Dr. James Gosling on Java, J2EE and SOA

About: I was invited to attend the Java world wide developer conference, this posts discusses the key messages I heard at Dr. James Gosling’s keynote address.

Hello,

It is always a pleasure and privilege to listen to the creator of Java and EMACS in his trademark no-nonsense style. Dr. James Gosling, a graduate of University of Calgary, Canada, started his key note address at the world wide developer conference in Toronto with a Joke about the relationship between Calgary and Toronto. He then went on and described Java’s capabilities around platform independence and security. He joked about the perseverance of EMACS and expressed tongue-in-cheek embarrassment that it was used as a major development environment for almost 20 years, however, he noted that more and more developers are moving towards visual tools. He mentioned that the developer tools have evolved from their traditional Edit-Compile-Debug functionality to include features for learning, exploring and sharing.

Dr. Gosling also spent some time describing JDK 5.0 features and gave a glimpse of the next version of the JDK. He referred to the recent hype around Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services and expressed frustration at the lack of industry standard definition for SOA. In his opinion every one who talks about SOA has something different in mind; he mentioned that a key characteristic of the SOA is to prevent any leakage of implementation information to the service consumer.

Dr. Gosling described complexity as the evil twin of functionality and capability and mentioned that as an issue with J2EE which is going to be addressed through better developer tools. He also described the development process for standards.

One of his most interesting comments was around ‘HTML backlash’ where he talked about the industry realizing that HTML does not fulfill all requirements for a number of enterprise systems and although its not politically appropriate to say so in many organizations, desktop applications need to be developed and deployed to address business need . He ended the session with the usual throwing out of dukes to the crowd.

Best regards,

Mohammad