OpenSolaris – this offers a transactional, pooled-storage abstraction which is exactly what this sort of architecture needs.

This is fascinating stuff. Reading around this subject it’s very clear that a lot of intellectual effort and investment has been poured into solving the problems of building and operating truly scalable ESB and SOA-based solutions and novel, high-performance persistence, and most (all?) of this amazing work has been done with Java, and is open-source.

As I worked my way through web pages and PDFs, I didn’t find references to Microsoft’s technologies – what, if anything, are they doing in this area?

I also enjoyed his comments about how Java was ‘rushed out’ to fill the gap, then subject to extensive refactoring.  The analogy with agile methods is just about admissible, especially in connection with AWT and Applets, but Eckel also notes the vitality of the Java world, and the strong, positive effect of competition on the Java / C# landscape.

Much of the rest of his post is an enthusiastic account of how Flash effectively solves the RIA problem, albeit in a vendor-dependent way. We may not like de facto standards emerging from a single commercial source, but when the technology is good enough we will find ways to compromise our principles.

The other piece is an IBM DeveloperWorks article by Elliotte Harold.  This is much more about the Java platform itself, and what we can expect to see happening to it in 2007.  With the decision to open-source the JDK, Sun has created the possibility of forks in the Java roadmap, allowing experimenters to introduce language or platform features.  This is a mixed blessing: the Java world is already a complicated place to be, and this will make it even more so.  On the other hand, this will allow a lot of talented people outside Sun to work on things like language primitives for structured data types, such as tables (for SQL integration) and trees (infosets and XML). There is a perception that Java lags behind C# in this respect (e.g. LINQ in C#).

Open-sourcing Java is good news, up to a point, but I just wish Sun would work harder to pull together the language, platform and libraries story into a more consistent whole.  There are simply too many ways to do something: for example, how many web-service frameworks are there?  I can think of three or four without trying too hard.  All different.  (Axis 1 and 2, XFire, JAX-WS, XINS, …)

There’s no doubt that C# and .NET is a simpler, cleaner and more consistent place to be than the Java world (especially the ‘enterprise’ Java world), but then it damn well ought to be, because it only has to live on top of one OS, and isn’t subject to any sort of community process to decide its future: only Redmond (and some Microsoft Research sites around the world, notably here in Cambridge) determine the trajectory of .NET and the C# language. (Don’t buy the line that the whole shebang has been ported to lots of other platforms: take a look at any of them and show me where the enterprise features are.  Yes, you can compile and run a C# program on Linux, but can you deploy and run a server-side C# component which depends on Enterprise Services, e.g. distributed transactions?  No, you can’t ).

Arguably, C# and .NET owe their very existence to Sun’s Java initiative.  This remains a largely unacknowledged technical debt, often ignored by Microsoft’s supporters. For many of the features we take for granted, Java got there first.  It really is a cross-platform proposition including on the server, albeit with some residual, ugly cruftiness which is being weeded out gradually.

Personally, I really like C# and the .NET platform, due to the internal consistency of the runtime and C#’s cleaner syntax. However,I really want to see Java develop and evolve, partly because I like it, but largely because we benefit in all the obvious ways from a competitive environment: if one or other platform put the other out of business, innovation and improvement would be subordinated to establishing and consolidating a monopoly position.

Software engineering is (or should be) about getting things done – creating and delivering something.  You use the tools and techniques which work well for you, in your environment.  In my view, Java and .NET are roughly equivalent in terms of their ability to enable delivery.  You cannot guarantee success by choosing one technology over another, but you can improve your chances: you select the one which most closely fits your circumstances.  This piece of common-sense at least emerged from some of the comments.  If your business (therefore your customer’s) is tightly bound to the Microsoft platform, then .NET probably makes good sense for you, regardless of engineering-purity arguments in favour of an alternative.

The breadth-of-choice issue, in relation to Java frameworks, libraries and technologies (and even IDEs), is an understandable point, but I see this is as one of Java’s great strengths. The Microsoft monoculture means you don’t have to think for yourself, and for many a jobbing programmer, this is a good thing. What’s needed is strong technical leadership where decisions concerning the language, tools and technologies to be used by default are made by senior engineering, following some process of study and selection. With the burden of technology-selection drastically reduced (even removed), development teams can get on with applying the selected technology, gaining experience with it and feeding-back into an iterative improvement process managed by the technical leaders. 

Some will complain that this smacks of a ‘two-tier’ technical hierarchy, with certain individuals occupying elevated positions and having control of process and technology.  Well, yes, that is exactly what I am suggesting.  I don’t see a workable alternative that doesn’t result in, at best, less effective teams constantly trying different things, and at worst, complete chaos.  It doesn’t mean the leaders are always right, and (as the hint at an iterative process indicates) it doesn’t mean things can’t change.

This article is timely because I have only recently started trying to use Java and Eclipse, after many years of C# and .NET.  I can sympathise with the .NET enthusiasts because I am at the stage where I know how to do it using C#/CLR but I’m not quite sure of the best way to do it using Java.  As it happens, I don’t think the range of alternatives is daunting at all: it looks to me as if I can go a long way with Eclipse (with additional libraries), Spring and Hibernate.  What continues to amaze (and delight) me is the range and quality of supporting libraries in the Eclipse space: there is no equivalent in the Microsoft world.