Utrecht, The Netherlands
Geneva, Switzerland
Madrid, Spain
Bayonne, France
Bordeaux, France
Montreal, Canada
Mexico City, Mexico
It is just before 05h30 and I am living the hotel. The weather is cold, really cold, at least for me (since I compare it to the nice climate of Mexico City). So, I guess it is now official. I am freaking nuts! But hey, it is going to be fun!
As I write this post on my way to WWDC, flying somewhere over Mexico, I cannot help think why I am doing this. After all, I have a nice job at IBM which I enjoy and (as a bonus) pays the bills. This doesn’t leave me much time for programming, specially since my family consumes most of the time I have left, which is normal since I really enjoy the quality time we spend together. So why do I always try to find some spare time to run XCode and add some new functionality to my side projects?
Just before boarding the plane I was reading an article in Spanish newspaper El Pais. It turns out that the PC is turning 25 this year. That is a lot, specially considering most marriages do not reach this mark nowadays. In my case, romance with software development is even older than that. It all started in 1980 when I was 13. I had been working hard to buy myself a motorcycle. I had saved enough money to buy it and even had some extra cash. I was going to use it to buy Sony Walkman (the early 80’s iPod). However, when I got to the store something strange happened. I saw a TI-58 programmable calculator at half-price because they had lost the original box. I had always been intrigued by those calculators as I knew they could be used to run simple games. It was a unique opportunity and Sony lost a sure sale. The TI was fun but I quickly outgrew it and move to the HP-41, which was a true dream calculator, even by todays standards. Meanwhile I started programming at school using a mini computer (a PR1ME system which had two 5MB hard disk drives called Castor and Polux). I also joined a TRS-80 user group which introduced me to BASIC. During a summer camp in Germany I also had the opportunity to play with a PET Commodore. So when I sold my motorcycle a year later because I was leaving Geneva to move to Madrid I had a pretty good idea of what computer to buy. It had to support for color, joysticks, floppy drives and be easily programmable in assembly language. The only option at the time was an Apple II.
You cannot imagine how much time I spent on that computer. There wasn’t as much software as there is today and everything needed to be done. I wrote, games, educational software and all kinds of stuff. I simply loved it. The OS was simple but bugs free and never got in my way. I was able to publish my first commercial application for that platform in the US at age 19 and continued for a couple of years while studying at college. During this period I could spend days in front of the computer, producing thousands of lines of assembly language code.
Now back in 2006 it has been 21 years since my first Apple Expo in San Francisco which I attended to find a publisher for a product called “Teacher’s Wizard”. I have just turned 40 and I thought that it was a good moment to look back and also look into the future. I was recently named manager at IBM and technical skills become less important. Most managers use that as an excuse to stop learning. Did I want that? Were my programming days behind me? Hell no. Managing a technical team is nice because you can help a lot of engineers which are normally misunderstood. But that doesn’t mean that I want to resign my technical skills. I still enjoy programming and have lots of projects that I want to bring to reality. The flame is still burning.
So, when I was thinking about what I wanted for my 40th birthday the answer was unambiguous, a new 17” MacBook Pro and a ticket to WWDC to share the passion with fellow programmers. I may not be able to fly to San Francisco next year, because these trips are quite expensive, but I will certainly be watching the keynote through the web while working on my next Cocoa application.
It turns out that all the information provided to developers at WWDC is confidential except for the Keynote. Well, that does come as a surprise. It is probably the first developer conference I attend (and believe me I have been to quite a few) that I will not be able to discuss with my friends and co-workers. I do not see how they expect to enforce that with attendants from all over the world but I will certainly not be the one leaking information.
So, what can you expect to see in this blog. Well, in addition to comments to the keynote I will tell you about the different events organized by Apple, the Design awards and in general my opinion about the event. I may go as far as telling you if all the secrecy seems justified or not. Other than that you will have to go to the rumors sites. Sorry!
Tomorrow I will be flying to San Francisco to attend WWDC. As many (probably most) Macintosh users I have been hearing all the rumors about possible new product launches at the conference. People are talking about new Macs, new iPods and even iPhones (let’s not forget the always popular tablet rumor).
The fact is that few are talking about Leopard, even though this is the only product we know for sure that will be presented at WWDC. Those who mention it usually focus on the applications that come with the OS such as iChat or iCal. When I started thinking about it I felt that this was quite weird. I remember the days when a new OS launch focused exclusively on the its new features. For example, when Prodos 16 was launched (back in the old good Apple II days), it’s major new feature was 16 bit support for larger volumes and files. Everyone was excited (well, kind of). Today, Apple has understood that new OS releases do need to have a broader appeal and therefore they usually try to balance innovation between OS improvements which are critical but seldom understood by the general public and new flashy features such as Dashboard or Exposé which can hardly be described as part of the OS. In fact, they have been so successful at this game that once again Microsoft is copying the model. Vista was supposed to be a major revamp of Windows but it turns out that the most interesting features for developers and power users such as WinFS have not been able to make the cut and will not be included in the final product when released in late 2006 (or 2007). However it seems that there will be a lot of eye candy for the average Joe.
So, do I really care about iChat, iCal, iSync and the other iApps included as part of the OS? Sure, but I want more. I want significant improvements to Cocoa, with new frameworks that will help developers create great new applications faster. For example, what about a new framework for charting? That would be great, suddently all Mac applications could look much more professional than their Windows counterparts. I would also like a new Kernel. Moving to a Linux 2.6 kernel would help Mac users to be able to use all the professional database engines available for that platform and scale better which is important now that most new Macs have dual core processors. Let’s not forget that we are likely to see Macs with four and eight cores before Apple releases another major update to the OS (probably in 2009). Without tweaking the current Mach kernel or moving to a totally new kernel the Macintosh will have a tough time competing as a server platform. Full 64 bit support is also required but Apple seems to have taken care of this aspect, if you look at the WWDC posters pictures published by most Macintosh sites.
