Related link: http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=13256
BEA WebLogic 7.0 has been released. TheServerSide.Com got to interview the 7.0 product manager, so check out the new features, and comments from the J2EE community. Is this a significant advance? Is the release cycle for enterprise app servers too short?
Do you think that release cycles are too short? Would you prefer to see longer times between releases, and have them be rock solid?
Related link: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-04-2002/jw-0426-xmljava3.html
XML Pull Parsers are the next big wave of parsers (from SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXB). There is a standard emerging around these new sets of parsers called XMLPull.
This article is the last in a 3 part series that walks us through SAX2, Pull parsers, and their new standard.
We end up with a performance analysis comparing various SAX2 parsers compared to the XML Pull ones.
The new Piccolo SAX 2 parser kicks butt in these tests!
Related link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44667-2002Apr24.html
I live and work in Silicon Valley. Everyone I know has a cell phone, and many people have more than one. I always wonder about etiquette: clearly, they should be turned off in meetings, and at public performances. But how about the people you see walking down the street and talking to a wire suspended in front of their throat?
We joke about it (”Remember when you used to be able to tell the homeless people from the engineers? They dressed the same, but the homeless people talked to themselves”) but this one of those questions that’s only going to get
thornier as we strap more and more pieces of equipment to our bodies.
Personally, I like to leave my cellphone at home.
Related link: http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=13179
The scales swing again, this time in IBM’s favour with their latest ECPerf results.
The results themselves are one thing, but watching people debate them, how they got the particular metric is more interesting. As we get more results, we will see what different configurations can give us (this result runs on Linux for the first time)
Do you make much of these metrics? Does your boss? :)
Related link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/04/24/google.html
Two of the front-page O’Reilly Network articles today take different views of SOAP: Paul Prescod seems to be trying to “prove” that SOAP was the wrong choice for the Google APIs, while Clay Shirky lauds SOAP as “astonishingly far along.” I’ll further this diversity of viewpoints by throwing in another two cents.
I should disclose that I am good friends with one of the Google engineers who worked on the APIs, and I’m sure this biases my viewpoint. I’d also say, though, that I fundamentally disagree with Paul’s viewpoint that Google made a “gaffe” by choosing SOAP — even if he has another technology he’d prefer, the SOAP API (which I beta-tested before it was released) works, and works very well for developers who want to experiment with Web services. Google could have chosen another platform, but with so few real Web services available, I am very supportive of their decision to use the most widely-accepted standard for providing such services in their first release. How many lines of XML go in and out (or how much energy is consumed, as Paul facetiously — I hope! — points out) should not be the only criteria for which technology Google chooses.
Speaking as a developer, I currently don’t have any reason to care one way or another which path Google takes. Submitting a SOAP query is easy to do, and there have been plenty of Google API toolkits released in the week or two after the APIs became available. Sending a specially-formed URL with arguments wouldn’t really need a toolkit, but I bet toolkits would appear, and I’d use them, too. So the only developers who should really care right now are: (1) toolkit developers, and (2) speed freaks. (1) seems to be not an issue — it
can’t be that much harder if so many SOAP toolkits appeared in a week — and with 1000/queries/day maximum per user, (2) speed freaks need not apply.
Speaking as a technologist, I think the demand for REST in this case is driven more by aesthetics than practicality. Maybe it’s really just anti-Microsoft. It feels like bloat, so people are opposed to it. For myself I like all of the things Microsoft has built on top of SOAP (like
auto-generated docs and so on), and I could easily conceive
of other people or companies building other cool things on top of it, too. If there’s a bunch of “foo for SOAP” that I can use, great, that makes my job easier. I would speculatively feel more enthusiastic about releasing a Web service that could play well with foo for SOAP, rather
than one that hews to a notion of aesthetics but doesn’t support foo.
Speaking as a product manager-type, I would say Google should support the “platforms” with sufficient business demand. View SOAP as Windows and REST as Linux and XML-RPC as Mac and make decisions accordingly. Do they have a business that would justify spending money to develop for multiple platforms based on the possible return from those platforms? Then maintain multiple interfaces. No? Then stick with the platform with the widest adoption (which I am assuming is SOAP). Really this argument is somewhat specious since the platform adoption rates are nowhere near as clear as they are for OS’s. It’s more like you have three BeOS’s duking it out for platform dominance no one cares about yet (the fights are so fierce because the stakes are so low). Given that, I would just choose the one you like (as in, “would bet on if it were a
horse”) and experiment with it on its own until there is better data for business analysis.
Taking the three of these considerations in combination, I would say that there’s no point in a business like Google investing in more than one Web services interface until there’s money attached to use of the service; and all other things being equal, which they seem to be, I would bet on Microsoft (i.e. SOAP).
