Josh Bloch Intro Q&A

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, December 4, 2007 @ 1:06 pm

They rolled out Josh Bloch for the intro Q&A. While knowledgeable about Java, his GWT kung fu was so so.

One gentleman from Business Objects asked an interesting question about deploying multiple GWT portlets in a single page. You end up loading duplicate java.lang and java.util. If you''ve developed more than one GWT mini-app or widget, you have felt this pain. No answers from Josh on this, though.

Most of the intro was devoted to singing the praises of statically typed languages (like Java) over dynamically typed languages (like JavaScript). To his credit, Josh refused to rise to the bait on Ruby on Rails, saying he hadn't really developed in the platform and to get a good answer, you needed to ask a RoR programmer.

So, some quotes from the intro Q&A:

"It is harder to maintain a JavaScript application as it grows."

"The limitations of JavaScript are also it's advantages. If you write something in JavaScript it will do something, and hopefully its what you want."

"Dynamic languages are just a tool. If you want to minimize the chances of a program failing at runtime, you want to maximize the amount of static analysis
you perform up front. Therefore you are better off using statically typed languages."

"A lot of Ajax applications are amazing not because of what they do, but simply because they work."

"In order to make better web applications you need to use a better platform with a better programming language."

"You cannot test the entire state space of a program. You can only test critical points. A set of tests will only tell you if your program is incorrect,
never if it is correct." (On the shortcomings of relying only on testing.)

Technorati Tags: ajax, gwt

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1. 

   All great, but did he say when Effective Java second edition is ever going to come out?

   Comment by Dan, Friday, December 7, 2007 @ 9:13 pm

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