Team $$$ Efficiency Through Modularity

Any veteran developer knows that integration and maintenence is where all the time and money goes, writing a simple module can be a few days work once the requirements, interfaces, and dependencies are set in stone. Modularity (OSGi) promises to eliminate much of that cost, by never fully integrating a module into the rest of the code base. Every module stands on it's own, lives in it's own classpath, and develops in it's own tested, versioned process. Read more »

Martin Lippert's recently announced move to SpringSource is one of the most exciting events to happen in software so far this fall.

Speculation - Good Things that May Now Happen:

• Fills gaps in OSGi and STS development at SpringSource
• Many half finished pieces have prospect of now being glued together in a nice fit.
• Critical last mile issues such as training and taking OSGi to the market, are now within reach. 

  Read more »

When I'm doing my job, I'm getting things done.

When OSGi (or modularity in general) is doing it's job, it is preventing things from getting done. That's the job of OSGi, to prevent things from working except within very narrow contractual relationships.

Which is why OSGi deserves a slow and painful death. OK OK OK, that's only the way I feel when I get in these week long moods that stem from my inability to get all the metadata right, and I can't get my "modules" to run perfectly. Read more »

Dangerous Fred

Every big team has seen one or two of these guys. Dangerous Fred. Brilliant and stupid at the same time, breaks the wrong rules and still gets pretty amazing stuff done. But you don't want him touching your code.

I think I've been Fred in decades past, at least once or twice. Sure have written a couple things I'm not so proud of, on the way to becoming a slightly better programmer. Read more »

If I'm going to break up with my main squeeze: Eclipse - the Platform, especially after I publicly admitted I was seeing another platform, the least I could do is give our relationship an honorable recap. I already vented my long term gripes yesterday. Read more »

Yesterday I hinted at how far back my loyalty to the Eclipse Platform goes, as if I was really gun-ho on this relationship. I glossed over warts that bugged me, because I'm a loyal guy.

The truth is, I'm not so excited about this relationship. Not most of the time.

The problem with Eclipse as a Platform is exactly what you would expect from a super powerful, super flexible, open source platform. It is frightfully challenging to maintain a working relationship with, for a small enterprise like my own. Read more »

Woohoo! I'm in love!  What a great feeling, to find such a sweet platform that does almost everything I need, and most of it very well.

Sweet! I didn't know 

My main squeeze, Eclipse didn't know I was checking out other fish in the sea, but really I wasn't. I was just googling for "Swing OSGi" and here comes NetBeans releases an OSGi version.  Read more »

The screencast below brings up many different approaches of modularity systems in Java. Hmmm. I never even considered anything beyond OSGi.

• OSGi
• JSR 277
• JSR 294
• NetBeans Modules
• Maven
• SMS
• Jigsaw

Jaroslave Tulach, the guy who wrote the netbeans module system is interviewed here, it's a great discussion.

I used to be a really fast java programmer. If you wanted something written quickly, I was your guy. But that was "so last month...".

Certainly not today.

And it's a psychological struggle, because I'm fighting back the shame constantly. It's embarrassing as hell being this slow - even when no-one is watching.

Why so slow?

I'm working on my own software now. This is my nickel. Not billing others for my time, so I can do things right. Read more »

Summary:

"We get it" was the three word version of this presentation. Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring should be proud that the entire focus of JEE and GlassFish teams seems to have been to enthusiastically and shamelessly imitate his every move in recent years. Almost no reference was made to Spring or the driving force behind the latest changes, but it's a credit to the many JSR working groups that they allowed themselves to be so thoroughly influenced by the direction that market moved when Spring supplanted so much of the market that EJBs were intended to serve 10 years ago.

There were over 50 attendees.

To wit - the following technologies were described as "new" that seemed to follow rather than lead, the trends set by market forces years ago. Read more »