Bruce Tate - Lightweight Development Strategies

How do you develop things in a lightweight way.
Java and java development has to get simpler, more reliable and more efficient or it will die.
Java bloat can be good. We need the new frameworks, but we need to be able to remove the deprecated stuff. The success of java and the shrikwrapped product acquisition model is forcing bloat. We need a new software model like subscription.
Don't sell processes, sell principles:

• Small, smart teams
• Good feedback from customers
• Quality
• Simple requirements management
• Simplicity
• Refactoring
• Automated unit testing

Management fears agile development because they think it lacks dicipline. Agile is automated testing, continuous integration, refactoring and use of customer feedback. Make sure that you balance out the formal things you take out...

POJO programming model is stretching java in that you add services through the use of Spring and other framework and the dependency injection principle.

AOP are good for removing cross-cutting stuff like transactions and logging from the object. Spring provides AOP with "training wheels".

Strategies for injecting behavior:

• Code generation (falling out of fashion)
• Byte code generation (runtime - dynamic proxies, compile time - injection)
• Source level metadata (annotations)

Java limitations is mainly that it is a rigid language, how to express configuration? Using Java or XML. What about metaprogramming in Java.

Callbacks can be used to simulate closures in places where they provide benefit, like JDBC, transactions. Continuation in Java with things like WebFlow, Rife, Cocoon2 or Lakeshore. More on these topics in the Beyond Java talk tomorrow.

We need code blocks (closures) and continuations in Java.

Spring will replace EJB, annotations and AOP will get us into trouble in some points, but in the end will survive, java metaprogramming will increase, REST wil slowly subsume WebServices (except maybe SOAP), one dynamic language explodes (Ruby?)