Erik’s… Hmm…

I have volunteered to give a talk on Java FX. Why? Hmm… Let me explain…

There is this great new Java user group that started here in Dallas back in January 2008. You can read the background on the group via these email announcements…

Sidenote:

Derek, if you’re listening, it sure would be nice if I could just link to a website for the group…. websites are created with this cool new technology called html… html has given us another way to communicate meetings, groups, etc…. websites sometimes work better then email lists.

… sorry about that sidenote… back to my post. So this great new user group is focusing on what you can do with JVM other then run standard Java code. Another cool thing about the group is that it’s members are kind of “learning as we go” and we are “teaching others what we learn.” The concept is that somebody volunteers for a meeting, even better if the topic they volunteer for is new to them, and then try to get the group up to speed on their specific topic.

So Derek came up with the 12 month schedule. We started with Groovy, then GORM, GSP, Grails, then into some months related to JRuby. All these meetings were quickly spoken for. Cool stuff that people wanted to learn. The meeting that people were ignoring, like the plague, was Java FX. I had been thinking about taking it, but kept saying to myself… why, I’ll never need to use this. Finally, yesterday, I couldn’t take it and just volunteered for it. I’m still not sure why.

What do I know about Java FX today? Not much. I know Sun tried to get people all excited about it last year at JavaONE. I know there was very little interest, and I still haven’t seen much interest. Still, Sun is pushing it, and there might just be something in there that is interesting. So come October, I’ll be doing a talk on Java FX.

Does anybody want to give me a heads-up before I head to Google and start digging? I know there will be info on Sun’s page, but I normally want to start with an unbiased opinion of a technology. I’ll let you know what I find.

Nope, you aren’t getting one here. I’ve argued Ant over Maven dozens of times in my life. Most recently, last night. But, I’m not gonna start the argument again.

That said, my friend Pete has a post on his blog trying to pull me offsides again. He was the cause, last night over a few beers after our monthly Java user group meeting, of my most recent, and last, argument over Ant or Maven.

It’s just not worth the fight. I personally love Ant. It’s crazy-flexible. It can do anything. It can do anything, the way I want it done. It doesn’t force me to do things the way I don’t want to. Ant is easy to use. There is no learning curve.

Maven makes my head hurt. To get a team of developers up to speed on Maven is miserable. Ask Pete on his blog about the time he tried to push Maven on a team last year at MMA. It was ugly. Maven is a technology that makes you change everything you do. Nothing about it feels natural. It actually hurts to use Maven.

That said, I wish I was using Maven today. Kill me for saying that. It’s a love - hate with Maven. I’m at a new company and our standard tool is Ant. I just left Countrywide where they use Maven. I was forced to learn it and use it. I hated it…. Now, I miss it.

Pete, I hate you.