Jazoon ’09: Keynote with SpringSource’s Adrian Colyer
Keynote title: The Changing Nature of Enterprise Java Application Development
Speaker: Adrian Colyer CTO SpringSource
Adrian – perhaps principally of AspectJ fame – begins by stating that we live interesting times and that “seeds of change” are present… which leads naturally enough to a rain-forest metaphor.
To cut a long story short: New stuff starts out as a seed, some of this stuff rises and becomes well established… whereas much of it dies out at some point on the way up. Assuming my interpretation of the symbolism is on the mark.
A picture of the sun setting over the rainforest… represents Sun “moving on”. And the metaphor continues… but strangely I find my interest in it is waning…
Adrian cites Java 7′s improved for support new languages, plus the proliferation of new languages (Groovy, Scala, Erlang, JRuby, Clojure, Jython, Ruby) as one of the significant new developments. And questions which one of the new languages will dominate over the coming years…
And initially picks Groovy, Clojure, JRuby and Scala because they are designed to work on a JVM.
A comparison of Java versus Groovy ensues, with emphasis on Groovy conciseness.
The challenges posed by concurrency are mentioned, and Clojure’s “immutability by default” and Scala’s built-in actor model are cited as a ways of addressing them.
The speaker drops Clojure from his list of candidates because he feels the Lisp-inspired syntax of Clojure too radical a leap from Java’s syntax and the C-legacy/culture.
Eventually he gives Groovy the edge because of its super-tight two-way integration with Java… and then is kind enough to admit his (or his company’s) bias in this matter.
Next up: A monolog on the various application frameworks, and acknowledges both the power and the complexity of the new programming environment. He recalls the classic terminal application to reinforce the point that times have changed radically. Can’t disagree with that!
The final message: “The future is coming!” which for me definitely means a very strong coffee.
Conclusion: A well delivered presentation, rather too drawn out and too long on metaphors. Nevertheless, an opportunity to reflect a bit about the strange, changing ocean in which we IT geeks are immersed. Hey… I wonder if I can develop this metaphor and use it in my next presentation?
