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Here are some thoughts on Vic Cekvenich’s presentation last night at JavaMUG.

I’d like to describe it as a “great presentation”. Not because Vic was very eloquent or because his delivery was so polished (I’m not saying either was bad). I’d like to call it “great” because it made you think.

He said a lot of things that had never been said at a JavaMUG meeting. Like, “the browser is dead”, and “don’t waste your time coding anything new in html”. He talked a lot about what might be the “profitable skills” for a developer to have going forward.

The presentation was hard to follow at times; sometimes the audience wasn’t really sure where he was going. Then the next slide would pop-up, sometimes it might be two or three slides later, and you’d see his point. By the end of “the show” you knew exactly what he was trying to say, even if he didn’t put it in big, bold letters.

I used the title “Rich Internet Application” (RiA) to describe this post on his presentation. I think a better title for this post would be Service Oriented Architecture (SoA). Vic was very big on the importance of services. He stressed that he believes in the future we won’t be using third-party jars in our applications. He thinks we will be using third-party services.

Vic also talked a lot about the importance of Full Text Search (FTS). He talked about how cheap storage is; how affordable a terabyte of space is. He repeatedly praised the Lucene project. He went as far as to call it the “Most beautiful Apache project.” That might be over-selling Lucene. I find Lucene a hard-sell as the most important Jakarta project, let alone Apache project, but that’s my opinion and I’m talking about Vic’s presentation now. His points on Lucene and FTS were well-taken. I agree that having strong skills in both are very important for developers going forward.

Vic also drew some funny looks when he talked about Inversion of Control (IoC) being a good concept, but it being a little “old”. He hyped the Chain of Responsibility (CoR) pattern. He mentioned the Jakarta Commons Chain implementation of the CoR pattern.

I’m going on-and-on, not making progress, so I’m gonna try to wrap this up. Vic was very clear on some things. He thinks the future is in SoA through RiAs. He thinks people should be using the CoR pattern and that FTS skills will be very profitable. He really touched on a number of new subjects for JavaMUG. Stuff that hadn’t really been covered before in our meetings.

I think going forward we could schedule many meetings on little parts of his talk and be much better for it. We need a session on Lucene. A whole session on CoR. A session on JDNC. These are things I would like to have covered, and things that I might just get scheduled.

Lastly, since Vic put my blog address in his PowerPoint, I’d like to say hello to any new readers. My posts are all over the spectrum in subject matter. Mostly they’re just my ramblings on stuff I don’t know anything about. I’d love to get some feedback on this post and anything else you read.