Your mother is ugly…or marketing strategies

If you are following what “s happening in the Java world, you know the most noted trouble makers: AJAX and Ruby.

After the media heated up these two technologies to several hundred degrees, some people started to take them seriously and move to these technologies for various reasons. I “m not planning/ready to discuss pros and cons of these technologies, but it “s clear that some want to cash in on being early adopters, while others try to promote their AJAX or Ruby books and frameworks.. Speaking of marketing… In my opinion, creators of this masterpiece were thinking about creating dynasties of RoR programmers. Location of the Rails logo assumes that your spouse also knows what ROR is, otherwise s/he won’t be impressed. On the same note, both proud parents of a baby wearing this piece must know what this logo means. We are clearly expecting new generations of RoR developers, which is great, because the last thing I want to see is the Rails logo on the birth control devices.

Anyway, let’s stop right here and return to early adopters. These people and software vendors use one of two strategies:

1. Try to find some common grounds to integrate and communicate with these popular technologies.

2. Start bashing Java whenever they have a chance.

There are people who try to use the first strategy and write good articles that explain what the new languages are about. I receive a printed version of SD Times magazine , which had a really nice and consice article introducing Ruby. Unfortunately, the online version does not have the code samples, which makes it pretty much useless. But this article was good…as well as this video. I’ll be more than happy to publish an article on Ruby in Java Developers Journal, as long as it it delivers any message other than “Java sucks “.

The second strategy is similar to starting a conversation with a statement “Your mother is ugly, and that “s why hellip; rdquo;. Maybe this is right. Maybe his mother is ugly, but do you think that starting a conversation like this helps in achieving your goal?

The smart way of convincing the Java and non-Java crowd to work with newcomers is by creating use cases that show benefits of combining the new and the tried-and-true technologies in a way that compliments each other, and smart software vendors follow this path already. This explains why many software vendors are quickly making their applications AJAX-enabled.

Java programmers should get exposed to new languages and technologies including Ruby and AJAX even from a pragmatic point of view: there are jobs out there. Today, offers 16000 Java jobs nationwide, 900 Ajax-related jobs and 200 jobs that require Ruby skills. If you live in New Jersey and want to see what is this buzz about, attend our Princeton JUG meeting on Ruby on Rails in August. By the way, I’ll gladly accept RoR book donations for free giveaway to our JUG members.

Your mother looks great, but if she had a nose job done hellip;


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