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Java.next
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by Erik Onnen on Feb 22, 2012 | NOTICE: The next QCon is in New York Jun 10-14, Join us!

Summary
Erik Onnen attempts to demonstrate that Java is still the best programming language for the JVM if simplified idioms are used along with proper tooling.

Bio

Erik Onnen is a Senior Engineer and Analytics team lead at Urban Airship, the leading provider of Push, In-App Purchase and Subscription services for mobile applications. He specializes in distributed systems at scale. Prior to joining Urban Airship, Erik was a platform lead for Jive Software where he lead the development of the activity and recommendation engine services.

Software is changing the world; QCon aims to empower software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the enterprise software development community; to achieve this, QCon is organized as a practitioner-driven conference designed for people influencing innovation in their teams: team leads, architects, project managers, engineering directors.

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Community comments

Trying to promote weaknesses as advantages ???? by Serge Bureau

After writing Scala for a little while, Java seems so weak.

Using available frameworks do save time, but for new code, Java does not even come close to cut it anymore.
The part I do agree with is moving away from EJB, EAR and WAR.

Java "easy to read", sorry but it is not true since Java 5 and it is getting worse each successive revisions.
Time to move on.

Very interesting by John O

Interesting talk. Erik clearly has a lot of practical experience with high-traffic servers. He makes points about many things; some that caught my attention:

  • - dumb, immutable data objects
  • - XML as danger sign
  • - prefer final, avoid extends if possible
  • - logging almost never degrades performance
  • - he prefers not using a container (!)


      I applaud his strong preference for simple practicality.

      What exactly does he use instead of a container, I wonder? That didn't seem clear from the talk.

    Re: Very interesting by Oleg Pro

    An app based on Play framework could be good example of system that dose not use web container.

    Re: Very interesting by Johannes Jensen

    He talked about using en embedded Jetty server with Jersey on top. So they are opting out of the container managed lifecycle but not containers per se.

    Get the message out there! by Ivan L

    Back on the east coast, there is still lot of hand wringing on the part of tech managers if they run something that wasn't defined in a specification. There is a very natural contradiction to be had in that these same managers are using enterprise products because they want to provide value, yet the specifications trail the open source community, which is popularized exactly because they provide value.

    On the contrary, once something makes it way into *insert enterprise container here*, its probably a diluted form of the good open source idea.

    I loved the easy dismissal of xml oriented orm tools, thank you for bringing sanity back to Java. After you code a DAO, you typically never need to see it again. The only thing that I've ever really seen Hibernate add is development and maintenance cost.

    I also agree on embedded Jetty. Previously I was advocate of Tomcat, but embedding Jetty was so easy I can't even see myself using Tomcat that much anymore either. You can also quickly add great features to embedded Jetty that would be a lot harder to do even Tomcat (and would force you to get into the configuration muck of it)

    Missing Language Features by Clifford James

    Good points but I still wish Java had language support for read-only C-style structs w/ built-in equals() and hashCode() semantics. Groovy and Scala both have shortcuts for this (Scala will enforce the immutability as well). I do feel like this is a missing java feature masked as a "pattern" that requires a good bit of boilerplate. Even with a good IDE, you still have to type a lot for these. Totally agree about XML though ;-)

    Re: Missing Language Features by Iqbal Yusuf

    Very radical specially if you are a developer in a enterprise IT. :) About a year back while upgrading a 10 year old Java system I proposed embedded Jetty without using any container. Could not sell the idea on security issues. I would like to know more about securing embedded Jetty. Great presentation.

    "logging almost never degrades performance" ??? by Kai Wähner

    I strongly disagree (though I have not watched the video, maybe it explains when you should do logging). I have seen several applications where logging was the bottleneck. Especially if you turn on logging of frameworks such as Hibernate.

    Of course, logging is important for development and production, but you should be aware when and what to log.

    Best regards,
    Kai Wähner (Twitter: @KaiWaehner)

    Cool idea of not using a container. by Sai Matam

    Erik's practice of not using a container and using embedded Jetty seems radical at first. This scaled very well for Erik. I also liked Erik's idea of keeping things simple and not to be intimidated by 'existing lore'.

    Sai Matam
    Codewalk.com

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