thejavajar

An interesting subject that I have been paying attention to is Scott McNealy (former CEO of Sun Microsystems) and his push for the Obama administration to embrace Open Source technologies. A few posts like this one have popped up recently explaining that McNealy’s working on a paper advocating Open Source technologies for the new administration. I did not know that McNealy was head of Sun Federal and this paper is explained as nothing more than a “white paper being sent to a big customer”. I think this a great opportunity for the U.S. government to get on the path of utilizing Open Source technologies which could stimulate the U.S. and global economy quite heavily. I think that if the right people are in place to make the right decisions, we can set ourselves up for a much more stable technological future. I don’t think that every problem has to be solved with an Open Source solution, but finding the best fit for the problem should be the primary goal.

I have been doing some proof of concept work and some small demos using the following technologies: Java, Groovy, Grails (Hibernate and Spring under the covers), GWT, Flex, and MySQL. Some of the technologies listed are technologies I have been using for quite some time and some of them are brand new to me. I can honestly say that I am continually impressed and motivated while working with these technologies. My level of satisfaction with these technologies is not based on the cool factor or the cutting edge factor, but my satisfaction is based on the pure fact that I am getting quality work done. It is as simple as that. I know that in the future I will be digging into technologies like Ruby, Rails, Scala, and Python in more detail, but for now I can be certain that I will be less interested in the wow factor and more interested in producing quality results faster.