JavaOne 2008 - part 1: small booths

posted by John Rizzo

This month, I really enjoyed going to JavaOne.

I must admit that I spent more time talking to people than attending technical sessions. That's probably the thing I like best about JavaOne: soooo many people to meet. It's huge. And they are all interesting, experienced folks.

The pavilion is a great place to meet them. Imagine a huge room, probably the size of a football (soccer) field, filled to the brim with sponsors, meeting tables and VIP lounges.

I'll refrain from telling you which was the worst company with the worst product. But I'm willing to tell you about one of the best: JavaRebel.

Jevgeni Kabanov proposes a product with a very narrow purpose, but that could save most of my customers a huge amount of man days and frustration. His tool frees the developer from waiting on the build.

Of course, you'll argue that IDEs like Eclipse compile as we type the code and there is no need to wait for them to compile. But as you know, Java EE introduces a productivity-killing concept: deployment. Large projects have an Ant build that takes a significant amount of time to execute. Significant enough to make you start doing something else and forget what you were doing originally. It interrupts your development process and context switching kills a developer's productivity.

Jevgeni didn't want to tell me the inner details/secrets, but basically, you can add methods to existing classes, add new classes and so on, save the source file from your IDE, and the change is instantly deployed.

JavaRebel small team developed a funny video to convince your boss:

JavaRebel cartoon (click to play)

I also made an interesting stop at the Jetty booth.

As you know, Jetty is a free web application server competing with Tomcat and others. For running JavaBlackBelt.com, we use Tomcat. So, I naturally asked the question: "Why should I move from Tomcat to Jetty ?"

The first answer was funny: "Because it's not Apache". Maybe some of you have non-funny experiences with Apache people/culture and want to debate it on our forum.

He also was convincing, giving me technical reasons which we could summarize as: smaller, embedded, faster.

Webtide (Jetty) booth, with on the right, Greg Wilkins, Webtide's CTO

My next question was obvious: I asked why Tomcat was such a success. Tomcat, he said, was the reference Servlet/JSP implementation. That fact alone draws many downloads, but currently, Tomcat is losing significant market share to ... Jetty.

Later in the evening, I dined with a few high-end technicians from various horizons. After a beer of two, I asked the question: "What's the best web application server, according to you ?"

The guys were quite unanimous that it was definitely not Tomcat, and they saw Jetty as a good choice.

In the part 2 of this article, we'll visit some large booths.

John.