Strange point of view in the .net community...

Some people have very strange ideas :

http://blog.i14y.net/ says :

J2EE is dying, competition doesn’t means innovation everytime but, digging its own tomb

March 27th, 2007

Competition means Innovation but Java is dying because of the amount of frameworks that are available. I wonder if someone is smart enough to understand and follow the amount of MVC frameworks, Design patterns or Object Relational Mapping tools that are available?

We can try to calculate the combinations of solutions (I don’t try to be exhaustive):

Web application frameworks: Apache Tapestry, Backbase, Bindows, DOJO, Eclipse RAP, Echo2, GWT, JFaces, Java Server Faces, JaverServer Pages, JavaServer Type Libraries, Struts, WebWork… (13)
Application frameworks: Spring, EJB3, Guice, Pico, Rico… (5)
Data access frameworks: Apache OJB, Cayenne, DBC, iBatis, JDBC, Hibernate, JDO, JPA, Oracle Toplink… (9)

Which means something like 13 * 5 * 9 combinations; I let you to make the calculation!

Dear developers and architects, when will you stop thinking that your framework is better than the others and create your own one ? Could you participate to already existing ones instead?

My answer :

Do you really think that having a lot of (good) choice means that a technology is dying ? That’s a very strange point of view… Do you think there is only one solution to a problem, that every similar problem has the exact same solution ?
I am happy to be in the java world where innovation is going so fast, where frustrations are often solved by new solutions…

I attended a few sessions at Sun TechDays Paris on last Thursday and Wednesday.
On Thursday, I saw an Ajax presentation where I could see jMaki in action. I really like the idea to be able to use all those powerful ajax library without handling those terrible javascript stuffs. I was impressed by the bus concept : one ajax component that could work together with an other one (the example was with fisheye and yahoo map).

On Wendsday some guys from OSSGTP were presenting their projects(open source, of course).

Stéfane Fermigier talked about nuxeo (an ECM), and why the moved from python to java. The technology behind is really impressive : seam, ejb3, jboss, Ajax interface, jackrabitt, lucente... while I didn't really understand how I could take avantage of such a nice piece of software at the moment, the light came later...

Vincent Massol talked about xwiki, which was one of my main reason to be there as I wanted to understand if it would be a viable solution for our public web site (www.financeactive.com). (Seems like "yes"!).

The most impressive presentation was surly made by Benjamin Mestrallet , about exo plateform. A lot of Ajax every where and an awesome desktop mode (webOS). Here we are far away from the last time I used a portal (apache JetSpeed). They are also developing an ECM solution.

After the conference, I went to the nuxeo pavilion for a little demo... I was impressed. I immediately saw it can provide me something I was looking for a few months already : a way to manage Specification documentation efficiently. By the way I would put any project documentation as the rights management solve most of my concerns.

I tried it today. Very easy to install, but very little documentation about setup (changing database for example, but as this is jboss, I should easily work this around) or customizing . I met a few bugs, but it seem stable enough for my need.

I found another very similar opensource software very similar : alfresco, but seem more mature. I will try it tomorrow before make up my mind.