As discriminatory as this is going to sound, this one is for the old-timers. If you started programming after the turn of the milennium, I don’t know if you’re going to be able to follow the trend of this post—not out of any serious deficiency on your part, hardly that. But I think this is something only the old-timers are going to identify with. (And thus, do I alienate probably 80% of my readership, but so be it.)

Is it me, or is programming just less interesting today than it was two decades ago?

By all means, shake your smartphones and other mobile devices at me and say, “Dude, how can you say that?”, but in many ways programming for Android and iOS reminds me of programming for Windows and Mac OS two decades ago. HTML 5 and JavaScript remind me of ten years ago, the first time HTML and JavaScript came around. The discussions around programming languages remind me of the discussions around C++. The discussions around NoSQL remind me of the arguments both for and against relational databases. It all feels like we’ve been here before, with only the names having changed.

Don’t get me wrong—if any of you comment on the differences between HTML 5 now and HTML 3.2 then, or the degree of the various browser companies agreeing to the standard today against the “browser wars” of a decade ago, I’ll agree with you. This isn’t so much of a rational and logical discussion as it is an emotive and intuitive one. It just feels similar.

To be honest, I get this sense that across the entire industry right now, there’s a sort of malaise, a general sort of “Bah, nothing really all that new is going on anymore”. NoSQL is re-introducing storage ideas that had been around before but were discarded (perhaps injudiciously and too quickly) in favor of the relational model. Functional languages have obviously been in place since the 50’s (in Lisp). And so on.

More importantly, look at the Java community: what truly innovative ideas have emerged here in the last five years? Every new open-source project or commercial endeavor either seems to be a refinement of an idea before it (how many different times are we going to create a new Web framework, guys?) or an attempt to leverage an idea coming from somewhere else (be it from .NET or from Ruby or from JavaScript or….). With the upcoming .NET 4.5 release and Windows 8, Microsoft is holding out very little “new and exciting” bits for the community to invest emotionally in: we hear about “async” in C# 5 (something that F# has had already, thank you), and of course there is WinRT (another platform or virtual machine… sort of), and… well, honestly, didn’t we just do this a decade ago? Where is the WCFs, the WPFs, the Silverlights, the things that would get us fired up? Hell, even a new approach to data access might stir some excitement. Node.js feels like an attempt to reinvent the app server, but if you look back far enough you see that the app server itself was reinvented once (in the Java world) in Spring and other lightweight frameworks, and before that by people who actually thought to write their own web servers in straight Java. (And, for the record, the whole event-driven I/O thing is something that’s been done in both Java and .NET a long time before now.)

And as much as this is going to probably just throw fat on the fire, all the excitement around JavaScript as a language reminds me of the excitement about Ruby as a language. Does nobody remember that Sun did this once already, with Phobos? Or that Netscape did this with LiveScript? JavaScript on the server end is not new, folks. It’s just new to the people who’d never seen it before.

In years past, there has always seemed to be something deeper, something more exciting and more innovative that drives the industry in strange ways. Artificial Intelligence was one such thing: the search to try and bring computers to a state of human-like sentience drove a lot of interesting ideas and concepts forward, but over the last decade or two, AI seems to have lost almost all of its luster and momentum. User interfaces—specifically, GUIs—were another force for a while, until GUIs got to the point where they were so common and so deeply rooted in their chosen pasts (the single-button of the Mac, the menubar-per-window of Windows, etc) that they left themselves so little room for maneuver. At least this is one area where Microsoft is (maybe) putting the fatted sacred cow to the butcher’s knife, with their Metro UI moves in Windows 8… but only up to a point.

Maybe I’m just old and tired and should hang up my keyboard and go take up farming, then go retire to my front porch’s rocking chair and practice my Hey you kids! Getoffamylawn! or something. But before you dismiss me entirely, do me a favor and tell me: what gets you excited these days? If you’ve been programming for twenty years, what about the industry today gets your blood moving and your mind sharpened?

Well, friends, another year has come and gone, and it's time for me to put my crystal ball into place and see what the upcoming year has for us. But, of course, in the long-standing tradition of these predictions, I also need to put my spectacles on (I did turn 40 last year, after all) and have a look at how well I did in this same activity twelve months ago.

Let's see what unbelievable gobs of hooey I slung last year came even remotely to pass. For 2011, I said....

