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EclipseZone Interviews: Wayne Beaton

The EclipseZone Interview Series lets you get to know the individuals and projects behind Eclipse. In-depth and personal interviews deliver back stage access to the people that make Eclipse possible.

In June 2005, the Eclipse Foundation started a search for a person described as an "Eclipse Evangelist". This person would travel to user conferences, write articles, create demos, etc. in order to promote Eclipse. Three months later, Mike Milinkovich, director of the Eclipse Foundation announced that the search had ended and Wayne Beaton was the new evangelist. Since Wayne has been largely unknown in the Eclipse community until now, I decided to try and get to know him a bit better.

Wasn't he on The
Young and the Restless?

[Ed] So what's your background?

[Wayne] I started my career at The Object People, doing object-oriented software development in Smalltalk in the early 90s. I was one of the original architects of the TopLink for Smalltalk product and worked pretty closely with team during the initial development of what is now Oracle's TopLink for Java product. I started working with Java sometime in the mid nineties and with application servers (that would eventually become J2EE) like WebLogic Server when it was still named "Tengah" and WebSphere Application Server when it was "Servlet Express" in the late nineties. I authored and delivered a lot of education for The Object People as well.

Have you been an Eclipse user long?

I started using Eclipse before it was even a whisper publically; most of the original Eclipse developers are guys that I went to university with and I've always taken a pretty keen interest in the stuff they work on (since it's all pretty interesting).

What did you use it for?

I've spent the last five years of my life working at Big Blue, mostly helping customers make sense of J2EE and WebSphere. This, of course, kept me pretty busy with WebSphere Studio Application Developer and Rational Application Developer (RAD) which are built on Eclipse technology. I actually developed one of the features for Rational Application Developer 6.0. I have developed a number of other plug-ins for Eclipse/RAD, including a tool that migrates J2EE extended deployment descriptors for WebLogic/JBoss/Borland AS to WebSphere Application Server equivalents.

I know you're just starting and trying to figure all this out, but what exactly does being Eclipse Evangelist involve?

I hope that you and everybody else will see a heavy presence online. I'm starting with blogging, but do intend to start writing articles for sites like Eclipse Zone. I'm also working my way into other forums. So far, I've only been browsing the UseNet groups, but I do intend to start contributing more. I've started to line up some conference presences over the next six months or so including WebSphere Technical Exchange in November, JavaPolis in December, and EclipseCon of course.

The relationship between Eclipse and other platforms like NetBeans, IDEA, and MS Visual Studio has often been contentious. What's your take on that?

I honestly believe that the folks championing alternative technologies are very nice people and are generally bright. I just don't happen to agree with them. I think what you're trying to ask is whether or not I'm going to take on the folks championing these alternatives. While there is little in life that I enjoy more than a good fistfight, I don't think that any of the communities are well-served by me tearing down these alternatives or by responding point-by-point to FUD statements. What I intend to do (and am doing) is tell people about how great Eclipse is. If anybody makes factual misrepresentations concerning Eclipse, I'll try to address that.

I think we need to treat our Java and open source sisters and brothers with the respect they are due. In fact, we need to treat everybody with respect even when we don't agree with them.

As a J2EE expert, why do you think EJB never settled down to the point that you could develop on one application server and have the code work on any other server?

Technically speaking, you can. That is, it is possible to develop an application using EJB that can work on application servers from multiple vendors. The rub is that you have to redeploy the application on these application server and that redeployment process is non-trivial. Of course, when you leverage the various programming model extensions that vendors provide to make EJB more useful, the whole write-once-deploy-everywhere notion goes out the window. Deployment is non trivial since the specifiers decided to leave parts open so that different vendors could distinguish themselves. To be honest, I'm not sure why obvious holes were left. In particular, it's very odd (to me) that there is no completely standard way to specify a global JNDI name for a bean. I understand why you might want to decouple local names from global names, but I don't get why this can't be done in a standard way.

I have actually had redeployments take me a couple of hours (WebLogic Server to WebSphere Application Server) which isn't all that bad. However, I have also had them take me three painstaking weeks.

Talk to the foot.

Do you think EJB3 will change that?

I don't know. I haven't looked very closely at EJB3 yet, so it's hard for me to say. If they've managed to make it possible to specify deployment information in a vendor neutral way, then the problem does indeed go away. However, if you need vendor-specific annotations or other programming model extensions, then you're still going to have to spend some time redeploying for new platforms (this is the case with XDoclet today).

I'm a little concerned that a whole new set of problems are imminent as folks start to come to grips with the new annotations-based paradigm. However, there are a lot of really smart people looking at the problem (including some old friends at Oracle) so I have hope that it will all work out.

From experience, I know that a lot of organizations have given up on entity beans with container-managed persistence (CMP) mostly because the initial specification was a load of crap and the more recent versions (EJB 2.x) are still pretty restrictive and awfully heavy-weight. Most organizations that I've worked with either use a RYO solution, or something like Hibernate or TopLink for persistence. Time will tell if EJB3 can woo some of those organizations back. Frankly, it kills me that we haven't worked out a decent general persistence story in the Java world before EJB3.

I often hear Smalltalk and Java being discussed together. What's the connection? It seems like Smalltalk's successor would be something more dynamically typed like, say, Ruby.

The connection between Java and Smalltalk is, I believe, the fact that Java came into its own about the same time the stewards of Smalltalk were screwing things up. We (The Object People) got involved with Java in the mid nineties because it looked like a real force and a good source of revenue; we were right and I credit my former bosses having great insight to embrace the new technology while Smalltalk still had a very vibrant community. Most die-hard Smalltalkers hated Java when it came out and many still do (a few of my friends still work with Smalltalk). I've warmed up to it over the years, but still tend think of Java as a decent tool rather than something that I'm excessively passionate about. I can't think of a single time that I've coded Java without thinking at least once to myself "this would be so much easier in Smalltalk".

A the end of the day, I think we all jumped on the Java bandwagon because it existed and we had mortgages and kids who might one day need braces. I don't recall hearing much about Ruby until a few years ago. I've only just started to look into Ruby myself...

There seems to be a lot of history between Smalltalk and Eclipse though.

There sure is. A good chunk (probably most) of the original Eclipse developers are former Smalltalkers. In fact, many of them are from the same group that created IBM Smalltalk. John Duimovich, lead of the Eclipse Tools PMC, was the lead designer and implementor for the virtual machine under IBM Smalltalk. Steve Northover, the principle architect behind SWT is the same guy who brought us Smalltalk's Common Widgets which provide similar functionality. Heck, even our own Mike Milinkovich was one of the original developers of the Envy/Smalltalk product which provided source code management for several Smalltalk implementations.

If you look out into the Eclipse community, you'll see a lot of Smalltalkers like Eric Clayberg, Kent Beck, and Dwight Deugo doing Eclipse stuff.

Wayne promises to make a
big splash in the community.

The Object People were based in Canada. Are you Canadian?

Yes, I am Canadian. But, curiously, I don't drink beer. I do however own several tuques and think that “route” and “root” are homonyms.

No beer? Next you're going to tell me you don't like hockey!

Well... I love hockey. I have two sons in the development programme (they've been practising/playing since July). I don't play it myself, but it's on my list. Mike has given me an open invitation to join his group, but I haven't been able to take him up on it yet.

For more information

You can find out more about Wayne at his web log.