Upgrade Skills, Knowledge, Open Source ...

It's been a long while that I didn't write anything on my blog. I am sure part of the reasons is because of my lazy attitude. Another reason is I do really busy on getting and learning new technologies in Groupware.

Recently I am reading a couple of books including Ajax, EJB3, and also learning Agile Software Development which one of the most hottest development methodologies in Australia. The following is some of my thoughts:

Ajax becomes maturer than before, and it looks like application will soon to rely on it very much. I remember on my old day, i usually try to avoid javascript stuff as I found it is the most hardest development tools that I have ever use. But nowaday, since Ajax become more and more popular, it basically relies on javascript, so I have been forced to study a bit more about it. Luckily, a lot more javascript tools like javascript debugger, firebugs which really helps a lot for the javascript development.

For EJB3, I personally do believe it will become a trend and impact on current tool set (Spring and Hibernate) which used by most of the companies. I expect that it will not have a great impact of the popularity of Hibernate since it supports JPA implementation, but for Spring, since EJB3 with JavaEE supports annotation which adopt dependency injection, which is one the great feature in Spring, it might take over the popularity of it.

For the development process, I found it is very interesting on Agile methodologies. In my previous company in Hong Kong, they are still focusing on old day methodologies and SDLC, it is actually works, but I reckon it is not as good as Agile development process. I am currently reading on it. And Groupware which I work for is adopting this approach. It looks very success and really can complete projects (which I usually saw lots of dead projects in HK). In the later day, I will try to post more key features about this methodologies.

Other than reading books and upgrade my skills, recently I contribute myself to Open Source community. They are iTrack and SpringLayout. Those projects were started by several great developers. And I just join recently. Those projects can be found in sourceforge.net. Personally I really like the concept of open source (cause I am a half blood of anti M$ person). I will try to dedicate more time on it. Hopefully someday I can create my own open source project.

Martin Fowler speech in Melbourne

2 days ago, I have attended a seminar about "Software Design in the 21th Century". The speaker, Martin Fowler, who is currently very famous celebrity in Software Engineering world, made the speech in the seminar. This seminar was held in Melbourne by Enterprise Java which is a Java community in Australia. His attendence attraced lots of people to come, especially in Java field. In his speech, I jot down several points which I was aware. I am going to share what are these points in here.

- The importance on Open Source. He said nowaday lots of proprietary software, like application servers, technology concepts are not as good as many open source projects. One eaxmple, as we can see, EJB3 by SunMicro System, the persistence storage concept is learned from Hibernate, which is a ORM data storage pioneer. And the IDE tools, he said he quite like IntelliJ since it was out. But Eclipse, he said a copy version of IntelliJ, is now almost dominant the market as it becomes free. He kept repeating on how important position will be Open Source in the future.

- Ruby on Rails or JRuby would probably be the next generation of programming language. As he knows, some of the professional who worked on Java for many yaers have already switched to Ruby. But still, as he mentioned, Java and .NET will still dominant the market in the next 5 years.

- As he is the pioneer of Agile methodology, of course in his speech, he talked about how important on Test-Driven programming, it would be a tragedy if a software without a good test.

- The position on AOP. He was making a joke that AOP is best tool for Logging only.

- A Framework should not do too many things. A framework should be as simple as possible, not tightly couple to each others.

I do get a lot of things from his speech. At least I know how are those people focusing on and the technology trend in the next few years, especially on Open Source. What I used in Hong Kong was proprietary application servers, tools. But it looks like the outside world are very focusing on Open Source projects. I do agree with Martin at this point. If more people starts to focus on Open Source, lots and lots of Corporation, Governments who needs a large amount of support may tend to give up these propriertary software and use Open Source tools. But it may be only a dream of mine...