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The full Java life: Interview with William Weiss at Zappos.com

On passion, determination, and playing at work

By Matthew Heusser, JavaWorld.com, 07/18/12

Page 5 of 6

Along the same lines of making things easier and quicker, I'm a big fan of pretty much everything from SpringSource. The Spring framework itself just seems to keep getting better and more useful, although I'm a little worried about some of the annotation stuff. While I have not had a chance to play with it much yet, I really like the idea of Roo. Anything that lightens the load of getting a project off the ground gets a thumbs up from me.

Matt Heusser: Okay, forget new and exciting. What do you think is the most under-appreciated feature or library in Java? What are the one to three things you use every day but suspect some folks have never heard of?

William Weiss: I can only speak based on the developers I interact with, but I would say the most under-appreciated feature would be the concurrent packages. Admittedly, if you aren't doing multithreaded development, you'll never miss them. But if you are -- wow are they helpful. I was so glad when they were folded in to the JDK.

As for three things I use everyday, I'd start with Hazelcast. It has been a lifesaver. A great tool for atomically sharing data in a cluster. ElasticSearch is another technology that has just become part of our arsenal. Provides great speed and awesome scalability for doing searches. Finally, I would probably have to say MyBatis. If you have to deal with legacy databases, this is a must, and we use it extensively.

Matt Heusser: What do you think is happening in the world of Java development right now? What do you think the future holds for Java technology?

William Weiss: Personally, I think we are in a very delicate place with Oracle at the helm. From where I sit, Java 7 didn't exactly wow anyone. On the other hand, other languages are being developed on top of Java, a good sign. Given the diversity of devices Java is used on, and the number of developers, I think it will continue to be a solid player in the heavy-lifting category. But will newer developers adopt it, or go for something with a lighter learning curve? Whether or not Java stays relevant will depend greatly on where Oracle takes it and more tools like Roo that make the cost to start a project easier to swallow.

Matt Heusser: One of the reasons Zappos gave for converting from Perl to Java was simple availability of talent -- yet I know of COBOL shops still training their own staff, holding on by the skin of their teeth. What do you think about a company's decision to move to Java for HR reasons, not technical ones? How did it turn out? What are some of the pros (and cons) of this kind of decision?

William Weiss: Being a Java developer, of course I thought the decision was pure genius! In reality, going back to what I was saying about being passionate and determined, I think if you are able to find developers with those qualities, it doesn't matter what language you choose -- they will pick it up and do a great job; it just may take a bit of time to spin up.