Cromoteca

The English part of my blog is mainly technical. If you can read Italian, check the Italian section for articles of other kind.

The news that Oracle sued Google brought me back to what I wrote more than year ago: I don't think that Oracle will play nicely with the open source community. Unfortunately I was right.

I agree with the need of an open source Java alliance, but the need I feel now is to express my disappointment in some way that Oracle can hear. I recall an article that suggested to delete Facebook accounts due to their privacy issues, so I thought that deleting my Oracle account(s) could be a good way of being heard. For this to work, though, many people should do the same. So I ask you to consider this option.

But there is an issue with this: I tried, but I was not able to get it done. It appears that there is no way to be deleted. Furthermore, I have more than one account, since I registered on both Oracle and Sun in the past. I sent an email to the support team, but I received an automated response that explains how to unsubscribe from newsletters.

So my questions are: does anyone know…

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Let me clarify: this is not a rant about GAE: I just want to write about my first approach with it. GAE is Free, is Java and is Hosting, so why this title? Because I've read some articles talking about GAE as a solution to host Java web applications for free. But it depends on how you think to use it: if you have written an application and are searching for a solution to host it, you must keep in mind that you will need to make heavy changes to your app.

In my case, I use MeshCMS, my own CMS, to experiment with new technologies. I knew that It would have been hard since MeshCMS uses the filesystem to store pages, and GAE does not allow to write to the filesystem. I decided to redirect filesystem writes to the datastore, just like GaeVFS does. I wrote the necessary code using both JDO and JPA, and at the end I chose JPA since it seemed to produce slightly cleaner code. In my opinion, it's easier to convert from filesystem to datastore than to convert from a traditional database…

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I've heard of many people criticizing GWT, some of the most common reasons are that it translates Java into JavaScript, that web sites are not desktop applications, and that GWT uses Java to write code. Well, here's my thoughts on these points.

I've always looked at GWT like a very interesting technology, but I only recently introduced myself to real GWT development to create the admin interface of MeshCMS 4 (my own GPL CMS). I'm really impressed, and I'm writing this post to point out how I think one should look at GWT.

GWT is neither Java nor JavaScript

Let me clarify what I mean. Sure, you use Java syntax and Java tools when developing (I'm a NetBeans fan for what it's worth). But in a certains sense you're not writing real Java code, since you're not targeting the Java VM. But clearly you're not writing JavaScript, and you can't use closures and such. If you write GWT code thinking about JavaScript, you've missed the whole point. Yes, it will become JavaScript…

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Yesterday I read a post by Jonathan Schwartz about a Java App Store. Again, I was hit by negative feelings, although most comments on that page are positive. I was hoping to have the Java runtime installation as silent as possible, as Flash does, instead we're going towards a malware-like installation. Too bad. I know that it has nothing to do with server-side development, but I'm afraid that the Java reputation will only get worse between end users and companies. I really hope I'll be proven wrong.

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The news that Oracle has acquired Sun has been like an earthquake for my development attitude. I have a long relationship with Java, I was having my first development experiences at college with FORTRAN 77 when Java 1.0 was published. It was an exciting new piece of software that tought me OO programming and let me play with fun things like image retouching.

Java helped me in a lot of situations: while in every field you can find something better, Java can do them all at a good level: desktop apps, web apps, web client apps... all with a single language, IDE and platform.

When Java became open source I was extremely happy, although it was clear that it was some sort of desperate move. Finally Java would have been included in Linux distros and would have been rewarded as an open source dev tool. It happened to some extent, but now things look different. Yes, OpenJDK is there and nobody can cancel it, but I don't think that Oracle will play nicely with the open source…

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