Matt Campbell's Blog

mostly techie, sometimes not
About Me

recovering java developer, budding rubyist, software engineering ninja, guitarist, gamer, husband, dad

My Other Sites
TwitterLinkedInBuzzmetaweblog
Tags
Archive
2012 (4)
2011 (19)
Archive for

August 2011

 

A few thoughts on Java from a former Java developer

I've been doing some following of the Java community even though I haven't been using Java much at work lately. Old habit's die hard. :)

Java in the Cloud

It seems that Java is gaining a lot of cloud momentum. Heroku's annoucement of support for Java puts them in company with Google App Engine, Cloud Foundry (from VMWare and SpringSource), AWS's Elastic Beanstalk, and OpenShift (Redhat). Four platforms for deploying java webapps (and by extension, just about any JVM language) to the cloud. That's pretty stinking good.

All of these are doing similar things. You build a java webapp, deploy it to the cloud, and much of the rest is managed for you. Herkou and OpenShift modify this model a bit. With both of these products, you push your source to the cloud as opposed to a deployable artifact of some kind. Additionally on heroku you follow their Procfile pattern, which means you would embedd jetty, or some other http server, instead of deploying a war that they drop into an existing servlet container. With OpenShift, you have access to a full blow JBoss AS 7, as opposed to just the Servlet API

Changes in the JCP

I have been following a little bit of the changes the JCP, and the main change I see here is that many of the members are pushing to make sure that the TCKs needed to certify implemention of JSRs being published under opensource friendly licenses. Movement in this direction will go along way in unencumbering the Java ecosystem from the baggage of the past.

Filed under  //  cloud   java   jcp  
Posted
 

Heroku Adds Support for Java

This is pretty stinking awesome! With this move, the guys at heroku are proving that they mean it when they say they want to be a polygot platform. I love how the blog post does a good job of seperating the good parts of Java, the JVM and the Java ecosystem from the bad parts (namely JEE and the baggage from a corporate dominated JCP). See heroku's announcement:

http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/8/25/java/

Filed under  //  heroku   java  
Posted
 

Google Buys Motorola Mobility? Why is that a good idea?

Google, a services company, buys a struggling hardware manufacturer with an insanely different corportate culture? I get Google wanting to get closer to the metal with Android, which is arguably their biggest challenge in competeing with Apple, but I'm not sure buying motorola is the answer.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/supercharging-android-google-to-acquir...

Filed under  //  mobile   google  
Posted
 

Mama Maggie Gobran on Silence

"There are secrets in the silence"

Silence your body to listen to your words
Silence your tongue to listen to your thoughts
Silence your thoughts to listen to your heart beating
Silence your heart to listen to your spirit
Silence your spirit to listen to His Spirit

Posted
 

My Thoughts from Day 1 of the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit

Quotes

"[Entrepreneurship] is a discipline like any other. It can be learned and practiced."
-Peter Drucker via Leonard Schlesinger

"If you can't predict the future, create it"
- Leonard Schlesinger

"Stop worrying about what you want to do and start worrying about what you are going to do next"
- Leonard Schlesinger quoting a colleagues Mom.

"Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear a word you say."
- Cory Booker on the need to first live out the change we want to see our world in ourselves.

"Competence is no longer a scarce commodity."
- Seth Godin

"We teach you to wait to be picked. Give me a break! Pick yourself and do what you want."
- Seth Godin

"If its worth doing, then what are you waiting for?"
- Seth Godin

Thoughts

Bill Hybels gave a great talk where he asked some thought provoking questions about hard situations you encounter in leadership. It got me thinking a lot about adjustments I can make to lead my team better. I want us to have fun building great software, be challenged to grow, and do it without letting the parts we have to do get in the way.

Leonard Schlesinger's talk showed me that being an entrepreneur isn't about being a crazy man like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. It about going after something you want and taking action with the resources you have. It was another kick in the pants to me to actually code some of the ideas I have, because they are things I want.

Seth Godin's talk was way cool. He talked about how computers and the Internet are making it so just being competent at something isn't valuable anymore. If you can reproduce something, you can find a way to do it cheaper. The value, and the power, we now have is that we can bring art to our work. I have been thinking about code as art more and more recently. Right now my team is wrapping up a proof-of-concept app to support a pilot program for one of our clients at Vibes. I'm feeling pretty damn proud of how we did it. I think that it is elegant code.bIt is a work of art. I want to bring more of my art to my code, both at work and in my spare time, and I want to inspire my team to do so as well.

Filed under  //  wcagls  
Posted
 

Heroku on polyglot platforms

I frequently am pushing for automation and ease for getting apps out the door and I think @heroku doing something right with it.

http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/8/3/polyglot_platform/

Filed under  //  programming  
Posted