• THEN: Android’s penetration into the mobile space is going to rise, then plateau around the middle of the year. Android phones, collectively, have outpaced iPhone sales. That’s a pretty significant statistic—and it means that there’s fewer customers buying smartphones in the coming year. More importantly, the first generation of Android slates (including the Galaxy Tab, which I own), are less-than-sublime, and not really an “iPad Killer” device by any stretch of the imagination. And I think that will slow down people buying Android slates and phones, particularly since Google has all but promised that Android releases will start slowing down.
  • NOW: Well, I think I get a point for saying that Android's penetration will rise... but then I lose it for suggesting that it would slow down. Wow, was I wrong on that. Once Amazon put the Kindle Fire out, suddenly for the first time Android tablets began to appear in peoples' hands in record numbers. The drawback here is that most people using the Fire don't realize it's an Android tablet, which certainly hurts Google's brand-awareness (not that Amazon really seems to mind), but the upshot is simple: people are still buying devices, even though they may already own one. Which amazes me.
• THEN: Windows Phone 7 penetration into the mobile space will appear huge, then slow down towards the middle of the year. Microsoft is getting some pretty decent numbers now, from what I can piece together, and I think that’s largely the “I love Microsoft” crowd buying in. But it’s a pretty crowded place right now with Android and iPhone, and I’m not sure if the much-easier Office and/or Exchange integration is enough to woo consumers (who care about Office) or business types (who care about Exchange) away from their Androids and iPhones.
  • NOW: Despite the catastrophic implosion of RIM (thus creating a huge market of people looking to trade their Blackberrys in for other mobile phones, ones which won't all go down when a RIM server implodes), WP7 has definitely not emerged as the "third player" in the mobile space; or, perhaps more precisely, they feel like a distant third, rather than a creditable alternative to the other two. In fact, more and more it just feels like this is a two-horse race and Microsoft is in it still because they're willing to throw loss after loss to stay in it. (For what reason, I'm not sure--it's not clear to me that they can ever reach a point of profitability here, even once Nokia makes the transition to WP7, which is supposedly going to take years. On the order of a half-decade or so.) Even living here in Redmon, where I would expect the WP7 concentration to be much, much higher than anywhere else in the world, it's still more common to see iPhones and 'droids in peoples' hands than it is to see WP7 phones.
• THEN: Android, iOS and/or Windows Phone 7 becomes a developer requirement. Developers, if you haven’t taken the time to learn how to program one of these three platforms, you are electing to remove yourself from a growing market that desperately wants people with these skills. I see the “mobile native app development” space as every bit as hot as the “Internet/Web development” space was back in 2000. If you don’t have a device, buy one. If you have a device, get the tools—in all three cases they’re free downloads—and start writing stupid little apps that nobody cares about, so you can have some skills on the platform when somebody cares about it.
  • NOW: Wow, yes. Right now, if you are a developer and you haven't spent at least a little time learning mobile development, you are excluding yourself from a development "boom" that rivals the one around Web sites in the mid-90's. Seriously: remember when everybody had to have a website? That's the mentality right now with a ton of different companies--"we have to have a mobile app!" "But we sell condom lubricant!" "Doesn't matter! We need a mobile app! Build us something! Go go go go go!"
• THEN: The Windows 7 slates will suck. This isn’t a prediction, this is established fact. I played with an “ExoPC” 10” form factor slate running Windows 7 (Dell I think was the manufacturer), and it was a horrible experience. Windows 7, like most OSes, really expects a keyboard to be present, and a slate doesn’t have one—so the OS was hacked to put a “keyboard” button at the top of the screen that would slide out to let you touch-type on the slate. I tried to fire up Notepad and type out a haiku, and it was an unbelievably awkward process. Android and iOS clearly own the slate market for the forseeable future, and if Dell has any brains in its corporate head, it will phone up Google tomorrow and start talking about putting Android on that hardware.
  • NOW: Yeah, that was something of a "gimme" point (but I'll take it). Windows7 on a slate was a Bad Idea, and I'm pretty sure the sales reflect that. Conduct your own anecdotal poll: see if you can find a store somewhere in your town or city that will actually sell you a Windows7 slate. Can't find one? I can--it's the Microsoft store in town, and I'm not entirely sure they still stock them. Certainly our local Best Buy doesn't.
• THEN: DSLs mostly disappear from the buzz. I still see no strawman (no “pet store” equivalent), and none of the traditional builders-of-strawmen (Microsoft, Oracle, etc) appear interested in DSLs much anymore, so I think 2010 will mark the last year that we spent any time talking about the concept.
  • NOW: I'm going to claim a point here, too. DSLs have pretty much left us hanging. Without a strawman for developers to "get", the DSL movement has more or less largely died out. I still sometimes hear people refer to something that isn't a programming language but does something technical as a "DSL" ("That shipping label? That's a DSL!"), and that just tells me that the concept never really took root.
• THEN: Facebook becomes more of a developer requirement than before. I don’t like Mark Zuckerburg. I don’t like Facebook’s privacy policies. I don’t particularly like the way Facebook approaches the Facebook Connect experience. But Facebook owns enough people to be the fourth-largest nation on the planet, and probably commands an economy of roughly that size to boot. If your app is aimed at the Facebook demographic (that is, everybody who’s not on Twitter), you have to know how to reach these people, and that means developing at least some part of your system to integrate with it.
  • NOW: Facebook, if anything, has become more important through 2011, particularly for startups looking to get some exposure and recognition. Facebook continues to screw with their user experience, though, and they keep screwing with their security policies, and as "big" a presence as they have, it's not invulnerable, and if they're not careful, they're going to find themselves on the other side of the relevance curve.
• THEN: Twitter becomes more of a developer requirement, too. Anybody who’s not on Facebook is on Twitter. Or dead. So to reach the other half of the online community, you have to know how to connect out with Twitter.
  • NOW: Twitter's impact has become deeper, but more muted in some ways--people don't think of Twitter as a "new" channel, but one that they've come to expect and get used to. At the same time, how Twitter is supposed to factor into different applications isn't always clear, which hinders Twitter's acceptance and "must-have"-ness. Of course, Twitter could care less, it seems, though it still confuses me how they actually make money.
• THEN: XMPP becomes more of a developer requirement. XMPP hasn’t crossed a lot of people’s radar screen before, but Facebook decided to adopt it as their chat system communication protocol, and Google’s already been using it, and suddenly there’s a whole lotta traffic going over XMPP. More importantly, it offers a two-way communication experience that is in some scenarios vastly better than what HTTP offers, yet running in a very “Internet-friendly” way just as HTTP does. I suspect that XMPP is going to start cropping up in a number of places as a useful alternative and/or complement to using HTTP.
  • NOW: Well, unfortunately, XMPP still hides underneath other names and still doesn't come to mind when people are thinking about communication, leaving this one way unfulfilled. *sigh* Maybe someday we will learn that not everything has to go over HTTP, but it didn't happen in 2011.
• THEN: “Gamification” starts making serious inroads into non-gaming systems. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been talking more about gaming, game design, and game implementation last year, but all of a sudden “gamification”—the process of putting game-like concepts into non-game applications—is cresting in a big way. FourSquare, Yelp, Gowalla, suddenly all these systems are offering achievement badges and scoring systems for people who want to play in their worlds. How long is it before a developer is pulled into a meeting and told that “we need to put achievement badges into the call-center support application”? Or the online e-commerce portal? It’ll start either this year or next.
  • NOW: Gamification is emerging, but slowly and under the radar. It's certainly not as strong as I thought it would be, but gamification concepts are sneaking their way into a variety of different scenarios (beyond games themselves). Probably can't claim a point here, no.
• THEN: Functional languages will hit a make-or-break point. I know, I said it last year. But the buzz keeps growing, and when that happens, it usually means that it’s either going to reach a critical mass and explode, or it’s going to implode—and the longer the buzz grows, the faster it explodes or implodes, accordingly. My personal guess is that the “F/O hybrids”—F#, Scala, etc—will continue to grow until they explode, particularly since the suggested v.Next changes to both Java and C# have to be done as language changes, whereas futures for F# frequently are either built as libraries masquerading as syntax (such as asynchronous workflows, introduced in 2.0) or as back-end library hooks that anybody can plug in (such as type providers, introduced at PDC a few months ago), neither of which require any language revs—and no concerns about backwards compatibility with existing code. This makes the F/O hybrids vastly more flexible and stable. In fact, I suspect that within five years or so, we’ll start seeing a gradual shift away from pure O-O systems, into systems that use a lot more functional concepts—and that will propel the F/O languages into the center of the developer mindshare.
  • NOW: More than any of my other predictions (or subjects of interest), functional languages stump me the most. On the one hand, there doesn't seem to be a drop-off of interest in the subject, based on a variety of anecdotal evidence (books, articles, etc), but on the other hand, they don't seem to be crossing over into the "mainstream" programming worlds, either. At best, we can say that they are entering the mindset of senior programmers and/or project leads and/or architects, but certainly they don't seem to be turning in to the "go-to" language for projects being done in 2011.
• THEN: The Microsoft Kinect will lose its shine. I hate to say it, but I just don’t see where the excitement is coming from. Remember when the Wii nunchucks were the most amazing thing anybody had ever seen? Frankly, after a slew of initial releases for the Wii that made use of them in interesting ways, the buzz has dropped off, and more importantly, the nunchucks turned out to be just another way to move an arrow around on the screen—in other words, we haven’t found particularly novel and interesting/game-changing ways to use the things. That’s what I think will happen with the Kinect. Sure, it’s really freakin’ cool that you can use your body as the controller—but how precise is it, how quickly can it react to my body movements, and most of all, what new user interface metaphors are people going to have to come up with in order to avoid the “me-too” dancing-game clones that are charging down the pipeline right now?
  • NOW: Kinect still makes for a great Christmas or birthday present, but nobody seems to be all that amazed by the idea anymore. Certainly we aren't seeing a huge surge in using Kinect as a general user interface device, at least not yet. Maybe it needed more time for people to develop those new metaphors, but at the same time, I would've expected at least a few more games to make use of it, and I haven't seen any this past year.
• THEN: There will be no clear victor in the Silverlight-vs-HTML5 war. And make no mistake about it, a war is brewing. Microsoft, I think, finds itself in the inenviable position of having two very clearly useful technologies, each one’s “sphere of utility” (meaning, the range of answers to the “where would I use it?” question) very clearly overlapping. It’s sort of like being a football team with both Brett Favre and Tom Brady on your roster—both of them are superstars, but you know, deep down, that you have to cut one, because you can’t devote the same degree of time and energy to both. Microsoft is going to take most of 2011 and probably part of 2012 trying to support both, making a mess of it, offering up conflicting rationale and reasoning, in the end achieving nothing but confusing developers and harming their relationship with the Microsoft developer community in the process. Personally, I think Microsoft has no choice but to get behind HTML 5, but I like a lot of the features of Silverlight and think that it has a lot of mojo that HTML 5 lacks, and would actually be in favor of Microsoft keeping both—so long as they make it very clear to the developer community when and where each should be used. In other words, the executives in charge of each should be locked into a room and not allowed out until they’ve hammered out a business strategy that is then printed and handed out to every developer within a 3-continent radius of Redmond. (Chances of this happening: .01%)
  • NOW: Well, this was accurate all the way up until the last couple of months, when Microsoft made it fairly clear that Silverlight was being effectively "put behind" HTML 5, despite shipping another version of Silverlight. In the meantime, though, they've tried to support both (and some Silverlighters tell me that the Silverlight team is still looking forward to continuing supporting it, though I'm not sure at this point what is rumor and what is fact anymore), and yes, they confused the hell out of everybody. I'm surprised they pulled the trigger on it in 2011, though--I expected it to go a version or two more before they finally pulled the rug out.
• THEN: Apple starts feeling the pressure to deliver a developer experience that isn’t mired in mid-90’s metaphor. Don’t look now, Apple, but a lot of software developers are coming to your platform from Java and .NET, and they’re bringing their expectations for what and how a developer IDE should look like, perform, and do, with them. Xcode is not a modern IDE, all the Apple fan-boy love for it notwithstanding, and this means that a few things will happen:
  • Eclipse gets an iOS plugin. Yes, I know, it wouldn’t work (for the most part) on a Windows-based Eclipse installation, but if Eclipse can have a native C/C++ developer experience, then there’s no reason why a Mac Eclipse install couldn’t have an Objective-C plugin, and that opens up the idea of using Eclipse to write iOS and/or native Mac apps (which will be critical when the Mac App Store debuts somewhere in 2011 or 2012).
  • Rumors will abound about Microsoft bringing Visual Studio to the Mac. Silverlight already runs on the Mac; why not bring the native development experience there? I’m not saying they’ll actually do it, and certainly not in 2011, but the rumors, they will be flyin….
  • Other third-party alternatives to Xcode will emerge and/or grow. MonoTouch is just one example. There’s opportunity here, just as the fledgling Java IDE market looked back in ‘96, and people will come to fill it.
  • NOW: Xcode 4 is "better", but it's still not what I would call comparable to the Microsoft Visual Studio or JetBrains IDEA experience. LLVM is definitely a better platform for the company's development efforts, long-term, and it's encouraging that they're investing so heavily into it, but I still wish the overall development experience was stronger. Meanwhile, though, no Eclipse plugin has emerged (that I'm aware of), which surprised me, and neither did we see Microsoft trying to step into that world, which doesn't surprise me, but disappoints me just a little. I realize that Microsoft's developer tools are generally designed to support the Windows operating system first, but Microsoft has to cut loose from that perspective if they're going to survive as a company. More on that later.
• THEN: NoSQL buzz grows. The NoSQL movement, which sort of got started last year, will reach significant states of buzz this year. NoSQL databases have a lot to offer, particularly in areas that relational databases are weak, such as hierarchical kinds of storage requirements, for example. That buzz will reach a fever pitch this year, and the relational database moguls (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) will start to fight back.
  • NOW: Well, the buzz certainly grew, and it surprised me that the big storage guys (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle) didn't do more to address it; I was expecting features to emerge in their database products to address some of the features present in MongoDB or CouchDB or some of the others, such as "schemaless" or map/reduce-style queries. Even just incorporating JavaScript into the engine somewhere would've generated a reaction.

Overall, it appears I'm running at about my usual 50/50 levels of prognostication. So be it. Let's see what the ol' crystal ball has in mind for 2012:

