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You want to know the latest trends for Java-based web development? Fewer and fewer people are going to be doing Java-based web development in the future.

Fuck trends. They're wrong. Every day the industry continues to stay with its current ridiculous technologies when vastly superior ones were invented decades ago infuriates me further. If it doesn't infuriate you, you're not paying close enough attention.

My advice: read Lambda the Ultimate and Steve Yegge's blog. Endeavor to learn what the lambda calculus and referential transparency are. If you are sincerely interested in bettering yourself as a programmer and don't go find out who Alonzo Church was then so help me God I will kick you in the balls. Learn about SML and type inference. Learn about Haskell and monads. Learn about process calculi and Erlang. Learn about Lisp and code generation and domain-specific languages. Learn about Scheme and lexical closures and continuations. Learn about Smalltalk and what OO was really supposed to be. Learn about type theory and formalism and the Curry-Howard correspondence. Learn about Forth and Joy and how you can have a powerful, expressive language without even so much as a grammar. Learn about Intercal and Befunge and just how badly your choice of programming language can torture you. Learn about UML and Ruby on Rails and Seaside and agile programming and Java generics and Python generators. Learn about aspect-oriented programming, context-oriented programming and concept programming. Learn about multi-paradigm languages like OCaml or Oz. Learn about weird Lisp dialects with syntax like Rebol or Dylan.

Realize that library design is language design. Realize that asynchronous programming with callbacks and explicit state in a world where lightweight coroutines were around in the days of fucking Simula in the 60s for Christ's sake is cruel and unusual torture. (Sorry, pet programming construct.) Realize that the programming language research community, while considering systems programming a solved problem and generally not interested in talking about human factors, is doing some genuinely promising work. Did you know that there are conc

"What communities are you a part of now that help you write and develop software?"

http://www.codegeneration.net/

http://www.developersdex.com/

http://www.metamodel.com/

Judging by the above. You can guess what I do for a living.

Also, clicks are probably great for advertising. A good slashdotting can get you over 200,000 hits in a single day, or around 6,000 potential customers. Advertisers will like those numbers.

I've already seen one post dissing code generators, but I expect to see that general class of software development tool to greatly increase in popularity over the next couple of years...

Why? Well mostly because they are getting better. Many of the newer code generation tools are very flexible and have some ability to preserve changes to the code; making them easier to fit into real development cycles. Also we are already seeing 'just in time' code generation as an optimization tool; that functionality, when combined with runtime environments like the Java Runtime or the CLR, is going to get easier and more powerful.

So, in the end, we may see developers tweaking code generation templates and filling in design forms/creating design diagrams in order to create some classes of software -- business software and game levels would probably benefit greatly from this scenario.

Obviously there are other classes of software development which would see much less benefit...

Amen. I took particular offense at the first line from a page describing "Code Generation in Action" which states that "Code generation is the technique of using or writing programs that write source code". I guess I'll have to rewrite all my papers by replacing "code generation" with "stuff that the back-end or JIT does".

What really irks me is that this Herrington guy seems to be trying to brand his name along side the misappropriated "code generation" title. Especially considering that this ("code generation") is not a new field and has been called other names in the past.

sdkone gives "Code Generation in Action" a "straight to the trashcan" rating for hubris.