Con grande soddisfazione ho l'onore di pubblicare la prima, spero di una lunga serie, intervista ad uno dei più grandi e famosi "guru" Java di livello mondiale.

Sang Shin è Technology Evangelist presso Sun Microsystems. Il suo sito javapassion.com eroga corsi gratuiti a diverse decine di migliaia di sviluppatori Java sparsi per il globo. E' speaker per conferenze mondiali nonchè docente presso l'Università del Massachusetts. Gli argomenti da lui trattati nei talk e nelle lezioni su javapassion spaziano da J2EE ad EJB, JMS, J2ME, Web application frameworks (Struts e JSF), e Web services.

Di seguito il testo integrale dell'intervista (conto di tradurla in italiano a breve):
Mario:
Hi Sang
first of all: have you ever been to Sicily?

Sang:
Not yet. I would love to visit Sicily someday. I heard it is
such a beautiful place.

Mario:
What do you think about JUGs?

Sang:
JUGs have been playing an extremely important role being
the focal points for the local Java developers
and have been a huge part of the whole Java eco-system
in my opinion.

It is interesting to note that some of the established JUGs are
playing even bigger roles well beyond their local regions. And
a good example is Be JUG with their hugely successful JavaPolis
conference. Moving forward, I would like
to see more collaboration among JUGs on a world-wide basis,
which is already happening through the JUG alias.

Finally I personally would like to express my sincere
thanks to all JUG leaders. I know how hard it is to get
things going.

Mario:
What do you think about the future of Java related RIA technologies?
In particular, by your opinion, will JavaFX be a real alternative to
JSF or not?

Sang:
JavaFX indeed has a reasonably good chance of becoming a real alternative
to currently well-established RIA technologies (such as Flex) in
my opinion, given that it is based on Java and many proven qualities
of Java platform can be readily taken advantage of.

On the other hand, it is true it still playing a catch-up mode
compared to Flex but you will see a very aggressive development
in JavaFX moving forward.

Mario:
What do you think about JRuby and Groovy? Can that languages help
non-Java web developers to approach Java platform?

Sang:
Absolutely. In my view, programming language is just a means to
an end. And different programming languages are designed for different
tasks. Each programming language has its own strengths and
weaknesses. And each will be used for different programming
tasks where the strength can be maximized.

What I expect to see moving forward is that people will choose best programming
language for the task at hand, maybe JRuby/Groovy/PHP for building a front-end
side of web application at the same time want to leverage
the power of Java EE backend, which is known for its performance, scalability,
transactional capabilities, integration with enterprise information systems,
and so on. This is where I believe seamless integration of these languages with
Java is important. As long as the languages they use are running on the
top of JVM and if they can use these languages seamlessly with Java programming
language, that is in fact a good thing. More power to the developers.

If you see what Sun has been doing with these languages during the past few
years, you probably noticed that Sun/Java community in fact has been
pro-actively embracing these scripting languages (rather than
resisting them) starting with JDK itself with pluggable scripting
language framework and best Ruby and Rails IDE (NetBeans), and so on.

Mario:
Many people foresee a future scenario where Java is used as a platform
to run applications written in languages other than Java. What do you
think about?

Sang:
I am in agreement with that assessment with just one comment - Java will
continue to remain as one of the most popular programming languages. Now
having multiple programming languages for the developers is perfectly fine
with Java community (and Sun) moving forward. When people think of Java,
they mostly think of it as just a language. But Java is more than a
language. It is in fact a combination of language and platform. In fact,
any language that can run on the top of Java platform, I consider it as part of
Java echo system.

Mario:
When and how the idea of javapassion.com is born?

Sang:
The idea was conceived about 6 years ago. It was the time of
dot.com bust. Many people were laid off at the time during the
downturn. One day, I was working in a local coffee shop and I met a
old colleague who had gotten just laid off and he was participating in
a support group meeting there. I felt guilty not being one of
them. I thought I would help them out by teaching a free but
high-quality course like the one I was teaching in Brandeis University
at the time.

The first course I taught was "Jini and JavaSpaces". Then I realized that
the skill set that were being sought-after by employers was
"Java EE". So after "Jini" course, I started teaching
"Java EE" course. About 200 people showed up every Monday in
Sun's Burlington campus. Then people in other regions heard
about it and I decided to offer it as a online course. The following
is the "How it got started" on my website.

http://www.javapassion.com/j2ee/index2.html#MessagestoPotential