• Lisps will be the languages to watch. With Clojure leading the way, Lisps (that is, languages that are more or less loosely based on Common Lisp or one of its variants) are slowly clawing their way back into the limelight. Lisps are both functional languages as well as dynamic languages, which gives them a significant reason for interest. Clojure runs on top of the JVM, which makes it highly interoperable with other JVM languages/systems, and Clojure/CLR is the version of Clojure for the CLR platform, though there seems to be less interest in it in the .NET world (which is a mistake, if you ask me).
• Functional languages will.... I have no idea. As I said above, I'm kind of stymied on the whole functional-language thing and their future. I keep thinking they will either "take off" or "drop off", and they keep tacking to the middle, doing neither, just sort of hanging in there as a concept for programmers to take and run with. Mind you, I like functional languages, and I want to see them become mainstream, or at least more so, but I keep wondering if the mainstream programming public is ready to accept the ideas and concepts hiding therein. So this year, let's try something different: I predict that they will remain exactly where they are, neither "done" nor "accepted", but continue next year to sort of hang out in the middle.
• F#'s type providers will show up in C# v.Next. This one is actually a "gimme", if you look across the history of F# and C#: for almost every version of F# v."N", features from that version show up in C# v."N+1". More importantly, F# 3.0's type provider feature is an amazing idea, and one that I think will open up language research in some very interesting ways. (Not sure what F#'s type providers are or what they'll do for you? Check out Don Syme's talk on it at BUILD last year.)
• Windows8 will generate a lot of chatter. As 2012 progresses, Microsoft will try to force a lot of buzz around it by keeping things under wraps until various points in the year that feel strategic (TechEd, BUILD, etc). In doing so, though, they will annoy a number of people by not talking about them more openly or transparently. What's more....
• Windows8 ("Metro")-style apps won't impress at first. The more I think about it, the more I'm becoming convinced that Metro-style apps on a desktop machine are going to collectively underwhelm. The UI simply isn't designed for keyboard-and-mouse kinds of interaction, and that's going to be the hardware setup that most people first experience Windows8 on--contrary to what (I think) Microsoft thinks, people do not just have tablets laying around waiting for Windows 8 to be installed on it, nor are they going to buy a Windows8 tablet just to try it out, at least not until it's gathered some mojo behind it. Microsoft is going to have to finesse the messaging here very, very finely, and that's not something they've shown themselves to be particularly good at over the last half-decade.
• Scala will get bigger, thanks to Heroku. With the adoption of Scala and Play for their Java apps, Heroku is going to make Scala look attractive as a development platform, and the adoption of Play by Typesafe (the same people who brought you Akka) means that these four--Heroku, Scala, Play and Akka--will combine into a very compelling and interesting platform. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of that.
• Cloud will continue to whip up a lot of air. For all the hype and money spent on it, it doesn't really seem like cloud is gathering commensurate amounts of traction, across all the various cloud providers with the possible exception of Amazon's cloud system. But, as the different cloud platforms start to diversify their platform technology (Microsoft seems to be leading the way here, ironically, with the introduction of Java, Hadoop and some limited NoSQL bits into their Azure offerings), and as we start to get more experience with the pricing and costs of cloud, 2012 might be the year that we start to see mainstream cloud adoption, beyond "just" the usage patterns we've seen so far (as a backing server for mobile apps and as an easy way to spin up startups).
• Android tablets will start to gain momentum. Amazon's Kindle Fire has hit the market strong, definitely better than any other Android-based tablet before it. The Nooq (the Kindle's principal competitor, at least in the e-reader world) is also an Android tablet, which means that right now, consumers can get into the Android tablet world for far, far less than what an iPad costs. Apple rumors suggest that they may have a 7" form factor tablet that will price competitively (in the $200/$300 range), but that's just rumor right now, and Apple has never shown an interest in that form factor, which means the 7" world will remain exclusively Android's (at least for now), and that's a nice form factor for a lot of things. This translates well into more sales of Android tablets in general, I think.
• Apple will release an iPad 3, and it will be "more of the same". Trying to predict Apple is generally a lost cause, particularly when it comes to their vaunted iOS lines, but somewhere around the middle of the year would be ripe for a new iPad, at the very least. (With the iPhone 4S out a few months ago, it's hard to imagine they'd cannibalize those sales by releasing a new iPhone, until the end of the year at the earliest.) Frankly, though, I don't expect the iPad 3 to be all that big of a boost, just a faster processor, more storage, and probably about the same size. Probably the only thing I'd want added to the iPad would be a USB port, but that conflicts with the Apple desire to present the iPad as a "device", rather than as a "computer". (USB ports smack of "computers", not self-contained "devices".)
• Apple will get hauled in front of the US government for... something. Apple's recent foray in the legal world, effectively informing Samsung that they can't make square phones and offering advice as to what will avoid future litigation, smacks of such hubris and arrogance, it makes Microsoft look like a Pollyanna Pushover by comparison. It is pretty much a given, it seems to me, that a confrontation in the legal halls is not far removed, either with the US or with the EU, over anti-cometitive behavior. (And if this kind of behavior continues, and there is no legal action, it'll be pretty apparent that Apple has a pretty good set of US Congressmen and Senators in their pocket, something they probably learned from watching Microsoft and IBM slug it out rather than just buy them off.)
• IBM will be entirely irrelevant again. Look, IBM's main contribution to the Java world is/was Eclipse, and to a much lesser degree, Harmony. With Eclipse more or less "done" (aside from all the work on plugins being done by third parties), and with IBM abandoning Harmony in favor of OpenJDK, IBM more or less removes themselves from the game, as far as developers are concerned. Which shouldn't really be surprising--they've been more or less irrelevant pretty much ever since the mid-2000s or so.
• Oracle will "screw it up" at least once. Right now, the Java community is poised, like a starving vulture, waiting for Oracle to do something else that demonstrates and befits their Evil Emperor status. The community has already been quick (far too quick, if you ask me) to highlight Oracle's supposed missteps, such as the JVM-crashing bug (which has already been fixed in the _u1 release of Java7, which garnered no attention from the various Java news sites) and the debacle around Hudson/Jenkins/whatever-the-heck-we-need-to-call-it-this-week. I'll grant you, the Hudson/Jenkins debacle was deserving of ire, but Oracle is hardly the Evil Emperor the community makes them out to be--at least, so far. (I'll admit it, though, I'm a touch biased, both because Brian Goetz is a friend of mine and because Oracle TechNet has asked me to write a column for them next year. Still, in the spirit of "innocent until proven guilty"....)
• VMWare/SpringSource will start pushing their cloud solution in a major way. Companies like Microsoft and Google are pushing cloud solutions because Software-as-a-Service is a reoccurring revenue model, generating revenue even in years when the product hasn't incremented. VMWare, being a product company, is in the same boat--the only time they make money is when they sell a new copy of their product, unless they can start pushing their virtualization story onto hardware on behalf of clients--a.k.a. "the cloud". With SpringSource as the software stack, VMWare has a more-or-less complete cloud play, so it's surprising that they didn't push it harder in 2011; I suspect they'll start cramming it down everybody's throats in 2012. Expect to see Rod Johnson talking a lot about the cloud as a result.
• JavaScript hype will continue to grow, and by years' end will be at near-backlash levels. JavaScript (more properly known as ECMAScript, not that anyone seems to care but me) is gaining all kinds of steam as a mainstream development language (as opposed to just-a-browser language), particularly with the release of NodeJS. That hype will continue to escalate, and by the end of the year we may start to see a backlash against it. (Speaking personally, NodeJS is an interesting solution, but suggesting that it will replace your Tomcat or IIS server is a bit far-fetched; event-driven I/O is something both of those servers have been doing for years, and the rest of it is "just" a language discussion. We could pretty easily use JavaScript as the development language inside both servers, as Sun demonstrated years ago with their "Phobos" project--not that anybody really cared back then.)
• NoSQL buzz will continue to grow, and by years' end will start to generate a backlash. More and more companies are jumping into NoSQL-based solutions, and this trend will continue to accelerate, until some extremely public failure will start to generate a backlash against it. (This seems to be a pattern that shows up with a lot of technologies, so it seems entirely realistic that it'll happen here, too.) Mind you, I don't mean to suggest that the backlash will be factual or correct--usually these sorts of things come from misuing the tool, not from any intrinsic failure in it--but it'll generate some bad press.
• Ted will thoroughly rock the house during his CodeMash keynote. Yeah, OK, that's more of a fervent wish than a prediction, but hey, keep a positive attitude and all that, right?
• Ted will continue to enjoy his time working for Neudesic. So far, it's been great working for these guys, and I'm looking forward to a great 2012 with them. (Hopefully this will be a prediction I get to tack on for many years to come, too.)

I hope that all of you have enjoyed reading these, and I wish you and yours a very merry, happy, profitable and fulfilling 2012. Thanks for reading.

As so many of you know by now, Dennis Ritchie passed away yesterday. For so many of you, he needs no introduction or explanation. But sometimes my family reads this blog, and it is a fact that while they know who Steve Jobs was, they have no idea who Dennis Ritchie was or why so many geeks mourn his passing.

And that is sad to me.

I don’t feel up to the task of eulogizing a man of Ritchie’s accomplishments properly right now; in fact, I don’t know that I ever will. But let it be said right now: in the end, though his contributions were far less recognized, it was Ritchie that provided the greater contribution to our world than Jobs did. IMHO.

Recently I got an email from Bohdan Zograf, who offered:

Hi!

I'm willing to translate publication located at http://blogs.tedneward.com/2006/06/26/The+Vietnam+Of+Computer+Science.aspx to the Belorussian language (my mother tongue). What I'm asking for is your written permission, so you don't mind after I'll post the translation to my blog.

I agreed, and next thing I know, I get the next email that it’s done. If your mother tongue is Belorussian, then I invite you to read the article in its translated form at http://www.moneyaisle.com/worldwide/the-vietnam-of-computer-science-be.

Thanks, Bohdan!

Long-time readers of this blog know what’s coming next: it’s time for Ted to prognosticate on what the coming year of tech will bring us. But I believe strongly in accountability, even in my offered-up-for-free predictions, so one of the traditions of this space is to go back and revisit my predictions from this time last year. So, without further ado, let’s look back at Ted’s 2010 predictions, and see how things played out; 2010 predictions are prefixed with “THEN”, and my thoughts on my predictions are prefixed with “NOW”:

For 2010, I predicted....

