No Suprise
I didn’t have to wait long to prove out my first prediction for 2009. Big Blue is apparently in talks to buy Sun.
I have pretty mixed feelings about this. It means Java would be safe, but it would also be dead. IBM is a technology dinosaur, usually running several years behind the pack in the Java space. This would mean the end of innovation at the JVM level and the chances for a Java 7 any time this decade probably go down to zero.
IBM might also try to start monetizing the JVM. While it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, never underestimate the stupidity of IBM.
The only bright spot will be what gets built on top of the JVM. The JDK 1.6.0_12 is a high-performance, stable beast of a platform. Things like Groovy and other JVM-based dynamic languages are the future of Java, so at least they’ll have a stable core to build on.
Getting Groovy
As we get more into our project at Orange Leap, we’re starting to see a lot of instances where a dynamic language would make our life easier. On all of our entity classes, we associate a map of custom fields. The custom fields are so that clients can customize the entities without us having to change the code each time. The custom field definitions go beyond basic key-value pairs and can include references to other custom fields. For example, spouse is a custom field that relates two entities and is bidirectional. If you open either entity, you’ll see the other in the spouse custom field.
A dynamic language would come into play in that we could access all the attributes of an entity in a consistent way, preferably through dot notation. Since we’re already running on top of Java 6, Groovy came to mind as the best candidate for a dynamic language.
I’ve never really played with Groovy before. I mostly played with Ruby and Rails, which really opened my eyes to the power of a good dynamic language. Some of the developers on my team wanted to get into Groovy while I was at Countrywide, but I kept us out of it for fear of ending up with an unmaintainable monster if one of the experts left. (this is actually the primary motivator in 99% of all enterprise technology decisions — the bus factor)
So this week I finally jumped in with both feet and I have to say I like what I found. Everything cool I liked about Ruby and .NET 3.5 was in Groovy. Metaprogramming, check. Mixins and Closures, check. Full access to all the JVM goodness, check. The recently released Groovy 1.6 even goes beyond Ruby and .NET 3.5. For example, if you tag a class with the annotation @Singleton, it turns it automagically into a singleton.
@Singleton class Friend { def name } f = Friend.instance f.name = "Tim" print "Hello, $f.name"
If you try and call new on the Friend class, you get an error that you can’t instantiate a Singleton. All this handled with a simple annotation. For an excellent overview of all the coolness in Groovy 1.6, check out this article on InfoQ.
So I’m going to keep working my way through Programming Groovy and am eager to start applying what I learn. And best of all, my favorite IDE has the industry’s best support for both Groovy and Grails.
Idiots of the Week
Has anyone else noticed a lot of companies coming down with a case of the stupids recently? It could be the economy is stressing people out and they’re commiting more errors, or, more likely, businesses are doing anything they can to boost revenue, including screwing their clients.
My first example is Time magazine. I’ve been a subscriber for years and signed up for their auto-renewal so that I quit getting nags to resubscribe every year. This year was a bit different. Here are the guts of my Paypal receipt:
So the description says $29.95 for a year (56 issues), but they charged me $41.15. Needless to say, I was a bit unhappy. This seems too dumb to be intentional, but who knows anymore. After complaining to customer service, I should be seeing a refund.
The other idiots I’ve had to deal are GoDaddy. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with them for a couple years, but haven’t been annoyed enough to move my domains and sites elsewhere. They might have finally reached the tipping point this week.
I let a domain name expire that I wasn’t using, yet I still got billed for some crap that I didn’t order orignally that they decided to hang off the initial order (“Business Listing”). GoDaddy has a pretty unethical habbit of hiding stuff on your orders as freedies that they’ll ding you for later.
For example, last year they tried to bill be for an SSL certificate renewal. Apparently, my hosting account came with a “free certificate” that I never even claimed or used. They tried to charge me $20 for renewing the unused certificate. After I called and complained, they refunded my money after realizing they never even issued an initial certificate, so kind of hard to bill me for a renewal.
So this week it was the same story again. Trying to bill me for stuff I didn’t order/want. I’m going looking for a better hosting provider and someplace to move my domain registration where they actually respect their customers.
Both of these cases are especially remarkable given the sorry economic conditions. Smart companies should be bending over backwards trying to keep their customers, not screw them over.
Rotten Apple
What the hell is wrong with Apple? They introduced new iMacs today and completely missed the boat. All them, including the top-of-the-line $2,000+ model, are still on Core 2 Duo chips. Not a quad core to be seen in the bunch. Given you can buy a loaded Dell Studio XPS with Intel’s next generation i7 quad core CPU for $1,400 that completely blows away any of the iMacs , I have a hard time understanding who they want to sell to.
I got over my Apple infatuation last year when it became clear that they wanted to become an even worse monopoly than Microsoft ever was, and were just missing the market share. None of their computers are particularly innovative, and if I want the *nix feel, I’ll just load up Linux. They could have used the new product release to at least show they were competitive, but instead chose to underwhelm. You would have to be insane to buy one of these “new” iMacs when there is so much better hardware to be had for less money.