Igor Polevoy on Java Development Tools

Well, I kind of envy, I think. For the time being, I was a typical Java guy, you know, not paying attention to what's happening outside Java. In the meantime, the Ruby and Rails revolution took off. And back in 2007, I was in the project, which was a Java project, but then Rails was slowly introduced into the project. And I picked up Ruby and Rails, Ruby as a language, and then Ruby and Rails, and I saw that developing with Ruby and Rails was so much faster and better than developing anything that we had in Java. And it was like, okay, Ruby developers enjoy this fantastic framework, why don't we have it in Java? Okay, so you were just like, how can I make something that's as quick to develop with? And that's where ActiveWeb came from. Right, so you were just like, how can I make something that's as quick to develop with? And that's where ActiveWeb came from. Well, no, that was not my immediate, my immediate reaction to this was, great, somebody must be developing right now. Oh, okay. Yeah, you wanted to see what was out there. And I waited a couple of years from 2007 to 2009, but nothing like that came out. So, I rolled up my sleeves and started developing first ActiveGDPC. Okay, so you started with the database first. Yeah. And was that something that you mostly used for your own projects? Oh, no, no, no. This was from the very beginning, it was used on commercial projects. We were building a massive system for an insurance company, and we had two and a half months to start and finish a massive project. So, if we didn't have an Agile tool, if we even went with something like Hibernate, at the time I was managing a relatively small team, it was a team of four people plus myself. And with ActiveGDPC, by the time we started the project, ActiveGDPC was already working. Right. So, you had to implement the rest. It was 80% or was it...? Well, it was probably 80% of what we needed for that one project. Okay. So, you had to implement the rest kind of on the line. Yes. And it was really funny because, you know, as a developer architect, sometimes you architect things right and sometimes you architect things the wrong way. Right. This one was architected right because when we hit the necessity of

When did you first release ActiveGDPC? We had it two days from now. Yeah. So, it was kind of battle-tested from the word go, you had the idea and then you immediately put it into production.

No, no, no, it's not Oracle-specific. So, the next implementation was for MySQL and then basically there's not much difference between different databases other than generating very specific queries for specific things like imagination.

Oh, basically I implemented Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL and H2 and two dialects for Microsoft SQL server were donated by the community. Okay, so this was, you had already released it and it was out in the wild.

How did people outside of your community get to find out about it? Well, I didn't really do too much effort or any effort to publicize it. I basically threw it out into Google code and that's it. Okay.

Oh. Well, number one reason, I'm not a salesman. But the reality is I used so much from open source community. Linux, all kinds of Java frameworks, you know, Ruby and Rails. I

And... So, you've put this out on... You've created these projects and you've put them out on the Google Code. And then you shared them out on the Google Code. And people sort of find them and they... Did they just say, 'Okay, we have these adapters and here's some adapters'? Are you getting patches back from anybody? I created patches. I created branches for people to work in because Google Code is actually a subversion. It's not Git. At the time, when I designed it, I guess, Git wasn't as popular. So, you know, some people were like, 'Hey, let's move this thing to Git. ' I'm like, 'Okay, what advantages are we going to have? ' Right. So, I guess historically, maybe someday we'll move it to Git. So, but mostly you get, like, what changes requests through the forums or...? Through forums, through personal emails, through patches, through branches. Through issue tracking system that also, you know, we're hosting with Google. So people submit sometimes patches, sometimes requests, sometimes find bugs. Do you have any idea, like, how many people are using, like, ActiveJDBC or ActiveWeb? I'm assuming that more people use ActiveJDBC than ActiveWeb because ActiveJDBC was older. I guess it came out before. There's an interesting use for ActiveJDBC that I found. Some people with big websites already built in Ruby and Rails. Right. are building massive back-end processes and they're finding ActiveJDBC indispensable because it mirrors a schema that is compatible to Rails one-to-one. So you can have these Java components that can hit your existing... Exactly the same. You can call it your legacy Rails database versus... Exactly. ... what you used to call the legacy databases before Rails. Yep. Okay. So, but I mean, do you have any idea, like, do you have... How many people? I don't know. I threw... I threw... You know, it seems like... I'm assuming tens of thousands, maybe... I... Sorry. So it's very active. It's very active. Because, look, I've been using so many different frameworks, like Log4J and others, but I never ask a question. Yeah. So, the people who are actually active in a specific community is a tiny fraction of that community. Yeah. It's usually, like, for every one person you hear, there's a hundred that you never hear from. And so, are you using... are you still using these tools? Are these something that are still in units? Yes. Well, the team that I started with back in 2009, actually I was running different teams before, but in 2009 is when we started using the frameworks. Grew to 12 people within a span of two years, and we built, like, four massive websites for members, for insurance companies based on ActiveGVC and ActiveWeb for Johnson & Johnson, for Humana, for Discover, for insurance company Discover. Right. So, that was between... I was with that company between 2009 and 2011, at which point I found

But are you using them to build anything outside of Groupon? Yes. I also have my own startup. It's called ExpressPigeon. com. Mm-hmm. Well, ExpressPigeon as in... It's an email marketing system. We'll have a lot. Yeah. So, the entire system is built, of course, on ActiveGVC IQ. Because I personally believe... Not because I built the tools, but I personally believe that without Active... Basically, today in Java environment, you have only two contenders. So, the Play Framework and Active Projects, the ones that I built, which allow you to develop at breakneck speed. Mm-hmm. And maintain high quality of your code versus kind of legacy Hibernate Spring stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And that's... With the testing, you have the JSPEC framework as well. Yeah. So, it's a pretty complete stack. You... It's kind of like with the Rails bundle. And then you have, you know, the Active Record... Uh... Yeah. Active Record and then your... The Rails and then the test units all kind of together. Right. In one piece. Okay.