• THEN: ... I will offer 3- and 4-day training classes on F# and Scala, among other things. OK, that's not fair—yes, I have the materials, I just need to work out locations and times. Contact me if you're interested in a private class, by the way.
• NOW: Well, I offered them… I just didn’t do much to advertise them or sell them. I got plenty busy just with the other things I had going on. Besides, this and the next prediction were pretty much all advertisement anyway, so I don’t know if anybody really counts these two.
• THEN: ... I will publish two books, one on F# and one on Scala. OK, OK, another plug. Or, rather, more of a resolution. One will be the "Professional F#" I'm doing for Wiley/Wrox, the other isn't yet finalized. But it'll either be published through a publisher, or self-published, by JavaOne 2010.
• NOW: “Professional F# 2.0” shipped in Q3 of 2010; the other Scala book I decided not to pursue—too much stuff going on to really put the necessary time into it. (Cue sad trombone.)
• THEN: ... DSLs will either "succeed" this year, or begin the short slide into the dustbin of obscure programming ideas. Domain-specific language advocates have to put up some kind of strawman for developers to learn from and poke at, or the whole concept will just fade away. Martin's book will help, if it ships this year, but even that might not be enough to generate interest if it doesn't have some kind of large-scale applicability in it. Patterns and refactoring and enterprise containers all had a huge advantage in that developers could see pretty easily what the problem was they solved; DSLs haven't made that clear yet.
• NOW: To be honest, this one is hard to call. Martin Fowler published his DSL book, which many people consider to be a good sign of what’s happening in the world, but really, the DSL buzz seems to have dropped off significantly. The strawman hasn’t appeared in any meaningful public way (I still don’t see an example being offered up from anybody), and that leads me to believe that the fading-away has started.
• THEN: ... functional languages will start to see a backlash. I hate to say it, but "getting" the functional mindset is hard, and there's precious few resources that are making it easy for mainstream (read: O-O) developers make that adjustment, far fewer than there was during the procedural-to-object shift. If the functional community doesn't want to become mainstream, then mainstream developers will find ways to take functional's most compelling gateway use-case (parallel/concurrent programming) and find a way to "git 'er done" in the traditional O-O approach, probably through software transactional memory, and functional languages like Haskell and Erlang will be relegated to the "What Might Have Been" of computer science history. Not sure what I mean? Try this: walk into a functional language forum, and ask what a monad is. Nobody yet has been able to produce an answer that doesn't involve math theory, or that does involve a practical domain-object-based example. In fact, nobody has really said why (or if) monads are even still useful. Or catamorphisms. Or any of the other dime-store words that the functional community likes to toss around.
• NOW: I think I have to admit that this hasn’t happened—at least, there’s been no backlash that I’ve seen. In fact, what’s interesting is that there’s been some movement to bring those functional concepts—including monads, which surprised me completely—into other languages like C# or Java for discussion and use. That being said, though, I don’t see Haskell and Erlang taking center stage as application languages—instead, I see them taking supporting-cast kinds of roles building other infrastructure that applications in turn make use of, a la CouchDB (written in Erlang). Monads still remain a mostly-opaque subject for most developers, however, and it’s still unclear if monads are something that people should think about applying in code, or if they are one of those “in theory” kinds of concepts. (You know, one of those ideas that change your brain forever, but you never actually use directly in code.)
• THEN: ... Visual Studio 2010 will ship on time, and be one of the buggiest and/or slowest releases in its history. I hate to make this prediction, because I really don't want to be right, but there's just so much happening in the Visual Studio refactoring effort that it makes me incredibly nervous. Widespread adoption of VS2010 will wait until SP1 at the earliest. In fact....
• NOW: Wow, did I get a few people here in Redmond annoyed with me about that one. And, as it turned out, I was pretty off-base about its stability. (It shipped pretty close if not exactly on the ship date Microsoft promised, as I recall, though I admit I wasn’t paying too much attention to it.)  I’ve been using VS 2010 for a lot of .NET work in the last six months, and I’ve yet (knock on wood) to have it crash on me. /bow Visual Studio team.
• THEN: ... Visual Studio 2010 SP 1 will ship within three months of the final product. Microsoft knows that people wait until SP 1 to think about upgrading, so they'll just plan for an eager SP 1 release, and hope that managers will be too hung over from the New Year (still) to notice that the necessary shakeout time hasn't happened.
• NOW: Uh…. nope. In fact, SP 1 has just reached a beta/CTP state. As for managers being too hung over, well…
• THEN: ... Apple will ship a tablet with multi-touch on it, and it will flop horribly. Not sure why I think this, but I just don't think the multi-touch paradigm that Apple has cooked up for the iPhone will carry over to a tablet/laptop device. That won't stop them from shipping it, and it won't stop Apple fan-boiz from buying it, but that's about where the interest will end.
• NOW: Oh, WOW did I come so close and yet missed the mark by a mile. Of course, the “tablet” that Apple shipped was the iPad, and it did pretty much everything except flop horribly. Apple fan-boys bought it… and then about 24 hours later, so did everybody else. My mom got one, for crying out loud. And folks, the iPad—along with the whole “slate” concept—is pretty clearly here to stay.
• THEN: ... JDK 7 closures will be debated for a few weeks, then become a fait accompli as the Java community shrugs its collective shoulders. Frankly, I think the Java community has exhausted its interest in debating new language features for Java. Recent college grads and open-source groups with an axe to grind will continue to try and make an issue out of this, but I think the overall Java community just... doesn't... care. They just want to see JDK 7 ship someday.
• NOW: Pretty close—except that closures won’t ship as part of JDK 7, largely due to the Oracle acquisition in the middle of the year here. And I was spot-on vis-à-vis the “they want to see JDK 7 ship someday”; when given the chance to wait for a year or so for a Java-with-closures to ship, the community overwhelmingly voted to get something sooner rather than later.
• THEN: ... Scala either "pops" in 2010, or begins to fall apart. By "pops", I mean reaches a critical mass of developers interested in using it, enough to convince somebody to create a company around it, a la G2One.
• NOW: … and by “somebody”, it turns out I meant Martin Odersky. Scala is pretty clearly a hot topic in the Java space, its buzz being disturbed only by Clojure. Scala and/or Clojure, plus Groovy, makes a really compelling JVM-based stack.
• THEN: ... Oracle is going to make a serious "cloud" play, probably by offering an Oracle-hosted version of Azure or AppEngine. Oracle loves the enterprise space too much, and derives too much money from it, to not at least appear to have some kind of offering here. Now that they own Java, they'll marry it up against OpenSolaris, the Oracle database, and throw the whole thing into a series of server centers all over the continent, and call it "Oracle 12c" (c for Cloud, of course) or something.
• NOW: Oracle made a play, but it was to continue to enhance Java, not build a cloud space. It surprises me that they haven’t made a more forceful move in this space, but I suspect that a huge amount of time and energy went into folding Sun into their corporate environment.
• THEN: ... Spring development will slow to a crawl and start to take a left turn toward cloud ideas. VMWare bought SpringSource for a reason, and I believe it's entirely centered around VMWare's movement into the cloud space—they want to be more than "just" a virtualization tool. Spring + Groovy makes a compelling development stack, particularly if VMWare does some interesting hooks-n-hacks to make Spring a virtualization environment in its own right somehow. But from a practical perspective, any community-driven development against Spring is all but basically dead. The source may be downloadable later, like the VMWare Player code is, but making contributions back? Fuhgeddabowdit.
• NOW: The Spring One show definitely played up Cloud stuff, and springsource.com seems to be emphasizing cloud more in a couple of subtle ways. Not sure if I call this one a win or not for me, though.
• THEN: ... the explosion of e-book readers brings the Kindle 2009 edition way down to size. The era of the e-book reader is here, and honestly, while I'm glad I have a Kindle, I'm expecting that I'll be dusting it off a shelf in a few years. Kinda like I do with my iPods from a few years ago.
• NOW: Honestly, can’t say that I’m using my Kindle a lot, but I am reading using the Kindle app on non-Kindle hardware more than I thought I would be. That said, I am eyeing the new Kindle hardware generation with an acquisitive eye…
• THEN: ... "social networking" becomes the "Web 2.0" of 2010. In other words, using the term will basically identify you as a tech wannabe and clearly out of touch with the bleeding edge.
• NOW: Um…. yeah.
• THEN: ... Facebook becomes a developer platform requirement. I don't pretend to know anything about Facebook—I'm not even on it, which amazes my family to no end—but clearly Facebook is one of those mechanisms by which people reach each other, and before long, it'll start showing up as a developer requirement for companies looking to hire. If you're looking to build out your resume to make yourself attractive to companies in 2010, mad Facebook skillz might not be a bad investment.
• NOW: I’m on Facebook, I’ve written some code for it, and given how much the startup scene loves the “Like” button, I think developers who knew Facebook in 2010 did pretty well for themselves.
• THEN: ... Nintendo releases an open SDK for building games for its next-gen DS-based device. With the spectacular success of games on the iPhone, Nintendo clearly must see that they're missing a huge opportunity every day developers can't write games for the Nintendo DS that are easily downloadable to the device for playing. Nintendo is not stupid—if they don't open up the SDK and promote "casual" games like those on the iPhone and those that can now be downloaded to the Zune or the XBox, they risk being marginalized out of existence.
• NOW: Um… yeah. Maybe this was me just being hopeful.

In general, it looks like I was more right than wrong, which is not a bad record to have. Of course, a couple of those “wrong”s were “giving up the big play” kind of wrongs, so while I may have a winning record, I still may have a defense that’s given up too many points to be taken seriously. *shrug* Oh, well.

What portends for 2011?

