First off, Neal, I’m afraid you are listed as the editor. Not on the cover, but on the title page (the second one - one has just the title, the other has the title and your name on it). This naturally led me to assume that you are the editor in the traditional sense of the word – someone who filters and revises the content of essay submissions. If this assumption was incorrect, then please accept my sincerest apologies for blaming you for someone else’s blunder. Naturally, passion is a great part of our work… if we’re not passionate about software, why write anything – code or essays? I would expect as a reader, though, that an editor (in the traditional sense) would temper the passions in what ultimately the readers see. You mention that I did not object to the absence of comparison to Struts or other frameworks in Chris Geary’s essay – true, but Chris Geary also did not make statements to the effect of “struts is dead” or “GWT is the better tool”. I would not object to such judgments in the slightest had they appeared in a blog or in an interview. A technical book, however, should, in my humble opinion, be held to different standards.

Where in the WS-* world can you find coverage on REST? Here’s one place: http://www.amazon.com/Web-Services-Platform-Architecture-WS-Addressing/dp/0131488740 - I happen to be a big fan of this book despite its age. And please note, while this is primarily a WS-* book, you will find no supremacist or derogatory claims. And here’s another place: the 2006 anthology, the very first essay in it by Scott Davis. And especially interesting are phrases such as “supporters of rest point to…” or “Opponents of REST argue…” I do not believe, as you suggest, that a comparison is at all necessary if the author does not wish to engage in it. If Mr. Sletten’s goal was only to explain the philosophy and possibilities of REST then he by all means should! But alas, he has already engaged in comparison by comparing the WS-* space to the Emperror’s New Clothes and the WS-* leaning decision maker to a “Napoleon in suspenders”… It is my belief that such judgments are best left to the reader and it is the burden of the impartial editor to tone down the rhetoric and shift the focus to the substance… I think this is a part of the unwritten contract between the publisher of a technical book and the reader (and if I’m wrong, maybe it’s a case for stronger contracts ;-)).

As I said in my review, Neal, I hold your opinions and your written work in high esteem. But, being a reader of your blog, I know that you are very passionate about many of the topics covered in the book, and that being the case, I believe the book is sorely missing the touch of that infallible impartial editor.

The reviewer mostly takes me to task for not forcing the authors to be more balanced against what he calls “agitation for the new age software movement”. If you look closely at the cover of the book, you’ll notice I’m not listed as the editor, but as the compiler (as in “Compiled by Neal Ford”). This distinction is important and planned. I did not edit this book in the normal sense (of vetting what the authors want to write), I merely compiled the essays. Frankly, it would be an awful job trying to get this group of authors to bend to my will! All the authors of this anthology are quite passionate about their subjects (which is what makes the book interesting, in my opinion).

The reviewer takes Brian to task for not providing the WS-* case against REST, but I don’t think that was the purpose of the essay. Where in the vast ocean of information about WS-* do you even see a mention of REST? Unless you are specifically comparing two technologies, you frequently don’t, well, compare them. I notice that David Geary (whose excellent essay was praised by the reviewer) didn’t compare and contrast it with Struts, which is the de-facto market leader.

But the more interesting issue for me is the clear disdain the reviewer has for what he calls “new age dogma”: REST vs. SOAP, dynamic languages, and Agile development. It’s no secret that many of the No Fluff, Just Stuff speakers do prefer agile development and looser contracts. While not suitable for all applications, this is the cutting edge of software development right now. It is contingent on “thought leaders” to point out the latest trends in software development, so that the attendees and readers know what’s on the horizon. Software and software development continues to evolve at a furious pace. While no one can predict the future (except maybe Bruce Tate), it is interesting to see where the people who were really into Java in 1996 are spending their time now (a hint: mostly with loose contracty type stuff).

Oh, and the reason there is more information about IntelliJ than Eclipse? Because most of the authors use IntelliJ (because we think it’s the best tool available), I got inundated with cool IntelliJ tips and tricks (and ended up cutting a bunch of them). We had to ask over and over to even get tips for Eclipse, which is not to say that Eclipse is bad, it just doesn’t generate as much passion than IntelliJ. There’s that word again: passion. All the writers of this volume are passionate about technology (which is extraordinary in and of itself), and want to write about it for very little remuneration.

Given the amount of other open source in the book, why wouldn’t we prefer Eclipse over IntelliJ it they were essentially the same? As a group, we tend to choose things that we think are best of breed, whether web framework or IDE. Hopefully, that’s at least some of the appeal of both the anthology and the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour.

As for Burr Sutter, yes, he is a great speaker (I watched his open-source SOA presentation on the web. And I have absolutely no qualms about him or his presentations… he does what he has to do, and, I agree, he does it remarkably well. My gripe is rather with the organizers. They’re the ones who purport to be vendor-neutral, they should worry about staying that way. According to the session description, “students learn to leverage the capabilities of… the most popular open source frameworks to create new enterprise applications”. First of all, in a market that’s in its infancy, how can any one ESB be “most popular”? And secondly, unless the NFJS presentation differs significantly from the one in the link above, the only “open source framework” covered is JBoss.

You have a very good point about interface21… but let’s be honest here, a session on Spring will serve to satisfy a demand for information that already exists… There is already a great deal of excitement about Spring, and a Spring session can be argued to satisfy an existing demand. A JBoss ESB session, however, can only serve to create interest, rather than to satisfy it, especially when presented under the guise of a SOA overview. Thus, I would argue, that the JBoss session serves a marketing purpose, far more so than the Spring sessions.

Sadly, I will be unable to attend Burr Sutter’s sessions, just as I’ll have to miss out on the two-part Spring saga. I’m really looking forward to your session on BDD though!

I look forward to meeting you at the show!

I’ve read Tor Norbye’s blog. Certainly the tools he has make life easier, but I don’t see any screenshots of “hard cases”. It’s not hard to complete [1,2,3].

And, though I haven’t played with JRuby, if its Java interoperability is similar to Groovy’s, I’d like to see what happens when a method of a compiled Java class modifies a field of the input to an value of a different type.