JavaOne aftermath
Java developers happy using Drupal, mad about Scala
The jet lag is finally easing. And boy, how many hills I've walked last week.
From May 6 till May 8, Numiton has exhibited at JavaOne in San Francisco. We wanted to showcase nTile PtoJ and get some business our way, of course. But also to build awareness about two things: 1. the concept of automated software migration and 2. our plans in the open-source world.
Hopefully, the first target was achieved. Of the many people stopping by our booth, some were skeptic regarding the possibility of translating from such a quirky language as PHP (weakly and dynamically typed) into Java. But after being given technical details and looking at a few samples, they were more convinced that it's feasible. And automated software migration, generally speaking, was not met with reluctance.
Surprisingly enough, the second goal encountered a lukewarm support. Numiton has medium-term plans to translate more of the popular PHP open-source projects (Have you heard of Joomla, Drupal, WordPress? Bet you did. Now, name a Java equivalent. Hmm...) So we wanted to assess the level of interest for such an endeavor, since translation would be only a first step and then community would have to step in. But somehow, the audience did not get exceedingly enthusiastic. Our forum's voting section on this topic remained unused, and almost everybody seemed to be content with the status-quo.
(Or is it that people were simply being polite in both instances, and we did not manage to raise a real interest at all? Only time will tell.)
Well, for the time being it seems we have to reconsider our open-source plans. No point in investing energy in something few care about...
And this brings my thoughts to something about the whole show. A lack of enthusiasm. We were wide-eyed JavaOne rookies, but from what I'd read from previous years I had expected people to be more – passionate. Speaking of this to someone who had been there before, I was given a possible cause: “Java has become mainstream. And with this, using it has become simply a business; it's not a passion anymore”. While the explanation is logical, I can't help being a little dismayed.
The best discussions of a show happen at parties, so from other bar talks I found out that the interest of the public seems to veer in another direction. Groovy, JRuby, Scala, Jython – all these programming languages run in the JVM, but they're closer to the scripting paradigm than to Java. So is the idea of translating open-source projects towards Java obsolete? Is Java (as a language, not as a platform) “so yesterday”, as I was told after a beer or three? The fashion industry experiences new/old/new again shifts twice a year, are programming languages victims following fads as well? Or are all these people onto something?
From a business point of view, this should be good news for Numiton. Because we've built our translator in a modular fashion, it's relatively easy to add new source/target languages. So maybe we should start thinking about PHP to JRuby. Or even Java to Jython. After all the effort we put into type inference, translating towards a weakly-typed language should be a piece of cake.
From a theoretical point of view and from experience, however, I am still not convinced that ditching Java is a good idea. And somehow I've never learned to put business before personal convictions. Luckily, that affects only marketing and not implementation, so as long as Numiton keeps me away from potential “Java to Groovy” customers - things should be OK :-)