• Android’s penetration into the mobile space is going to rise, then plateau around the middle of the year. Android phones, collectively, have outpaced iPhone sales. That’s a pretty significant statistic—and it means that there’s fewer customers buying smartphones in the coming year. More importantly, the first generation of Android slates (including the Galaxy Tab, which I own), are less-than-sublime, and not really an “iPad Killer” device by any stretch of the imagination. And I think that will slow down people buying Android slates and phones, particularly since Google has all but promised that Android releases will start slowing down.
• Windows Phone 7 penetration into the mobile space will appear huge, then slow down towards the middle of the year. Microsoft is getting some pretty decent numbers now, from what I can piece together, and I think that’s largely the “I love Microsoft” crowd buying in. But it’s a pretty crowded place right now with Android and iPhone, and I’m not sure if the much-easier Office and/or Exchange integration is enough to woo consumers (who care about Office) or business types (who care about Exchange) away from their Androids and iPhones.
• Android, iOS and/or Windows Phone 7 becomes a developer requirement. Developers, if you haven’t taken the time to learn how to program one of these three platforms, you are electing to remove yourself from a growing market that desperately wants people with these skills. I see the “mobile native app development” space as every bit as hot as the “Internet/Web development” space was back in 2000. If you don’t have a device, buy one. If you have a device, get the tools—in all three cases they’re free downloads—and start writing stupid little apps that nobody cares about, so you can have some skills on the platform when somebody cares about it.
• The Windows 7 slates will suck. This isn’t a prediction, this is established fact. I played with an “ExoPC” 10” form factor slate running Windows 7 (Dell I think was the manufacturer), and it was a horrible experience. Windows 7, like most OSes, really expects a keyboard to be present, and a slate doesn’t have one—so the OS was hacked to put a “keyboard” button at the top of the screen that would slide out to let you touch-type on the slate. I tried to fire up Notepad and type out a haiku, and it was an unbelievably awkward process. Android and iOS clearly own the slate market for the forseeable future, and if Dell has any brains in its corporate head, it will phone up Google tomorrow and start talking about putting Android on that hardware.
• DSLs mostly disappear from the buzz. I still see no strawman (no “pet store” equivalent), and none of the traditional builders-of-strawmen (Microsoft, Oracle, etc) appear interested in DSLs much anymore, so I think 2010 will mark the last year that we spent any time talking about the concept.
• Facebook becomes more of a developer requirement than before. I don’t like Mark Zuckerburg. I don’t like Facebook’s privacy policies. I don’t particularly like the way Facebook approaches the Facebook Connect experience. But Facebook owns enough people to be the fourth-largest nation on the planet, and probably commands an economy of roughly that size to boot. If your app is aimed at the Facebook demographic (that is, everybody who’s not on Twitter), you have to know how to reach these people, and that means developing at least some part of your system to integrate with it.
• Twitter becomes more of a developer requirement, too. Anybody who’s not on Facebook is on Twitter. Or dead. So to reach the other half of the online community, you have to know how to connect out with Twitter.
• XMPP becomes more of a developer requirement. XMPP hasn’t crossed a lot of people’s radar screen before, but Facebook decided to adopt it as their chat system communication protocol, and Google’s already been using it, and suddenly there’s a whole lotta traffic going over XMPP. More importantly, it offers a two-way communication experience that is in some scenarios vastly better than what HTTP offers, yet running in a very “Internet-friendly” way just as HTTP does. I suspect that XMPP is going to start cropping up in a number of places as a useful alternative and/or complement to using HTTP.
• “Gamification” starts making serious inroads into non-gaming systems. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been talking more about gaming, game design, and game implementation last year, but all of a sudden “gamification”—the process of putting game-like concepts into non-game applications—is cresting in a big way. FourSquare, Yelp, Gowalla, suddenly all these systems are offering achievement badges and scoring systems for people who want to play in their worlds. How long is it before a developer is pulled into a meeting and told that “we need to put achievement badges into the call-center support application”? Or the online e-commerce portal? It’ll start either this year or next.
• Functional languages will hit a make-or-break point. I know, I said it last year. But the buzz keeps growing, and when that happens, it usually means that it’s either going to reach a critical mass and explode, or it’s going to implode—and the longer the buzz grows, the faster it explodes or implodes, accordingly. My personal guess is that the “F/O hybrids”—F#, Scala, etc—will continue to grow until they explode, particularly since the suggested v.Next changes to both Java and C# have to be done as language changes, whereas futures for F# frequently are either built as libraries masquerading as syntax (such as asynchronous workflows, introduced in 2.0) or as back-end library hooks that anybody can plug in (such as type providers, introduced at PDC a few months ago), neither of which require any language revs—and no concerns about backwards compatibility with existing code. This makes the F/O hybrids vastly more flexible and stable. In fact, I suspect that within five years or so, we’ll start seeing a gradual shift away from pure O-O systems, into systems that use a lot more functional concepts—and that will propel the F/O languages into the center of the developer mindshare.
• The Microsoft Kinect will lose its shine. I hate to say it, but I just don’t see where the excitement is coming from. Remember when the Wii nunchucks were the most amazing thing anybody had ever seen? Frankly, after a slew of initial releases for the Wii that made use of them in interesting ways, the buzz has dropped off, and more importantly, the nunchucks turned out to be just another way to move an arrow around on the screen—in other words, we haven’t found particularly novel and interesting/game-changing ways to use the things. That’s what I think will happen with the Kinect. Sure, it’s really freakin’ cool that you can use your body as the controller—but how precise is it, how quickly can it react to my body movements, and most of all, what new user interface metaphors are people going to have to come up with in order to avoid the “me-too” dancing-game clones that are charging down the pipeline right now?
• There will be no clear victor in the Silverlight-vs-HTML5 war. And make no mistake about it, a war is brewing. Microsoft, I think, finds itself in the inenviable position of having two very clearly useful technologies, each one’s “sphere of utility” (meaning, the range of answers to the “where would I use it?” question) very clearly overlapping. It’s sort of like being a football team with both Brett Favre and Tom Brady on your roster—both of them are superstars, but you know, deep down, that you have to cut one, because you can’t devote the same degree of time and energy to both. Microsoft is going to take most of 2011 and probably part of 2012 trying to support both, making a mess of it, offering up conflicting rationale and reasoning, in the end achieving nothing but confusing developers and harming their relationship with the Microsoft developer community in the process. Personally, I think Microsoft has no choice but to get behind HTML 5, but I like a lot of the features of Silverlight and think that it has a lot of mojo that HTML 5 lacks, and would actually be in favor of Microsoft keeping both—so long as they make it very clear to the developer community when and where each should be used. In other words, the executives in charge of each should be locked into a room and not allowed out until they’ve hammered out a business strategy that is then printed and handed out to every developer within a 3-continent radius of Redmond. (Chances of this happening: .01%)
• Apple starts feeling the pressure to deliver a developer experience that isn’t mired in mid-90’s metaphor. Don’t look now, Apple, but a lot of software developers are coming to your platform from Java and .NET, and they’re bringing their expectations for what and how a developer IDE should look like, perform, and do, with them. Xcode is not a modern IDE, all the Apple fan-boy love for it notwithstanding, and this means that a few things will happen:
• Eclipse gets an iOS plugin. Yes, I know, it wouldn’t work (for the most part) on a Windows-based Eclipse installation, but if Eclipse can have a native C/C++ developer experience, then there’s no reason why a Mac Eclipse install couldn’t have an Objective-C plugin, and that opens up the idea of using Eclipse to write iOS and/or native Mac apps (which will be critical when the Mac App Store debuts somewhere in 2011 or 2012).
• Rumors will abound about Microsoft bringing Visual Studio to the Mac. Silverlight already runs on the Mac; why not bring the native development experience there? I’m not saying they’ll actually do it, and certainly not in 2011, but the rumors, they will be flyin….
• Other third-party alternatives to Xcode will emerge and/or grow. MonoTouch is just one example. There’s opportunity here, just as the fledgling Java IDE market looked back in ‘96, and people will come to fill it.
• NoSQL buzz grows. The NoSQL movement, which sort of got started last year, will reach significant states of buzz this year. NoSQL databases have a lot to offer, particularly in areas that relational databases are weak, such as hierarchical kinds of storage requirements, for example. That buzz will reach a fever pitch this year, and the relational database moguls (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) will start to fight back.

I could probably go on making a few more, but I think these are enough to get me into trouble for the year.

To all of you who’ve been readers of this blog for the past year, I thank you—blog-gathered statistics tell me that I get, on average, about 7,000 hits a day, which just stuns me—and it is a New Years’ Resolution that I blog more and give you even more reason to stick around. Happy New Year, and may your 2011 be just as peaceful, prosperous, and eventful as you want it to be.

Startup Weekend came to Redmond this weekend, and as I write this it is all of three hours over. In the spirit of capturing post-mortem thoughts as quickly as possible, I thought I’d blog my reactions and thoughts from it, both as a reference for myself for the next one, and as a guide/warning/data point for others considering doing it.

A few weeks ago, emails started crossing the Seattle Tech Startup mailing list about this thing called “Startup Weekend”. I didn’t do a whole lot of research around it—just glanced at the website, and asked a few questions of the organizer in an email. Specifically, I wanted to know that as a tech guy, with no specific startup ideas, I would find something to do. I was reassured immediately that, in fact, as a tech guy, I would be “heavily recruited” by others at the event who were business types.

First takeaway: I can’t speak for all the events, this being my first, but it was a surprise, nay, a shock, to me just how many “business” and/or “marketing” types were at this event. I seriously expected that tech folks would outnumber the non-tech folks by a substantial margin, but it was exactly the opposite, probably on the order of 2 to 1. As a developer, I was definitely being courted, rather than hunting for a team to find a way to make room for me. It was refreshing, exciting and a little overwhelming at the same time.

The format of the event is interesting: anybody can pitch an idea, then everybody in the room is free to “attach” themselves to that idea to form a team to implement it somehow, sort of a “Law of Two Feet” applied to team-building.

Second takeaway: Have a pretty clear idea of what you want to do here. The ideas initially all sound pretty good, and choosing between them can actually be quite painful and difficult. Have a clear goal for yourself what you want out of the weekend—to socialize, to stretch yourself, to build a business, whatever. Mine were (1) just to be here and experience the event, (2) to socialize and network more deeply with the startup scene, (3) to hack on some code and try to ship something, and (4) to learn some new tech that I hadn’t had the chance to use beyond a “Hello World” demo before. There was always the chance I wouldn’t get any of those things, in which case I accepted a consolation prize of simply watching how the event was structured and run, since it operates in many ways on the same basic concept that  GiveCamp does, which is something I want to see done in Seattle sooner rather than later. So just by going and watching the event as a uninvolved observer was worth the price of admission, so once I’d walked through the door, I’d already met my #1 win condition.

I realized as I was choosing which team to join that I didn’t want to be paired alone with the project-pitching person (whomever that would be), since I had no idea how this event worked or what we were going for, so I deliberately turned away from a few projects that sounded interesting. I ended up as part of a team that was pretty well spread-out in terms of skillsets/interests (Chris, developer and “original idea guy”, Libby, business development, Maizer, also business development, Mohammed, small businessman, and Aaron, graphic designer), working on an idea around “social bar gaming”. In other words, we had a nebulous fuzzy idea about using games on a mobile device to help people in bars connect to other people in bars via some kind of “scavenger hunt” or similar social-engagement game. I had suggested that maybe one feature or idea would be to help groups of hard-drinking souls chart their path between bars (something like a Traveling Saleman’s Problem meets a PubCrawl), and Chris thought that was definitely something to consider. We laid out a brief idea of what it was we wanted to build, then parted ways Friday night about midnight or so, except for Chris and myself, who headed out to Denny’s to mull over some technology ideas for a while, until about 3 AM in the morning.

Third takeaway: Hoard the nighttime hours on Friday, to spend them working on the app the rest of the weekend. Even though you’re full of energy Friday night, rarin’ to go, bank it because you’ll need to be well-rested for the marathon that is Saturday and Sunday.

Chris and I briefly discussed the technology approaches we could use, and settled in on using Azure for the backplane, mostly because I felt it would be the quickest way to get us provisioned on a server, and it was an excuse for me to play with Azure, something I haven’t had much of a chance to do beyond simple demos. We also thought that having some kind of Facebook integration would be a good idea, depending on what we actually wanted to do with the idea. I thought to myself, “OK, so this is going to be interesting for me—I’m going to be actually ‘stretching’ on three things simultaneously: Azure, Facebook, and whatever Web framework we use to build this”, since I haven’t done much Web work in .NET in many, many years, and don’t consider myself “up to speed” on either ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC. Chris was a “front to middle tier” guy, though, so I figured I’d focus on the Azure back-end parts—storage, queueing, etc—and maybe the Facebook integration, and we’d be good.

By Saturday morning, thanks to a few other things I had to do after Chris left, I got there a bit late—about 10:30—fully expecting that the team had a pretty clear app vision laid out and ready for Chris and I to execute on. Alas, not quite—we were still sort of thrashing on what exactly we wanted to build—specifically, we kept bouncing back and forth between what the game would be and how it would be monetized. If we wanted to sell to bars as a way to get more bodies in the door, then we needed some kind of “check-in” game where people earned points for bringing friends to the bar. Or we could sell to bars by creating a game that was a kind of “scavenger hunt”, forcing patrons to discover things about the bar or about new drinks the bar sells, and so on. But we also wanted a game that was intrinsically social, forcing peoples’ eyes away from the screens and up towards the other patrons—otherwise why play the game?

Aaron, a two-time veteran of Startup Weekend, suggested that we finalize our vision by 11 AM so we could start hacking. By 11 AM, we had a vision… until about an hour later, when I realized that Libby, Chris, Maizer, and Mohammed were changing the game to suit new monetization ideas. We set another deadline for 2 PM, at which point we had a vision…. until about an hour later again, when I looked up again and found them discussing again what kind of game we wanted to build. In the end, it wasn’t until 7 or 8 PM Saturday when we finally nailed down some kind of game app idea—and then only because Aaron came out of his shell a little and politely yelled at the group for wasting all of our time.

