Java

I’m back :)

It has been a long time since last post from me. I have had a lot to do at work lately, but this is in my eyes not an excuse. Guess I have been wondering whether to continue blogging or not. Seems like these traditional blogs are kind of out nowadays. Everybody seem to have moved from blogging via Facebook over to Twitter…

The title of this post has a double meening. Not only am I back in the blogspace, but I am also back in San Francisco. That means it is time for JavaOne again.Watch out for new posts here. Maybe this is just what I need to get me back in the game again…

Is Java harmful?

An article called Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow in STSC Crosstalk discusses the declining competence of tomorrow’s software engineers. If you read the article fast (as most journalists seems to do…), you might get the impression that Java as a language is to blame for this. But reading the article more carefully reveals that the authors are actually attacking the fact that most CS studies are based on Java only.

I agree with the authors that students should learn programming rather than a programming language. And that is best achieved by using several languages in the education. All languages has its purpose (even C# 🙂 ), and should be used to whatever it is designed for.

What I do not agree with are the reasons the authors means Java matters (concurrency and reflection). They seem to miss that Java is one of the simplest and easiest all-purpose object oriented languages. When teaching fundamental concepts of OO, I would definitely go for Java rather than C++.  The Smalltalk guys would probably object to this, but since I have no experience of Smalltalk, Java is my OO language of choice.

Code Quality

What is code quality? According to the guys behind Crap4j it is the kind of code that makes you cry: This is crap! I think this is a pretty good definition. I have just read Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck. The main theme of this book is that the most important thing when writing good quality code is that it communicates well since code is read much more often than it is written…. and that the total cost of a piece of software is the sum of the initial cost of developing it and the cost of maintaining it. It often turns out that the maintenance cost is much higher than the initial cost. Hence good quality code is code that is easy to read and easy to maintain (i.e. add, remove and change functionality).

This is only one small aspect, so more will come…. I promise!

Øredev 2007 – Day 2

Well, I did not win the iPod… But I ended up 5th at the coding challege at the Epsilon booth. Not too bad if you consider the amount of programming expertise present at the conference. The second day of the conference started with an excellent keynote by Joel Spolsky. He talked about what it is that makes some products blue-chip products while other that just as good end up being ordinaray products.

I also heard Andy Hunt talking about how to refactor your wetware, Kevlin Henney talked about the Agility Cube and Jeff Sutherland
presented Project Management with Scrum. The conference ended with a panel debate about the complexity we are facing in modern software development. All in all a great day at the conference.

Øredev 2007 – Day 1

I blogged a short comment every day during JavaOne this summer. These days I am attending the Øredev 2007 Conference and I can not be any less ambitious now, so here we go 🙂

Day 1 opened with a keynote by Andy Hunt that was talking about “How hard can it be?“. It turns out that the answer to this question is that “it is as hard as we make it“.

In one session Rickard Öberg gave a crash course in Qi4j and Context Driven Design. Floyd Marinescu talked about trends and future of enterprise Java™. We got a presentation of JavaFX by Torbjörn Frizon where he coded the presentation viewer on the fly…  Rob Harrop gave an introduction to Spring Batch and Jeff Sutherland talked about The Agile Enterprise.

The afternoon keynote was held by Dan North where he talked about Best Practices or Better “Best” Practices or No Best Practices at all.  He kept his promise to let us out to get our well deserved beer on time 🙂

All in all a great day on the conference that ended with dinner, stand-up comedy and a couple of beers. Tomorrow I plan on winning an iPod in the exhibition hall…!!

Book Recommendation

I suddenly discovered that I have been a bit lazy lately regarding updating this blog. I hope that I will be getting better at it from now of…

Anyway, I have just started reading a book by Gerard Meszaros called xUnit Test Patterns.  So far it seems really good and I nearly can’t wait till I can start applying some of the stuff on my project’s test code base.

Javaforum in Malmö September 27

Next Javaforum meeting in Malmö will be held September 27. At this meeting, I will give a presentation called Simply Java. I will not reveal more of the content at this moment, but I hope it will be worth while…

There will also be presentations on Netbeans and mobility, news in Spring 2.1
and an introduction to JavaFX.

See invitation for more information.