What else would be nice? A new release of XCode. Sure Cocoa is great and objective-C is a nice language, but XCode is much worse than Eclipse as a development tool. I really expect Apple to at least improve the text editing functionality of the product with a tabbed text editor that helps me quickly move from one file to the other.
Well, on Monday we will know. I certainly expect Apple to manage to keep a fair balance between end-user features and stuff that really matters. This also means that I do not expect them to talk about iPods unless there is a new API to program to, which, by the way, would be very nice.
I will blog daily during WWDC. Keep visiting this page to find out more about this exciting event from a casual developer perspective.
I was finally able to post the seventh episode of IT Insight (Spanish). It turns out that managers work much harder than previously thought 🙂 This episode is mostly about planning carefully an SOA implementation and avoiding common pitfalls. With this episode I think that I have covered the most important aspects of SOA for now. In the next episodes I will cover other aspects of enterprise computing. I will also publish a special podcast about Apple’s WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) which I hope will be an exciting event.
A couple of days ago I attended a meeting of Java programmers sponsored by SUN to be part of a round-table discussion around SOA with people from BEA and other local companies. I had a lot of fun but this really isn’t the point of this entry.
During the discussion we were trying to explain what SOA was and how to design SOA based applications. What really stuck me was that we were all explaining how to implement and ESB from scratch and use it to create new applications designed from the beginning to use it.
The fact is that this is simply not true. SOA is not something that most people plan from scratch. What really happened is that in the late 90s, companies just started to lose faith in their IT departments. They started to buy ERP systems because they promised better reliability, functionality and performance. ERP and other CRM systems are the great failure of the corporate IT departments. Corporate developers in midsize companies could just not deliver the value their employers expected from them. As a result, the number of development jobs started shrinking.
However, the promise of ERPs did not hold totally true. Most companies need functionality not provided by their corporate systems and implementing it using BAPIs or other proprietary systems to extend them is normally much more expensive than doing it quickly in languages such as Java or PHP.
So, SOA is really the last chance for corporate developers to save their jobs. If they can use it to successfully provide additional functionality at a lower price than their ERP providers, then they can show value to their upper management and will probably be asked to continue developing. Otherwise corporate IT will lose their remaining developers and will finally be completely outsourced as systems administration is usually not strategic.
I got an email from Ana who disagreed with one of my statements over AJAX in my latest episode of IT Insight. What I said (translated from Spanish) was roughly:
“The MVC paradigm was designed to separate the application layer from the presentation layer. AJAX is a step back as it makes this virtually impossible”
She pointed out that the goal of AJAX is precisely to separate those two layers and that AJAX emphasizes the value of the code that resides within the server.
I must say that at first I was quite surprised that she wouldn’t agree with my statement since AJAX pages usually include a hell of a lot of JavaScript code. To me it was evident that this got in the way of having a clean “view” layer. However, after rereading the e-mail I realized that Ana had a web-designer background and I started to understand.
From a web designer perspective, it makes a lot of sense to consider the “view” layer everything that runs inside the browser. This allows them to work on a much larger projects and grab a larger part of the total application value. Today, most web designers working on large web applications only have a marginal role in the application development. They usually only develop templates that are later used by the application developers.
However, from an enterprise application developer perspective, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Web pages developed using AJAX, specially recent complex applications such as Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com) cannot usually be designed by web designers. That is because those pages do include some application code that is not trivial. Therefore, developers will argue that they have to develop those pages. They will probably also argue that web designers usually do not use version control systems or understand customer requisites. The idea is that by separating the two layers it becomes more difficult to manege the project as a whole. Using different languages for each tier (JavaScript and Java, for example) doesn’t make the problem any easier. That is why large corporations tend to prefer a single programming model such as J2EE.
In the end we must recognize that there is a power struggle going on between developers and designers. Both want a large share of the pie. Right now designers have the higher ground in smaller accounts while developers rule the corporate world.
I have just registered for WWDC 2006. This will be my first Apple developers conference since the Apple II days. Although I am quite excited about Leopard, the new Mac OS X release due in early 2007, I cannot avoid thinking that the OS glory days are already well behind us. It really looks like that in the near future all applications will be accessed through the browser.
Developing today any kind of application that does not allow users to create some kind of content that will ultimately be published to or shared through the web seems to be a recipe for failure. Most of these applications are written today in languages other than Objective-C on server platforms that are definitively not Macs.
Even so I do not lose my faith in Apple and I am sure that Steve Jobs will deliver new technologies that will make us developers want to spend more time working with XCode. I will keep you posted!.
I was just promoted as Technical Sales Manager at IBM. In this new role I will manage a team of almost thirty engineers from all of IBM’s software brands (DB2, WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli and Rational). This is going to be a tough challenge but I am really happy to have received this opportunity. I have always been unhappy with the way managers interact with technical people. They seem to forget their roots quite quickly and I will do my best to avoid all the pitfalls that I have been complaining about during my career.
I have spent a long boring week with a customer in Northern Mexico reviewing defective Java code. Since there wasn’t much to do (at least things that my wife would approve) I have spent some time recording this new episode that deals with important questions such as what is an ESB and how does it work. I hope that the increasing number of people who download the podcast is an indication that the subjects have been interesting so far. The next episode will deal with AJAX and I plan to later return to the subject of SOA and how to successfully implement it. Please let me know what other Enterprise IT matters you would like to see covered.