Fourth takeaway: Know what’s clear and unclear about your vision/idea. I think we didn’t realize how nebulous our ideas were until we started trying to put game mechanics around it, and that was what led to all the thrashing on ideas.

Fifth takeaway: Put somebody in charge. Have a dictator in place. Yes, everybody wants to be polite and yes, choosing a leader can be a bit uncomfortable, but having that final unambiguous deciding vote—a leader—who can make decisions and isn’t afraid to do so would have saved us a lot of headache and gotten us much more quickly down the path. Libby said it best in our little post-mortem at the bar afterwards: Don’t you dare leave Friday night until everybody is 100% clear on what you’re building.

Meanwhile, on the technical front, another warm front was meeting another cold front and developing into a storm. When we’d decided to use Azure, I had suggested it over Google App Engine because Chris had said he’d done some development with it before, so I figured he was comfortable with it and ready to go. As we started pulling out laptops to start working, though, Chris mentioned that he needed to spin up a virtual machine with Windows 7, Visual Studio, and the Azure tools in it. No worries—I needed some time to read up on Azure provisioning, data storage, and so on.

Unfortunately, setting up the VM took until about 8 PM Saturday night, meaning we lost 11 of our 15 hours (9 AM to midnight) for that day.

Sixth takeaway: Have your tools ready to go before you get there. Find a hosting provider—come on, everybody is going to need a hosting provider, even if you build a mobile app—and have a virtual machine or laptop configured with every dev tool you can think of, ready to go. Getting stuff downloaded and installed is burning a very precious commodity that you don’t have nearly enough of: time.

Seventh takeaway: Be clear about your personal motivation/win conditions for the weekend. Yes, I wanted to explore a new tech, but Chris took that to mean that I wasn’t going to succeed if we abandoned Azure, and as a result, we burned close to 50% of our development cycles prepping a VM just so I could put Azure on my resume. I would’ve happily redacted that line on my resume in exchange for getting us up and running by 11 AM Saturday morning, particularly because it became clear to me that others in the group were running with win conditions of “spin up a legitimate business startup idea”, and I had already met most of my win conditions for the weekend by this point. I should’ve mentioned this much earlier, but didn’t realize what was happening until a chance comment Chris made in passing Saturday night when we left for the night.

Sunday I got in about noonish, owing to a long day, short night, and forgotten cell phone (alarm clock) in the car. By the time I got there, tempers were starting to flare because we were clearly well behind the curve. Chris had been up all night working on HTML forms for the game, Aaron had been up all night creating some (amazing!) graphics for the game, I had been up a significant part of the night diving into Facebook APIs, and I think we all sensed that this was in real danger of falling apart. Unfortunately, we couldn’t even split the work between Chris and I, because we had (foolishly) not bothered to get some kind of source-control server going for the code so we could work in parallel.

See the sixth takeaway. It applies to source-control servers, too. And source-control clients, while we’re at it.

We were slotted to present our app and business idea first, as it turned out, which was my preference—I figured that if we went first, we might set a high bar that other groups would have a hard time matching. (That turned out to be a really false hope—the other groups’ work was amazing.) The group asked me to make the pitch, which was fine with me—when have I ever turned down the chance to work a crowd?

But our big concern was the demo—we’d originally called for a “feature freeze” at 4PM, so we would have time to put the app on the server and test it, but by 4:15 Chris was still stitching pages together and putting images on pages. In fact, the push to the Azure server for v0.1 of our app happened about about 5:15, a full 30 seconds before I started the pitch.

The pitch itself was deliberately simple: we put Libby on a bar stool facing the crowd, Mohammed standing against a wall, and said, “Ever been in a bar, wanting to strike up a conversation with that cute girl at the far table? With Pubbn, we give you an excuse—a social scavenger hunt—to strike up a conversation with her, or earn some points, or win a discount from the bar, or more. We want to take the usual social networking premise—pushing socialization into the network—and instead flip it on its ear—using the network to make it easier to socialize.” It was a nice pitch, but I forgot to tell people to download the app and try it during the demo, which left some people thinking we never actually finished anything. ACK.

Pubbn, by the way, was our app name, derived (obviously) from “going pubbing”, as in, going out to drink and socialize. I loved this name. It’s up at http://www.pubbn.com, but I’ll warn you now, it’s a static mockup and a far cry from what we wanted to end up with—in fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that of all the projects, ours was by far the weakest technical achievement, and I lay the blame for that at my feet. I should’ve stepped up and taken more firm control of the development so Chris could focus more on the overall picture.

The eventual winners for the weekend were “Doodle-A-Doodle”, a fantastic learn-to-draw app for kids on the iPad; “Hold It!”, a game about standing in line in the mens’ room; and “CamBadge”, a brilliant little iPhone app for creating a conference badge on your phone, hanging your phone around your neck, and snapping a picture of the person standing in front of you with a single touch to the screen (assuming, of course, you have an iPhone 4 with its front-facing camera).

“CamBadge” was one of the apps I thought about working on, but passed on it because it didn’t seem challenging enough technologically. Clearly that was a foolish choice from a business perspective, but this is why knowing what your win conditions for the weekend are so important—I didn’t necessarily want to build a new business out of this weekend, and, to me, the more important “win” was to make a social connection with the people who looked like good folks to know in this space—and the “CamBadge” principal, Adam, clearly fit that bill. Drinking with him was far more important—to me—than building an app with him. Next Startup Weekend, my win conditions might be different, and if so, I’d make an entirely different decision.

In the end, Startup Weekend was a blast, and something I thoroughly recommend every developer who’s ever thought of going independent do. The cost is well, well worth the experience, and if you fail miserably, well, better to do that here, with so little invested, than to fail later in a “real” startup with millions attached.

By the way, Startup Weekend Redmond was/is #swred on Twitter, if you want to see the buzz that came out of it. Particularly good reading are the Tweets starting at about 5 PM tonight, because that’s when the presentations started.

A small degree of panic set in amongst the Java development community over the weekend, as Apple announced that they were “de-emphasizing” Java on the Mac OS. Being the Big Java Geek that I am, I thought I’d weigh in on this.

Let the pundits speak

But first, let’s see what the actual news reports said:

As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the Java runtime ported by Apple and that ships with Mac OS X is deprecated. Developers should not rely on the Apple-supplied Java runtime being present in future versions of Mac OS X.

The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products.

--Apple Developer Documentation

MacRumors reported that Scott Fraser, the CEO of Portico Systems, a developer of Enterprise software written in Java, wrote Steve Jobs an e-mail asking if Apple was killing off Java on the Max. Mr. Fraser posted a screenshot of his e-mail and what he said was a reply from Mr. Jobs.

In that reply. Mr. Jobs wrote, “Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms. They have their own release schedules, which are almost always different than ours, so the Java we ship is always a version behind. This may not be the best way to do it.” …

There’s only one problem with that, however, and that’s the small fact that Oracle (used to be Sun) doesn’t actually supply Java for all other platforms, at least not according to Java creator James Gosling, who said in a blog post Friday, “It simply isn’t true that ‘Sun (now Oracle) supplies Java for all other platforms’. IBM supplies Java for IBM’s platforms, HP for HP’s, even Azul systems does the JVM for their systems (admittedly, these all start with code from Snorcle - but then, so does Apple).”

Mr. Gosling also pointed out that it’s true that Sun (now Oracle) does supply Java for Windows, but only because Sun took it away from Microsoft after Big Redmond tried its “embrace and extend” strategy of crippling Java’s cross-platform capabilities by adding Windows-only features in the port it had been developing.

--The Mac Observer

Seeing that they're not hurting for money at all (see Apple makes more than $1.6M revenue per employee), there are two possible answers here:

1. Oracle, the new owner of Java, is forcing Apple's hand, just like they're going after Google for their Java implementation.
2. This is Apple's back-handed way of keeping Java apps out of the newly announced Mac App Store.

I don't have any contacts inside Apple, my guess is #2, this is Apple's way of keeping Java applications out of the Mac App Store, which was also announced yesterday. I don't believe there's any coincidence at all that (a) the "Java Deprecation" announcement was made in the Java update release notes at the same time (b) a similar statement was placed in the Mac Developer Program License Agreement.

--devdaily.com

Pundit responses (including the typically childish response from James Gosling, and something I’ve never found very appealing about his commentary, to be honest), check. Hype machine working overtime on this, check. Twitter-stream filled with people posting “I just signed the Apple-Java petition!” and overreacting to the current state of affairs overall, check.

My turn

Ted’s take?

About frickin’ time.

You heard me: it’s about frickin’ time that Apple finally owned up to a state of affairs that has been pretty obvious for more than a few years now.

Look, I understand that a lot of the Java developers out there bought Macs because they could (it ran a pretty decent version of Java) and because there was a certain je ne sais quois about doing so—after all, they were watching the “cool kids” (for a certain definition thereof) switching over to a Mac, and they seemed to be getting away with it, the thought “Why not me too?” was bound to go off in somebody’s head before long. And hey, let’s admit it, “going Mac” was a pretty nifty “geek” thing to do for a while there, particularly because the iPhone was just ramping up and we could all see that this was a platform we all of us wanted a part of.

But truth is, this divorce was a long time coming, and heavily overdue. C’mon, kids, you knew it was coming—when Mom and Dad rarely even talk to each other anymore, when one’s almost never around when the other is in front of you, when one tells you that the other isn’t really relevant anymore, or when one of them really just stops participating in anything going on in the other’s world, you can tell that something’s “up”. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anybody who was paying attention.

Apple and Sun barely ever spoke to each other, particularly after Apple chose to deprecate the Java APIs for accessing the nifty-cool Mac OS X Aqua user interface. Even back then, Apple never really wanted to see much Java on the desktop—the Aqua Look-And-Feel for Swing was only available from the Mac JDK, for example, and it was some kind of licensing infraction to try and move it to another platform (or so the rumors said—I never bothered to look it up).

Apple never participated in any of the JSRs that were being moved through the JCP, or if they did, they were never JSRs that had any sort of “weight” in the Java world. (At least, not to my knowledge; I’ve done no Google search through the JCP to see if Apple ever had a representative on any of the JSRs, but in all the years I’ve read through JSRs in-process, Apple’s name never seemed to appear in the Expert Committee list.)

Apple never showed up at JavaOne to talk about Java-on-Mac, or about Java-on-anything-else, for that matter. For crying out loud, people, Microsoft has been at JavaOne. I know—they paid me to be at the booth last year, and they covered my T&E to speak on their behalf (about .NET/Java compatibility/interoperability) at other .NET and/or Java conferences. Microsoft cared more about Java than Apple did, plain and simple.

