Rich Sharples' Blog

As you’re probably already aware – I’m always ready to have a chuckle at IBM’s expense – I have nothing in particular against IBM but if you can’t take the piss out of  a mammoth company like IBM who can you have fun with ?

I didn’t get to go to Devoxx but I followed some of the tweets and live blogging – sounds like it was a fun show. As with many of these style of developer event there was the mandatory whiteboard poll which I actually find very useful. I’m not saying the results are completely representative or useful in isolation but they’re useful all the same. A public spirited fellow called Sven snapped pictures of the whiteboard poll and put them up on Picasa.

Slide 2 captured the votes for different jvm-based languages (except Java) and Scala / Groovy seem to be the most popular followed by “don’t care”. On the “Java Cool Wall 2008″ – it’s interesting to see Spring mid-table whereas Seam, EJB 3 / EJB 3.1 are way up at the cool end. The big surprise for me at least was JavaFX which is at the extreme cool end of the scale.

But what really brought a smile to my face was the App server vote. Geronimo got the lowest number of votes – which provides some backup for my gut feel – ie. few people are using it. And the biggest cause for mirth was the Websphere (Websfear) column – which actually got some votes – slightly more than WebLogic but you have to read the comments !! As reflected in the comments of a recent blog post – people seem to despise Websphere with a passion. What has IBM done to piss so many Java developers off ?

Tags: java, JBoss, websfear, websphere