Pittsburgh Java User Group: Java EE 7, 8, and beyond; or done?

Aug 13, 2013 · 3 minute read · Comments
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The Pittsburgh Java User Group has not been meeting regularly for some time now. The last meeting was almost two months ago. I attended this one with the impression that it might well be my last attendance of the group, and even more, that it might be the end of the group altogether.

The meeting did nothing to change my intuition.

Presentation by Reza Rahman

Reza Rahman of Oracle, a “Java EE/GlassFish Evangelist” gave the presentation. His goal was to promote the new and exciting things coming up in Java EE, and try to get community feedback into what next.

He gave a retrospective on how surprisingly long ago Java EE came on the scene, a decade ago, and described the evolution over the years to improve developer productivity.

Also it was good to see that the new APIs have improved since the old ones, including “fluent” APIs, the fact is that everything still seems clunky and “old”.

Furthermore, the Java community is still stuck with old stuff. He bemoaned the fact that the old J2EE is still most widely used.

And Java developers are still not keeping up to date with developments. He asked the audience how many had heard of WebSocket, and hardly anyone raised their hands. He asked who knew what “hypermedia” is, and nobody raised their hand. Wow.

The presentation went very long, to two hours. Near the end, he said that they wanted to know what people wanted next, but nobody really responded. He asked, “What do we need to do in the cloud?”

Conclusion

My overall impression was that I was done attending more PittJUG meetings. In any case, the main organizers have long since moved on to other stuff besides Java anyway, and gotten busy, and it has been hard to find speakers. More generally, those who attend have not seemed very excited and proactive about asking for speakers or topics to be covered.

I believe it’s the end of an era. After all, I do not write any Java code any more, myself! I came to this talk about Java’s future expecting it to be my last, and it did not disappoint.

(Update of 2014-06-10)

It’s been almost a year since the last PittJUG meeting, as far as I know. So I think the group really is dead.

There has been talk of expanding the group to not just be about Java, but anything JVM-related (such as other languages compiling to the JVM, e.g., Scala, Clojure, JRuby). Nothing seems to have happened of that.