::Seamless in San Diego:: [/tech/java] (16:16)

I'm heading to San Diego to give a Seam talk at SDJUG tomorrow. That's Tuesday, August 19th at 7pm, to be specific. This will be be the "10 things you need to know about Seam" presentation, where I go over what I consider to be the most important details someone needs to know to make an informed decision about whether Seam has a place on their project.

Hope to see you there if you are in the area.

::Austin iPhone DevCamp 2 thoughts:: [/tech/mac] (13:55)

I've finally recovered from the long weekend of iPhone hacking at the Austin satellite of iPhone DevCamp 2. I really wasn't sure what to expect from experience. My impression from some of the pre-event discussions was that there wasn't a lot of people actually doing iPhone development now, a fact which was confirmed when I arrived. That meant that my weekend of sharing iPhone coding tricks and finding answers to some of the problems I've been having didn't materialize, but the weekend was still fun. Sunday was the more entertaining of the two days, as the crowd thinned a bit and more people got down to doing some actual coding. Of course, the real value of these things is meeting people, and for that the event was a huge success.

It remains to be seen whether a regular meeting of iPhone developers will emerge here or if the Austin CocoaCoder.org group will just expand in scope to assimilate the local iPhone coders. I do know that I'm on tap to present my iPhone app at this Thursday's (Aug 7) CocoaCoder meeting, so I'm guessing at least initially we'll explore both roads and see where the local community takes things.

::iphone dev camp - austin:: [/tech/mac] (11:34)

I'll be hitting Austin iPhoneDevCamp 2 this weekend. Tonight looks like a purely social event, so there's a good chance I'll wait until Saturday/Sunday for the main event. I've been putting my spare time into an iPhone app that should be submitted to the App Store sometime today. Now that I'm done, I'm really eager to talk to other local iPhone developers to see what they have been up to and maybe see if others have found better solutions to some of the iPhone dev problems I've run into.

Hope to see everyone there!

::Seam talk in St. Louis (this time for real):: [/tech/java] (10:09)

I was supposed to give a Seam talk at the St. Louis JUG earlier this year, but due to some particularly nasty weather the meeting had to be cancelled. Fortunately we were able to reschedule for the warmer month of July.

I'll be there this Thursday (July 10th) giving a brand new Seam talk: 10 things you need to know about Seam. I'll cover my own take on the 10 most important things you should know about Seam. If you have been considering Seam, but haven't been able to pull the trigger or if you just haven't figured out why Seam is worth considering in the first place, then you should definitely stop by.

Hope to see you there!

updated with correct link to the meeting

::Technologies I'm learning now:: [/tech/java] (14:57)

It's about half-way through the year, so I thought I might catch up my new "stuff I'm learning" list. Here's the three things that are (or soon will be) taking up most of my learning time:

Git

At the beginning of the year, I wanted to learn about distributed version control. The two choices were git and mercurial. After a bit of research, I decided to give git a try. I've been using git (hosted at github) for 3 or 4 months, but for some book work and for some of my side projects. I still don't have it completely figured out, but I really like it. I want to learn about the svn bridge so that I can do my Seam development locally in git, pushing my work back into the project svn later.

Cocoa Touch

I've been working on an iPhone app in my spare time. While I'm still troubled by how absolutely primitive Objective-C is compared to Java, I really am liking Cocoa Touch. The APIs are still a bit slim, but like desktop Cocoa, it's really well thought out and easy to use. App store here I come!

Amazon WS

I've just barely gotten started here, but I'm fascinated by S3 and EC2. I'm definitely going to play with them over the next few months. As a software guy, I really like the idea of commoditizing server power and bandwidth like this so that I can just focus on getting my app working.

::Mophie Juice-Pack Review:: [/tech/mac] (11:19)

I'll be doing some overseas travel next week. With 18 hours in the air plus some airport time, I am quite concerned about how my iPhone will hold up. I'm not sure if I'll have access to under the seat power on this flight, so I started my hunt for some sort of extra battery for my iPhone.

There were several cheap devices for running an iPod off of battery power, but none of them really looked like they were up to the challenge of keeping an iPhone going. All the designs I saw were tethered, whereby a batter was connected by cable to the device. That would be fairly awkward on a plane. And, the existing models were reported to put the iPhone into airplane mode. Obviously that's not a problem for this use case, but I'd like to be able to use the backup battery in non-airplane situations without any fuss.

Just as I was about to give up and dig out my old nano as a backup device, I ran across the Mophie iPhone Juice Pack. The Juice Pack fits around the iPhone like a case, except that it instead of just wrapping the iPhone, the iPhone slides into it like a dock. While in the case, the battery in the case charges the iPhone and keeps the battery full for as it can. On my first day of use yesterday, I got my iPhone home and the iPhone was at full charge, with the Mophie at about half charge. (The Mophie has a battery level display that works like MacBook/MacBook Pro batteries)

I'm very impressed. The Mophie is not cheap, but my initial usage makes me feel that the money was well spent. I won't know until I try, but I'm confident it will get be through my trip with power to spare. Being able to snap the case on the iPhone should make it easy to transport.