And Mr. Jobs has clearly no love for interpreted/virtual machine languages, if his commentary and vendetta against Flash is anything to go by. (Some will point out that LLVM is a virtual machine, but I think this is a red herring for a few reasons, not least of which is that as near as I can tell, LLVM isn’t allowed on the iOS machines any more than a JVM or CLR is. On top of that, the various LLVM personalities involved routinely draw a line of differentiation between LLVM and its “virtual machine” cousins, the JVM and CLR.)

The fact is, folks, this is a long time coming. Does this mean your shiny new Mac Book Air is no longer a viable Java development platform? Maybe—you could always drop Ubuntu on it, or run a VMWare Virtual Machine to run your favorite Java development OS on it (which is something I’ve been doing for years, by the way, and I gotta tell you, Windows 7 on VMWare Fusion on an old non-unibody MacBookPro is a pretty good experience), or just not upgrade to Lion at all. Which may not be a bad idea anyway, seeing as how Mac OS X seems to be creeping towards the same state of “unusable on the first release” that Windows is at. (Mac fanboi’s, please don’t argue with this one—ask anyone who wanted to play StarCraft 2 how wonderful the Mac experience was.)

The Mac is a wonderful machine, and a wonderful OS. I won’t argue with that. Nor will I argue with the assertion that Java is a wonderful language and platform. I’ll even argue with people who say that Java “can’t” do desktop apps—that’s pure bullshit, particularly if you talk to people who’ve got more than five minutes’ worth of experience doing nifty things on the Java desktop (like Chet Haase and Romain Guy do in Filthy Rich Clients or Andrew Davison in Killer Game Programming in Java). Lord knows, the desktop experience could be better in Java…. but much of Java’s weakness in the desktop space was due to a lack of resources being thrown at it.

Going forward

For the short term, as quoted above, Java on Snow Leopard is a fait accompli. Don’t panic. It’s only with the release of Lion, sometime mid-2011, that Java will quietly disappear from the Mac horizon. (And even then, I expect that there will probably be some kind of hack that the Mac community comes up with to put the Snow Leopard-based JVM on a Lion box. Assuming Apple doesn’t somehow put in a hack to prevent it.)

The bigger question, of course, is the one facing all those “super-hip” developers who bought Macs thinking that they would use that to develop their enterprise Java apps and deploy the resulting compiled artifacts to a “real” production server system, like Linux, Windows, or Google App Engine—what to do, what to do?

There’s a couple of ways this plays out, depending on Apple’s intent:

1. Apple turns to Oracle, says “OpenJDK is the path forward for Java on the Mac—enjoy!” and bails out completely.
2. Apple turns to Oracle, says “OpenJDK is the path forward for Java on the Mac, and here’s all the extensions that we wrote for Java on the Mac OS over all these years, and let us know if there’s anything else you need” and bails out more or less completely.
3. Apple turns to Oracle, says “You’re a douche” and bails out completely.

Given the personalities of Jobs and Ellison, which do you see as the most likely scenario?

Looking at the limited resources (Mike Swingler, you are a champion, let that be said now!) that Apple threw at Java over the past decade, I can’t see them continuing to support a platform that they’ve already made very clear has a limited shelf life. They’re not going to stop you from installing a JRE on your machine, I don’t think, but they’re not going to help you in any way, either.

The real surprise hiding in all of this? This is exactly what happens on the Windows platform. Thousands upon thousands of Java developers have been building—and even sometimes deploying!—to Mr. Gates’ and Mr. Ballmer’s platform for years, and the lack of a pre-existing JRE has never stood in the way of that happening. In fact, it might actually be something of a boon—now we can get past the rather Byzantine Java Virtual Machine installation directory circus that Apple always inflicted on us. (Ever tried to figure out where the JVM lives on a Mac? Insanity! Particularly when compared to a *nix-based or even Windows-based JVM installation. Those at least make some sense.)

Yes, we’ll lose some of the nifty extensions that Apple developed to make it easier to interact with the desktop. Exactly like what happens on a Windows platform. Or any other platform, for that matter. Need to get at the dock? Dude—do what Windows and Linux guys have been doing for years—either build a shell script to do that platform-specific stuff first, or get to it through JNI (or, now, its much nicer cousin, JNA). Not a big deal.

Building an enterprise app? Dude…. you already know what I’m going to say.

Looking to Sun/Oracle

The bigger question will be what Oracle does vis-à-vis the Mac OS. If they decide to support the Mac by providing build infrastructure for building the OpenJDK on the Mac, wahoo! We win.

But don’t hold your breath.

Why? A poll, please, of the entire Internet:

• Would all of those who use Java for desktop Mac applications, please raise your hands?
• Now would all of those who use Mac OS X Server as an enterprise Java production server, please raise your hands?

Count the hands, people. That’s how many reasons Sun/Oracle can see, too. And those reasons have to come in high enough in order to be justifying the cost to go through the costs of adding the Mac OS to the OpenJDK build toolchain, figure out the right command-line switches to throw in the Mac gnu C/C++ compilers, figure out how best to JIT for the Intel platform while running underneath a Mac, accommodate all the C/C++ headers on the Mac platform that aren’t in the same place as their cousins on Windows or Linux, and so on.

I don’t see it happening. Donated source code or no, results of the Rick Ross-endorsed “Apple/OpenJDK petition” notwithstanding, I just don’t see Oracle finding it cost-effective to support the Mac in the OpenJDK.

Oh, and Mr. Gosling? Come out of your childish funk and smell the dollars here. The reason why HP and IBM all provide their own JDKs is pretty easy to spot—no one would use their platform if there weren’t a JVM for that platform. (Have you ever heard a Java guy go, “Ooh! Ooh! I get to run my code on an AS/400!"? Me neither. Hell, half the time, being asked to deploy to a Solaris box made the Java folks groan.) Apple clearly believes that the “shoe has moved to the other foot”—that they have a critical mass of users, and they don’t need to care about the Java community any more (if they ever did in the first place).

Only time will tell if Mr. Jobs was right.

Update Well, folks, it would be churlish of me to say "I told you so", but....

What I will say, though, is that the main message out of this is that apparently James Gosling has so little class that he insists on referring to the current owner of his platform as "Snorcle", a pretty clearly derogatory reference in the same vein as calling the .NET platform owner "Microsloth" or "M$". Mr. Gosling, the Java community deserves better than that. Try to put your childish peevishness aside and take the higher road. Seriously.

Short version: Matthew Baxter-Reynolds has written an intriguing book, Multimobile Development, about writing the same application over and over again on different mobile platforms. On the one hand, I applaud the effort, and think this is a great resource for developers who want to get started on mobile development, particularly since this book means you won’t have to choose a platform first. On the other hand, there’s a few things about the book I didn’t like, such as the fact that it misses the third platform in the room (Windows Phone 7) and that it could go out of date fairly quickly. On the other hand, there were a lot of things I did like about the book, like the use of OData and the sample app “in the cloud”. On the other hand…. wait, I ran out of hands. A while ago, in fact. Regardless, the book is worth picking up.

Long version: One of the interesting things about being me is that publishers periodically send me books to review, on the hopes that I’ll find it interesting and blog about it, and you, faithful blog readers that you are, will be so overwhelmed by my implicit endorsement that you’ll immediately drop what you’re doing and run (don’t walk!) to the nearest bookstore or Web browser and engage in that capitalist activity known as “impulsive consumption”. Now, I don’t know if that latter part of the equation actually takes shape, but I do like to get books, so….

(What publishers don’t like about me is when they send me a book and I don’t write a review about it. Usually that’s because I didn’t like it, didn’t think it covered the material well, or my cat is sitting on the laptop keyboard and I’m too lazy to move him off of it. Or I’m just too busy to blog about it. Or any of dozens of other reasons that have nothing to do with the book. Sometimes I’m just too busy eating pie and don’t want to get crumbs on the keyboard. Mmmm, pie. Wait. Where was I? Ah, right. Sorry.)

As many of you who’ve seen me present over the last couple of years know, I’ve been getting steadily deeper and deeper into the mobile space, predominantly aimed at three platforms: iOS, Android and WindowsPhone 7. I own an iPhone 3GS that I use for day-to-day stuff, an iPhone 3G (recycled hand-me-down in the family when one of my family bought an iPhone 4) that I feel free to abuse since it’s not my “business line phone”, an iPod Touch that I feel free to abuse for the same reason, an iPad WiFi that I just bought a few weeks ago that I’ll eventually feel like I can abuse, a Motorola Droid that my friends refer to as my “skank phone” (it has a live phone # associated with it), a Palm Pre that I rarely touch anymore, and a few other devices even older than that laying around. And yes, I will be buying a Windows Phone 7 when it comes out here in the US, and I probably will replace my Droid with a Droid X or Samsung Galaxy before long, and get an Android tablet/slate/whatever when they start to come out (I’m guessing around Christmas).

Yeah, OK, so it’s probably an addiction by this point. I’m fine. I can stop whenever I want. Really.

All of that is by way of establishing that I’m very interested in writing software for the mobile device market, and I’ve got a few ideas (games, utilities, whatever) that I tinker with when I have the chance, and I always have this little voice in the back of my head whispering that “It’s such a pain that I have to write different client apps for each one of the mobile devices—wouldn’t it be cool if I could reuse code across the different platforms….?”

(Honesty compels me to say that’s totally not true—the little voice part, I mean. Well, no, I mean, I do hear voices, but they don’t say anything about reusing code. I write these little knick-knacks because I want to learn about writing code for all the different platforms. But I can imagine somebody asking me that question at a conference, so I pretend. And the voices? Well, they tell me lots of things, but I only listen to some of them and then only some of the time. Usually when the body is easily disposable.)

Baxter-Reynolds’ book, then, really caught my eye—if there’s a way to do development across these different platforms in any sort of capturable way, then hell, yes, I want to have a look.

Except…. That’s not really what this book is about. Well, sort of.

Put bluntly, Multimobile Development is about writing two client apps for a “cloud”-based service, “Six Bookmarks”. (It’s an app that lets you jump to a URL from one of the six buttons exposed in the app—in other words, a fixed-number of URL bookmarks. The point is not the usefulness of the service, it’s to have a relatively useful backplane against which to develop the mobile apps, and this one is “just right” in terms of complexity for mobile app clients.) He then writes the same client app twice, once on Android and then once for iPhone, quite literally as a duplicate of one another. The chapters even line up one-for-one with one another: Chapters 4 and 8 are about “Installing the Toolset”, the first for Android and the second for iOS, Chapters 5 and 9 are both “Building the Logon Form and Consuming REST Services”, Chatpers 6 and 10 are “An ORM Layer Over SQLite”, and so on. It’s not about trying to reuse code between the two clients, but he does do a great job of demonstrating how the server is written to support both (using, not surprisingly, OData as the “wire protocol” for data between the two), thus facilitating a small amount of effective reuse by doing so.

