Marco has been in Toronto for the last two weeks. Tuesday I drove down there to meet him for dinner before attending the Java Users Group. At dinner I put a small can of tuna in front of him. This is a bit of a personal joke because when he was in Orillia for 10 months he ate a can of tuna every single day :) After the meeting we stuck around for another hour to talk about programming and his current employment situation. When we left, we were locked in the building! Marco unlocked the door, and as we exited some other people entered. They locked the door behind them.

The JUG meeting was great. This month's topic was trends in enterprise Java over the next few years. He pointed out a lot of things from Spring and Hibernate such as aspect oriented programming, dependency injection, and a few other things most of us have known about for years. He then went into Java's new support for scripting such as Ruby, JRuby, Grails, Groovy, etc...

A while back I was saying that there are two kinds of Java developers I know of: 1) The open source guys who use Spring, Hibernate, who like scripting languages like Ruby, etc... and 2) The guys who stick to JSR standards such as Enterprise Java Beans 3, Java Persistence Architecture, Java Server Faces, etc... Since I'm a #2 guy I was not too impressed with what he had to say. The most interesting part of the night was the poll he did with everyone at the meeting. He asked how many people would choose EJB3/JPA over Spring/Hibernate in a new project. Out of over 100 people, I would say about 6-10 raised their hands (including me). This was a real shocker because it seems like every decision I have made goes against the norm. NetBeans instead of Eclipse, Sun Application Server 9 instead of JBoss/Websphere/Weblogic etc..., EJB instead of Spring, JPA instead of Hibernate, JSF instead of Struts, etc... I'm sticking to my guns though, because I have read books on and used the alternatives before choosing what I use now. I am a strong supporter of the technologies I use; especially NetBeans IDE and Sun App Server 9/Glassfish.

I'm hoping I'll be able to find some people at JavaOne who have the same views about Java as I. Like everything else in computers, these topics are a bit religious and are often the source of heated debates. The airport shuttle picks me up in 45 minutes. JavaOne, here I come!