There are a couple of negatives to the device. The case adds a small amount of bulk and weight to the iPhone. That doesn't bother me, but if weight is a big deal to you, you might want to try it out. If you are already have another case, then you'll have to give it up to use the Mophie. My iPhone is generally naked, so no loss for me there. The biggest draw back is that although the Mophie does have a standard iPhone connector on the bottom, you cannot sync through it. The case was a little too thick to dock in my iHome, so I couldn't verify whether or not you can play through it. Even if it can play, I consider the lack of sync capabilities a very serious flaw for such a high priced accessory. Finally, if you are considering purchasing a 3G iPhone in the near future, you've got no guarantee that the form factor of the new phone will be compatible with the Mophie. As wonderful as I think the Mophie is, I do plan to jump on the 3G iPhone when it comes out. If I weren't desperate for a solution for my upcoming trip, I think I would wait a bit to make sure the device won't be obsolete when the new models come out.

::Should Java be on the iPhone?:: [/tech/mac] (09:56)

Even though Java bashing is the fashion of the day, I'm not afraid to say that I still love working with Java. I still consider Java the only credible choice for just about every flavor of web or enterprise development. Some might even label me a Java fanboy, though my affection for Java is purely pragmatic. By almost any objective technical measure, Java is usually going to be the best tool in the toolbox.

You might assume then that I'm going to argue that Java should be on the iPhone. In some ways, I do think that. I think Objective-C is a nice language, and I've even argued that Java would be better off if it were more like Objective-C. That being said, I still think overall Java is better than Objective-C. Although the recent introduction of garbage collection is a a godsend for Objective-C, the language still feels like it's stuck 10 years in the past. Header files? Prefixes on every class name to avoid naming conflicts? It's just a clunky language. That doesn't mean it's bad. I really do like Objective-C. It doesn't have the comforts and conveniences of Java, but it gets the job done.

The iPhone is also set up to be a security nightmare. I haven't looked too closely into the security of the iPhone yet. I know apps operate in a sandbox, and requiring signed binaries will eliminate many types of threats. However, given Apple's track record with holes in Safari on the iPhone I think it's pretty clear that we'll have the same type of security problems we've seen on desktop machines. Since the iPhone will be the dominant mobile platform, it won't be able to hide behind the small market share that has kept the mac desktop relatively safe. It is possible that Apple has most of the bases covered here since the iPhone is a small and tightly controlled environment, but I'm not entirely sure. Apple does a lot of things well, but security is NOT one of them. The iPhone would be much better off running apps inside of a virtual machine (like the JVM) with no direct access to raw memory or hardware.

So, I'm arguing for Java, right? Sadly, no. You see, the key to the joy of Mac programming is Cocoa, and by extension what makes the iPhone great to work with is Cocoa Touch. Sadly, even though Java has had years to catch up, Swing is no Cocoa. As a Java guy, my first instinct would be to simply mirror the Cocoa APIs in Java. In theory you'd get the best of both worlds. Sadly, Apple tried that, and it didn't work out very well. Wrappers like that rarely do. To be fair, few Java programmers of the time were interested in developing apps limited to the Mac desktop, so Apple never had any incentive to really develop the Java bridge as fully as it could have. The iPhone would be a different story because it's a platform that Java developers would embrace developing platform-specific apps for. Still, I think a Java bridge for the iPhone would be a lost cause.

Similarly, Java ME and Swing apps have no place on the device. The iPhone should run Cocoa Touch apps written specifically for the device and for the multi-touch interface. I'd submit Android as proof of that. Android applications just look goofy as they try to support more primitive 0-9 touchpad interfaces. Maybe I've been using a Mac so long that I've just turned into a snob, but I don't want ugly apps on the phone. If the iPhone allows non-Cocoa applications, then I feel we'll get a lot of junk Java ME ports instead of apps that look and work like iPhone apps.

So, in summary, I don't want Java on the iPhone. I do wish the entire Cocoa stack were based on Java, and I do think it would be better if it were. But Cocoa is not Java, and as such there's very little that Java has to offer the iPhone right now.

::Seam talk at Houston JBUG:: [/tech/java] (15:37)

I'll be heading down to Houston tomorrow (Wed 2/27) to give a talk on Seam at the Houston JBUG. Since I've given a few Seam talks to the group over the last few years, so instead of my typical intro to Seam talk, I'll be giving more of a roadmap talk. I'll spend a little time talking about the new features in Seam 2.0, then I'll talk about our plans for the 2.0 and 2.1 branches. Finally, I'll talk about plans for Seam 3.0 and WebBeans.

If you are in the area, I hope to see you there!

::Seam talk at St. Louis JUG (Thurs 2/21):: [/tech/java] (22:57)

I'll be giving a Seam talk tommorrow (Thursday) at the St. Louis JUG. In the talk I'll give an intro to the basic concepts of Seam and demo the Seam support in JBoss tools. If you are in the area, please stop by and say hi!

::Seam talks at Denver and Boulder JUGs:: [/tech/java] (11:24)

I'm just about to fly out to Colorado for a few JUG talks. I'll be at the Boulder Java Users Group on Tuesday (Jan 8th) and at the Denver Java Users Group on Wednesday. (Jan 9th) In both cases, I'll be talking about Seam. I'll talk about Seam and demo the Seam part of JBoss Tools / JBoss Developer Studio. This will be my first Seam talk since we released Seam 2.0, so it should be a lot of fun showing off some of the new stuff. Hope to see you there!