The prose is pretty clear, although he does, from time to time, resort to the use of exclamation points, which I find as a pet peeve in technical writing; to me, it just doesn’t read well, almost like the faked enthusiasm you see from a late-night product-pitch man. (“The Sham-Wow! It’s great! You’ll love it! Somebody, please stop me from yelling like this!”) But it’s rare enough that I can blow past it, and I generally write it off as just an aesthetic difference between me and the author. Beyond that, he does a good job of laying down clear explanations, objectives, and rationale.

A couple of concerns I have about this book, both of which can be corrected in a future edition, stand out as “must be mentioned”. First, this space is clearly a moving target, something Baxter-Reynolds highlights in the very first two pages of the book itself. He chooses to use the XCode 4 Developer Preview for the iOS code, which obviously is not the latest bits by the time you get your hands on the book—he admits as much in the prose, but relies on the idea that the production/shipping version of XCode 4 won’t be that different from the beta (which may or may not be a viable assumption to make).

The other concern is a bit more far-reaching: I kinda wish the book had Windows Phone 7 in here, too.

I mean, if he’s OK with using the developer preview of XCode for the iOS parts, it would seem reasonable to do the same for the WP7 Developer Tools, which have been out in a relatively stable form for quite a few months. Granted, he (probably) wouldn’t have been able to test his software on the actual device, since they appear to be rarer than software architects who still write code, but I don’t know that this would’ve changed his point whatsoever, either. Still, if he’s working on a second edition with WP7 as an additional client platform and another five or so chapters for comparison, it’d be a near-flawless keeper, at least for the next two or three years.

(Granted, he does do the .NET world a little justice by including a final chapter on MonoTouch, but that feels a little “thrown in” at the end, almost as if he felt the need to assuage the WP7 stuff by reminding the .NET developers: “Don’t worry, guys, someday, real soon now, you’ll be able to write mobile apps, too! And then clients will love you! And women will flock to you at cocktail parties! Somebody, please stop me from yelling like this!”.)

Overall, it’s a good book, and I like the fact that somebody’s taking on the obvious topic of “Multi-Mobile” development without falling into the “one source base, multiple platforms” trap. (I groan at the thought of how many developers are now going to go off and try to write cross-platform mobile frameworks, by the way. I don’t think it’ll be pretty.) It’s not a complete reference to all things iOS or Android—you probably want a good reference to go with each platform you write to—but as a “getting started with mobile development”, this is actually a great resource to have for both of the major platforms.

Hey, anybody who’s got significant VMWare mojo, help out a bro?

I’ve got a Win7 VM (one of many) that appears to be exhibiting weird disk behavior—the vmdk, a growable single-file VMDK, is almost precisely twice the used space. It’s a 120GB growable disk, and the Win7 guest reports about 35GB used, but the VMDK takes about 70GB on host disk. CHKDSK inside Windows says everything’s good, and the VMWare “Disk Cleanup” doesn’t change anything, either. It doesn’t seem to be a Windows7 thing, because I’ve got a half-dozen other Win7 VMs that operate… well, normally (by which I mean, 30GB used in the VMDK means 30GB used on disk). It’s a VMWare Fusion host, if that makes any difference. Any other details that might be relevant, let me know and I’ll post.

Anybody got any ideas what the heck is going on inside this disk?

By now, the Twitter messages have spread, and the word is out: at Uberconf this year, I did a session ("Pragmatic Architecture"), which I've done at other venues before, but this time we made it into a 180-minute workshop instead of a 90-minute session, and the workshop included breaking the room up into small (10-ish, which was still a teensy bit too big) groups and giving each one an "architectural kata" to work on.

The architectural kata is a take on PragDave's coding kata, except taken to a higher level: the architectural kata is an exercise in which the group seeks to create an architecture to solve the problem presented. The inspiration for this came from Frederick Brooks' latest book, The Design of Design, in which he points out that the only way to get great designers is to get them to design. The corollary, of course, is that in order to create great architects, we have to get them to architect. But few architects get a chance to architect a system more than a half-dozen times or so over the lifetime of a career, and that's only for those who are fortunate to be given the opportunity to architect in the first place. Of course, the problem here is, you have to be an architect in order to get hired as an architect, but if you're not an architect, then how can you architect in order to become an architect?

Um... hang on, let me make sure I wrote that right.

Anyway, the "rules" around the kata (which makes it more difficult to consume the kata but makes the scenario more realistic, IMHO):

• you may ask the instructor questions about the project
• you must be prepared to present a rough architectural vision of the project and defend questions about it
• you must be prepared to ask questions of other participants' presentations
• you may safely make assumptions about technologies you don't know well as long as those assumptions are clearly defined and spelled out
• you may not assume you have hiring/firing authority over the development team
• any technology is fair game (but you must justify its use)
• any other rules, you may ask about

The groups were given 30 minutes in which to formulate some ideas, and then three of them were given a few minutes to present their ideas and defend it against some questions from the crowd.

An example kata is below:

Architectural Kata #5: I'll have the BLT

a national sandwich shop wants to enable "fax in your order" but over the Internet instead

users: millions+

requirements: users will place their order, then be given a time to pick up their sandwich and directions to the shop (which must integrate with Google Maps); if the shop offers a delivery service, dispatch the driver with the sandwich to the user; mobile-device accessibility; offer national daily promotionals/specials; offer local daily promotionals/specials; accept payment online or in person/on delivery

As you can tell, it's vague in some ways, and this is somewhat deliberate—as one group discovered, part of the architect's job is to ask questions of the project champion (me), and they didn't, and felt like they failed pretty miserably. (In their defense, the kata they drew—randomly—was pretty much universally thought to be the hardest of the lot.) But overall, the exercise was well-received, lots of people found it a great opportunity to try being an architect, and even the team that failed felt that it was a valuable exercise.

I'm definitely going to do more of these, and refine the whole thing a little. (Thanks to everyone who participated and gave me great feedback on how to make it better.) If you're interested in having it done as a practice exercise for your development team before the start of a big project, ping me. I think this would be a *great* exercise to do during a user group meeting, too.

Code Katas are small, relatively simple exercises designed to give you a problem to try and solve. I like to use them as a way to get my feet wet and help write something more interesting than "Hello World" but less complicated than "The Internet's Next Killer App".

This one is from the UVa online programming contest judge system, which I discovered after picking up the book Programming Challenges, which is highly recommended as a source of code katas, by the way. Much of the advice parts of the book can be skimmed or ignored by the long-time professional developer, but it's still worth a read, since it can be an interesting source of ideas and approaches when solving real-world scenarios.

Problem: You work for a manufacturing company, and they have just received their newest piece of super-modern hardware, a highly efficient assembly-line mechanized pneumatic item manipulator, also known in some circles as a "robotic arm". It is driven by a series of commands, and your job is to write the software to drive the arm. The initial test will be to have the arm move a series of blocks around.

Context: The test begins with n number of blocks, laid out sequentially next to each other, each block with a number on it. (You may safely assume that n never exceeds 25.) So, if n is 4, then the blocks are laid out (starting from 0) as:

0: 0

1: 1

2: 2

3: 3

The display output here is the block-numbered "slot", then a colon, then the block(s) that are stacked in that slot, lowest to highest in left to right order. Thus, in the following display:

0:

1:

2: 0 1 2 3

3:

The 3 block is stacked on top of the 2 block is stacked on top of the 1 block is stacked on top of the 0 block, all in slot 2. This can be shortened to the representation [0:, 1:, 2: 0 1 2 3, 3:] for conciseness.

The arm understands a number of different commands, as well as an optic sensor. (Yeah, the guys who created the arm were good enough to write code that knows how to read the number off a block, but not to actually drive the arm. Go figure.) The commands are as follows, where a and b are valid block numbers (meaning they are between 0 and n-1):

• "move a onto b" This command orders the arm to find block a, and return any blocks stacked on top of it to their original position. Do the same for block b, then stack block a on top of b.
• "move a over b" This command orders the arm to find block a, and return any blocks stacked on top of it to their original position. Then stack block a on top of the stack of blocks containing b.
• "pile a onto b" This command orders the arm to find the stack of blocks containing block b, and return any blocks stacked on top of it to their original position. Then the arm must find the stack of blocks containing block a, and take the stack of blocks starting from a on upwards (in other words, don't do anything with any blocks on top of a) and put that stack on top of block b.
• "pile a over b" This command orders the arm to find the stack of blocks containing block a and take the stack of blocks starting from a on upwards (in other words, don't do anything with any blocks on top of a) and put that stack on top of the stack of blocks containing block b (in other words, don't do anything with the stack of blocks containing b, either).
• "quit" This command tells the arm to shut down (and thus terminates the simulation).

Note that if the input command sequence accidentally offers a command where a and b are the same value, that command is illegal and should be ignored.

As an example, then, if we have 4 blocks in the state [0: 0, 1: 1, 2: 2, 3: 3], and run a "move 2 onto 3", we get [0: 0, 1: 1, 2:, 3: 3 2]. If we then run a "pile 3 over 1", we should end up with [0: 0, 1: 1 3 2, 2:, 3:]. And so on.

Input: n = 10. Run these commands:

1. move 9 onto 1
2. move 8 over 1
3. move 7 over 1
4. move 6 over 1
5. pile 8 over 6
6. pile 8 over 5
7. move 2 over 1
8. move 4 over 9
9. quit

The result should be [0: 0, 1: 1 9 2 4, 2:, 3: 3, 4:, 5: 5 8 7 6, 6:, 7:, 8:, 9:]

Challenges:

• Implement the Towers of Hanoi (or as close to it as you can get) using this system.
• Add an optimizer to the arm, in essence reading in the entire program (up to "quit"), finding shorter paths and/or different commands to achieve the same result.
• Add a visual component to the simulation, displaying the arm as it moves over each block and moves blocks around.
• Add another robotic arm, and allow commands to be given simultaneously. This will require some thought—does each arm execute a complete command before allowing the other arm to execute (which reduces the performance having two arms might offer), or can each arm act entirely independently? The two (or more) arms will probably need separate command streams, but you might try running them with one command stream just for grins. Note that deciding how to synchronized the arms so they don't conflict with one another will probably require adding some kind of synchronization instructions into the stream as well.