Marching on...

I used to develop applications with PowerBuilder (PB) for about 8 years.  I started with PB 1.0.  In the beginning it was new and exciting.  Windows was new.  Client/Server was new and even object oriented development in a mainstream tool was relatively new (at least in the corporate software development scene).  But as technology progressed I began to see exciting things elsewhere.  At the time Delphi was the cool new product.  The speed, the beauty, the elegance... ahhh I was smitten.  But the other PB developers around me didn't see it.  I fought for Delphi and even did one or two project with it.  But unfortunately Delphi wouldn't become my mainstream development tool.  PB was entrenched and the developers around it protected it with a passion.  It was disappointing. 

Then Java came along.  To my eye Java shared a lot in common with Delphi.  I liked it too.  But still the PB developers around me couldn't seem to appreciate this new tool. In fact, a lot of them were actually pretty hostile to anything that might threaten the sacred cow that was PB.  Fortunately for me the hype of the Internet and the .COM boom turned Java into something people couldn't ignore.  And I decided to ride the wave and finally leave PowerBuilder behind.

Now another 8 years has gone by and I find myself in the middle of a community of Java developers who are extraordinarily similar to that crowd of PowerBuilder developers.  They only see Java.  They've built a career around it, they're entrenched and they protect it with a passion.  For me, I see the appeal of other languages and tools.  In particular Ruby is beautiful and Rails elegantly solves many of my Java web development headaches.  But many of the people around me don't see it and quite frankly I doubt that they've even looked.  And that's the disappointing thing.  They're just like the PB guys with the blinders on.  They're hostile to anything that isn't Java.

In my current group there seems to be a new love forming for GWT.  Personally, the Google Web Toolkit and its unmistakable Swing/AWT flavor of Web development just seems wrong.  It's definitely web development for Java developers and I can see why they like it, but to me it's an artificial abstraction that doesn't sit well with me. Ruby and Rails isn't perfect either, but even a couple years after I started looking at it I still think it's better than GWT.  Rails embraces the browser technology of HTML, CSS, and Javascript and makes it easy to work with.  GWT on the other hand, puts me behind a Java facade where I can pretend to be developing Swing and it will generate the HTML and Javascript for me.  Ick.  No thanks Google.

Anyway, my point is that I think I'm getting to another point in my career where I need to migrate to a new place with like-minded people.  I'm tired of trying to get others to see what I think is self-evident if only they'd look...