Many people who voted in this past week's java.net poll think the hype surrounding 'the cloud' may be a bit overblown. The poll was submitted by Geertjan Wielenga, and it was a good one, drawing 347 votes and four thoughtful comments.
The exact poll question and results were:
What's your opinion of 'the Cloud'?
13% (45 votes) - It's the future: gradually all apps will move to the Cloud.
6% (21 votes) - It's great. I'm using it already.
26% (91 votes) - It's an interesting development. I'll wait and see what comes of it.
19% (66 votes) - It's a passing phase, like so many other things we've seen.
30% (105 votes) - It's the emperor's new clothes: the Cloud is just a server, what's so new about it?
5% (19 votes) - I don't know; other
So, combining the "passing phase" and "emperor's new clothes" options, 49% of the voters don't consider the Cloud to be significant or new. Add in some of the "wait and see" votes, and you can say that a majority of poll takers think the hype the Cloud is receiving is or may be overblown.
Meanwhile, 19% of voters were enthusiastic about the cloud: they are either using it already, or believe they'll be using it in the future as applications migrate to the cloud.
Only 5% selected the "I don't know; other" option, which means that people have indeed thought about the Cloud, and also that the range of response options in the poll was pretty good.
My own view of the Cloud is... Well, when I was interviewing Adam Bien for a Community Corner podcast at the last JavaOne conference, at one point I realized that what's happening in the Java EE space with respect to clients (fat is now good -- think RIA) is somewhat akin to what was happening 8-10 years ago; then, fat clients were good, because they provided an excellent user experience. But suddenly, a year or two later, fat clients were a horrible thing, because the internet and middle tier couldn't easily support them, they bogged down the entire system, so now all clients had to be thin and, ideally, stateless. Fast forward to now: today, if your application doesn't support a rich client, you're so passe! It gave us a good laugh, as Adam said you just wait ten years, and the same technology returns, only under a different name.
Yes, the Cloud is new in certain aspects, but how different is it really? You're connecting to a remote server where an application and data reside. Maybe the physical distance between your desk and that server is thousands of miles, but how different is it, really, from the days in the early 1970's when I wrote my first programs (in APL) on a teletype terminal in my high school that was connected to an IBM 360 at a university on the other side of my state? I mean, yes, there have been advances (I no longer need to store and load my program from a scroll of yellow paper tape with holes punched into it -- see Figure 1) -- but, how different is the Cloud, really?
Figure 1: tool for connecting to 'the Cloud' circa 1970
As I said, there were four interesting comments posted to the poll. aleixmr said the cloud idea is good, programming tools are obsolete, and weanon concurred. ronaldtm noted that not all apps will move to the cloud, only certain types of apps, and new types of application will be enabled by the cloud. dwalend noted that connection problems can render the cloud useless at times: if you can't get your data to the remote app, you can't do your work.
New poll: new JVM languages
Our new java.net poll asks "What do you think about the accelerating emergence of new languages for the JVM?" Voting will be open for the coming week.
Dan Sline co-leader of the Houston JUG writes that the Houston TechFest is this weekend. Better Hurry, they have over 1300 people signed-up for the event and Pre-Registration end Wed Nite (Sep 23rd). There are great talks lined up on the Java and Scripting side: From 0 to Grails in 60 Seconds; Java FX (by Java Evangelist Sang Shin); Emerging Java Technologies (by Sang Shin); Groovy in Web Services; Data Mining in Java; Cost Effective Technical Solutions; Ruby; Scala, and many more. Pictures from the event will appear on the JUG Community Page. This event is a partnership between the local JUG, Ruby, and .NET communities who are organizing the event.
The java.net QMVC project has as its goal expediting "Swing Application development and best practices by using Generic Views, Models and Generic Controllers":
Making Swing's MVC pattern Generic and using annotations would speed up development of complex Swing FAT client . This new approach allows Controllers to receive and sometimes send POJO selection and/or model change messages, which greatly simplifies the design of Controllers. Today's implementation is to much row index based and uses only java.lang.Object to allow it to be speudo Generic. Using this new new gmvc package would also allow support of IDE to understand what Model, View and Controller components are using annotations so that they can also generate code to connect a Controller to certain selection model(s) and/or data model(s).
One of my colleagues at work raised a question regarding 'breaking the singleton' using Java Reflection, and asked of a way to avoid such actions. It inspired me, and started to think about a way to avoid it, and following is the outcome of it...
I delivered a "Develop, Deploy, and Scale your Rails app on GlassFish" webinar earlier today. There were over 300 unique attendees. A complete replay of the webinar is available at sun.com/software/webinars...
The second small change from coin project, new numeric litterals has been integrated to jdk7/tl workspace and will be soon promoted into jdk7 main workspace. The patch introduces two new notations for numeric litterals...
Poison messages are basically delivery deadlocks caused
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project. The easiest way of reproducing the poison messages issue
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In the Forums, xlancealotx needs New SSL cert installing on new clean GF server help: "Well I needed to get my server back (old post) so removed/reinstalled GF v2 server. The server came back and is now listening, responding, admin works (woo hoo!) Next, I have purchased an SSL cert which I need to install. I followed the..."
deniswsrosa asks Is remotePublish mandatory for RDV nodes?: "Hello all! I am trying to call a service through a edge peer, this service was published in a rdz peer using the method publish, but I realized that it just work when i use the remotePublish method on the rdz too. When i call a service on a..."
And sliebeskind wonders about Checking custom wsdl/schemas that work with Metro for interop with WCF/.NET: "I have developed a custom wsdl (doc/literal/wrapped, or so I believed) and supporting XML schemas containing the datatypes and elements. I thought it would be relatively easy to generate a .NET client based on what is suggested in the Metro User..."
Our current Spotlight is the new Janice Heiss interview with "Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine on Performance Tuning and Cloud Computing": "java.sun.com (JSC): In your talks, you always warn developers that they must carefully evaluate any generic advice that you provide to see if it applies to a particular situation. Why is this so important? Pepperdine: While I do give generic advice, I carefully explain that people have to evaluate it to see if it will work. I am giving advice in a vacuum, so what may work for many people most of the time may be very detrimental in other contexts. I don't know in advance what specific problem someone is working on..."
Our Feature Articles include Jeff Lowery's A Finite State Machine Supporting Concurrent States, which demonstrates how Java enums and EnumSets can be used as a basis to define and validate application states and state transitions. We're also featuring Jeff Friesen's article Introducing Custom Paints to JavaFX, which shows how you can leverage undocumented JavaFX capabilities to support custom paints in JavaFX Version 1.2.
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