So I said I'd blog over here more often in my last post didn't I? Well a combination of real-world trials and tribulations have made that a little difficult but what the heck!
Since I've been 'away', it's been nice to keep up with the releases of the Seam project flying in thick and fast - lots of nice new features for my favorite development framework and lots of discussions had with people promoting Seam in my travels.
It appears that a lot of Java developers who I speak to are all at approaching the same point; they have been working with Java for so long and they wonder what's coming next. The majority seem to have grown comfortable with Java over the years, but are hearing a lot about the new young upstarts like Flex and Ruby on Rails and I've been involved in a lot of discussions over the past few months about the pro's and con's of each approach and I have been fighting Seam's corner (and for Java in general) in these discussions.
Seam is Java. It's a nice, warm place for Java developers. Especially Java developers who have had their hands burned by EJB2. Mention 'enterprise' to many Java developers and they are likely to produce a sharp intake of breath between their teeth and regail you with tales of 2am debugging sessions that involved 4 or more XML files and a similar number of class files, only to find that the return value of a method differs between the Java and the XML. And that was the last time they looked at it; they've been cranking out DAOs ever since.
You can imagine the looks I get when I describe annotation. I imagine that any attempts to describe the new Bean Validation JSR discussed elsewhere on this site may involve me being burned at the stake for witchcraft!
Plus you get all this Web2.0 'stuff', but you also get the ability to cluster, cache, use business processes, integrate with legacy applications, add security features, use asynchronous messages, create PDFs, provide full-text searches and a whole bunch of other 'cool' features without having to bend over backwards to achieve it. And a lot of these features are required by real businesses that you may not read about in Wired, but have real world needs that we can solve without going right to the bleeding edge.
Anyway, I thought I'd just point you over to my other blog for the on-going adventures with Google Maps, Richfaces and Seam. Check out:
UK Postcode Lookups in Google Maps
Coming soon: rendering a map with info boxes!
