Month: March 2012

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Time traveller brings J2EE back to the future from 2006

I’m sorry, J2EE? You realise Java EE has not officially called ‘J2EE’ since the release of Java EE 5 back in 2006, right? It’s now 2012. That’s SIX YEARS AGO.

For a while after the name changes it was acceptable and common to hear all combinations of the names, for example, referring to Java EE 5 as J2EE 1.5. The last EE version with the J2EE name was J2EE 1.4, released in 2003.

When I hear J2EE today, it tells me one of the following:

  • you haven’t actually worked hands on with Java since roughly 2006. At some point in the past you did have some hands on experience, but not recently, at least not in the last few years
  • you’ve been working with J2EE 1.4 technology since 2006
  • you’ve been working in cave in 2006 and have just emerged to get some sunlight
  • you just picked up an old copy of a J2EE book and decided to learn Java Enterprise technology, not realizing how old the book was, or the fact that it’s not vastly out of date
  • you possess a time machine and have just traveled to the future from 2006

Please – if you haven’t worked with Java technology for the last six years, please try and get up to date. A lot has changed in the last six years.

Also, if you have been working in the technological cave (a long running development project) for the past six years… you owe it to yourself and your career to try and keep more up to date with the tools that you use.

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The ‘Social Enterprise’ according to salesforce.com

I had the chance to go to the saleforce.com CloudForce/CloudStock event in SF yesterday. I went primarily to attend the tech sessions on using Heroku and Amazon AWS, but it was interesting to sit in the keynote session and hear the salesforce CEO Marc Benioff give his sales speech on why Social Media is big for business. In a nutshell, here’s my summary of what social means to business (from the view of salesforce.com):

  • Social Media has exploded in popularity. It’s massive.
  • Integrating the way you do business with Social Media allows you to connect with your customers/clients and their needs, wants, likes, dislikes – accessing a goldmine of marketing information and the potential to building ongoing/interactive relationships with your customers
  • Integrating social media concepts within the enterprise brings benefits of growing communities within the company, increasing inter-team/group/department interactivity, increasing group collaboration and access to current/relative information and events in real time

As a consumer, I’ve often had the opinion that I don’t want company x knowing what I ‘like’ on Facebook, or what videos I’m watching on YouTube. Hearing Benioff and other salesforce.com customers talk about the profound beneficial changes that Social Media is bringing to their companies, it was interesting to hear why this is an important trend for doing business in today’s world. Information is key to succeeding in business, and it’s obvious why businesses ‘want in’ on the social media scene to use this data for their own advantage. Whether all consumers want businesses they interact with to have access to their personal likes, dislikes and online activity though is another story.

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