Java and J2EE Today: An interview with Satish Talim

In this interview, we speak to Satish Talim, a well known IT name in India. Satish has been working with Java for almost a decade.  Here he shares his Java experiences, his views on open source and also has some useful advice for those starting off with Java.

IndicThreads >> Welcome to IndicThreads. Could you introduce yourself to IndicThreads visitors?
Satish Talim >> I have an Engineering and Management background and associated with the I.T. industry in Pune, India since 1978. Got involved with Java since its Beta days way back in 1995. I have helped start the Indian subsidiaries of two US companies – Infonox www.infonox.com and Netaps www.netaps.com Currently doing Build/Operate/Transfer (BOT) for many US companies who are into Java based product development, in India.

IndicThreads >> Considering that you have been with Java for almost 10 years, how do you think has Java changed over the years?

Satish Talim >> Java has evolved into a very mature and stable language over the years. For server-side programming, I consider it the best.However, I would like Java to become Open Source in the days to come.

IndicThreads >> How do you think is India placed in the Java world and where do you see it going from here?

Satish Talim >> It has always been my opinion that Indian programmers are one of the best and they are doing exceedingly well with Java too! You go to any US company (in the US) and invariably you will find many Indian Java programmers on their roles. I am very optimistic of the future for India.

IndicThreads >> What are your views on the open source community’s contribution to Java in its growth as a leading technology platform?

Satish Talim >> The contribution has been tremendous. In fact, many of the current US projects that we are executing use a lot of Open Source products and I am sure that this trend will keep growing.Java per se is defenitely benefitting and will keep it postioned as the number one technology platforms.

IndicThreads >> Tell us a little bit about your company and the kind of J2EE work you take?

Satish Talim >> As I mentioned earlier, we are doing a lot of BOT operations for US based companies building Java based products. My obseravtion is that all of these companies prefer Open Source platforms/products like Ant, Eclipse, Struts, Hibernate, PostgreSQL etc. The programmers normally use JSPs and Struts framework.

IndicThreads >> EJB is the thing which many people not dare to handle due its complexity? What are your views on this?

Satish Talim >> Given a chance, I too would stay away from EJBs! I guess very large, distributed applications would need EJBs, but applications can do without it. In the last 9 years of my association with Java, I have had a chance to use it only once and that too in a very trivial way.

IndicThreads >> Any J2EE learnings / pitfalls that you would want to share?

Satish Talim >> Nothing specific but a bit of advise for future Java programmers – Java like any other language can be mastered by actually getting your hands dirty! Code, make mistakes, re-code ie. keep coding. Books, articles etc. are good but the fastet way to learn is to code.

Another thing that I have observed is that most beginning programmers are stuck when they get errors. For example, if one is deploying an application in say JBoss and the server console gives a stack trace. Where do they get the solution – you have various discussion groups but I found that the fastest way to get to the root of the problem is to copy the main line of the stack trace into say Goggle’s search engine and presto you would get some solution.

IndicThreads >> Thanks Satish. Any final words for IndicThreads members?

Satish Talim >> Being from Pune, I had started a similar effort called PuneJava in 1995. Being hard pressed for time I cannot give due justice to it. I sincerely hope that IndicThreads is more successful with their effort. All the best and count me in for any help that you require.

IndicThreads >> Thanks Satish. Its been great talking to you. Before we say goodbye, I would just like IndicThreads readers to make a note of the Quick Hibernate series that Satish is writing for IndicThreads. The article is a quick start guide to the Object Relational tool Hibernate. Do check it out!