Ten years of "the desktop is dead, web-apps are the only way" makes a great corporate religion. If you're a true believer in this religion, read no further - I'm a non-believer. Requiring a web app should never mean I don't want a desktop - even more.

I want web apps and mobile web apps, sure. But I want the default as a desktop app that can shuffle as much of the computing to the local CPU as is reasonable.

And of course, I want to write the app one time. The platform should be super powerful and fully developed by others. It should update automagically, have superb installers, and a  phenomenal list of features, yada yada. An impossible dream.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.