Where does the time go...and technology extremism

Where did the time go... Wow! It's September and I can't actually think what happened to July and August, well I can and it's been a frenzy of work. For a number of years now I've worked on the basis that during my work year there are two quiet periods - August and December. These quiet times are when I can sit down and do all the little things I just don't have time to do during the rest of the year, one example is looking at a new programming language or technology trend in detail.

A quiet August didn't happen this year. I spent some of August cutting code, and that actually felt good as I haven't had to do real code for quite a while. When I say real code I mean the stuff that has to go into source control and be tested.

July and the rest of August have been consumed by roadmap and technology discussions, talking to existing and prospective clients. The discussions about system architecture and the critical analysis of technologies and how they should be applied are what I enjoy most. These discussions lead to a lot of creative thinking and there is certainly a lot of that going on at Altio - which I'm surprised we manage to do seeing how busy we are.

So will December be quiet for me, nope. That's going to be my first big holiday for a long time, several weeks in Australia, I can't wait. Although, I am a little concerned about getting prepared, will I have time to even pack my bags?

Technology Extremist? - Google just released Chrome their new browser, and you need Java 6 update 10RC1 or later to use the Java Plug-in. This leads me to thinking about if I am some kind of technical extremist. Chrome gets released on Windows only, why not the Mac or Linux? Rhetorical question really - Windows dominates the desktop computer marketplace, so it makes it the best thing for testing new products. Except Microsoft uses the Apple Mac to test new ideas for Microsoft Office, which is why I like Microsoft Office on the Mac so much - so there's my other Technology Extremism, I like using an Apple Mac at home. The final extreme technology, I still believe in Java Applets for doing complex stuff in the Web Browser. This is why I why I sometimes get frustrated when people say Altio is great but why use Java, that's a different rant for another time.

Well my opinion for a long time is that Google is just Microsoft in disguise - it's out to dominate the world, well the web part of it at least. So should I bow to the masses and adopt JavaScript as the way forward for writing rich web based applications? Should I bow to the masses and go Microsoft and use .Net, after all lot's of people keep saying Java is dead (http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=39066, http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=221903, http://java.sys-con.com/node/169595, http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/01/java_to_the_iphone_can_you_hea.html). I'm sure someone will come up with the bright idea of putting type safety into JavaScript, oh hold on won't that make it Java :-). Anyway, these are all my opinions, and at the moment I see no reason to listen to the news from as far back as 2006 that Java is dead. Sun Microsystems has at least sat up and realised there is still a long way to go and is re-invigorating the Java Swing teams, first step JavaFX.

As far as technology choice goes, you should ensure you have available in your toolkit a number of tools and the knowledge of how they should be used, that way you have a better chance of delivering the most appropriate solutions - on time, within cost and meeting the requirements.