So, I agree neither with Paul nor Clay. We don’t yet know which technologies are going to make it in the Web services world; there are several considerations that might go into the outcome; and unless more businesses follow Google’s lead and release Web services of their own, this discussion simply won’t matter. If Amazon and Google use two different design models for their services, that’s excellent — it allows us to see how their respective services develop over time. Maybe one of these technologies will be more flexible, or will perform better, or will be easier to use, or will otherwise attract more development. Just like the O’Reilly Network is willing to give equal time to several viewpoints on this debate, we should be happy to have a variety of Web services approaches represented in the marketplace.
Related link: http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2860227,00.html
Metagroup claim that “Global 2000 organizations will have heterogeneous application environments indefinitely, but .Net share will increase to 30 percent of enterprise development projects as J2EE use stabilizes at 40 percent by 2004″.
Where do these get this from? Is it purely guessing? Did they just talk to a couple of CTO’s?
I agree .NET is going to “gain steam”. It has too…. it is starting from scratch! .NET is a decent technology don’t get me wrong, but these claims are infuriating!
I trust them as much as I trust the weather-man on a long range forecast.
One thing is for sure… there is a place for both technologies.
Do you think .NET is going to make big gains like the ones mentioned in the article?
Related link: http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2002-04/sunflash.20020423.1.html
Based on email to Sun’s JXTA mailing list and a press release, significant items to date in the JXTA project’s growth and progress include:
1. A new slate of startups using JXTA: Avaki, Cimpler, IAM, Improv, Inclusive, Infoglyptic, infonie GmbH, nDevia, R-Objects, Tryllian, VistaPortal.
2. A first-ever slate of larger, established organizations using JXTA: Boies, Schiller & Flexner, LLP; Ericsson Microwave AB; Hughes Network Systems; NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; National Association of Realtors; Research In Motion; Siemens Corporate Technology; Sony Corporation of America; and the University of Maryland.
3. Implementations are available or underway in C, J2SE, J2ME, Objective-C, Perl, Python, Ruby, and SmallTalk.
For more information on JXTA and where it’s at now, check out the following:
What do you think of JXTA’s progress over its first year?
Related link: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-hunter/?loc=j
IBM’s developerWorks syndicates an interview with O’Reilly author, Servlets.com Publisher and Apache VP Jason Hunter, done by Linux Magazine Editor-at-large Robert McMillan. The interview goes into the “story behind Apache’s quest to open up the Java platform.”
Related link: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&ncid=581&e=10&u=/nm/20020423…
Reuters reports that DVD rentals doubled last quarter versus the same quarter of the previous year (presumably everyone who got a DVD player over the holidays immediately signed up for Netflix), and one in four US households now owns a DVD player. It’s interesting to remember the background of DVD technology, particularly considering today’s battles over P2P filesharing.
Soon after DVD’s were commercially introduced, a Los Angeles law firm teamed up with Circuit City to release a competing home video format called Divx (not the same thing as the more recent online video format, DivX). The idea of Divx was that you would buy low-cost discs that you could take home and use for a few days, after which time they would “expire” and become unusable, unless you paid an additional usage fee. Unlike DVD’s, which consumers can buy and use for as long as they like, Divx discs kept control of the media directly in the hands of the media distributors. A child only a lawyer could love.
Divx failed. Consumers hated the idea. The competing DVD format, with less privacy restrictions, less centralized control, and a concrete feeling of ownership for the person buying the disc, won out and put Divx out of business. (And I still won’t shop at Circuit City.)
There’s a lesson here for the current debates about filesharing and digital rights management: consumers won’t buy less control over their media if more control is available to them. “Divx model” online music sites are very likely to end up with the same fate as Divx itself, and ignoring the parallels is just a waste of money for their backers. The incredible success of the DVD format shows that in the long run, less control for Hollywood can add up to greater consumer acceptance, and therefore greater profits.
Related link: http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/index.html
Cactus has come out with a new version of its server-side unit testing framework (for testing Servlets, EJBs, Tag Libs, Filters, etc). One interesting item about the new release is that they use AspectJ, and weave aspects to take care of their cross cutting concerns (such as logging).
When I look at a lot of EJB projects I see the following:
Is this OO? It looks to me that we are doing RPC calls from the client to the server (via the facade).
Our entities are glorified structs, and sessions are functions that work on that data.
So what do you think… is this the right way to be doing things? Is this OO? Are your projects like this?
If I was a JINI biggot, I would maybe jump on this as a “plus” for JINI. JINI thinks differently. You locate objects and you ask them to do things. Is that purer?
I am interested to hear your experiences and thoughts on this topic:
Related link: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20020417/tc_usatoday/403…
According to a Microsoft expert witness Kevin Murphy, “Netscape, Java posed no real threat to Windows…” as reported by USA Today’s Paul Davidson. Because of this, Microsoft’s expert witness, an economic professor from the University of Chicago, believes that the antitrust santions should be modest.
That’s certainly an interesting claim; one that is false on the server. As far as client-side Java and the Netscape brower, it’s possible depending on the time frame he references.
However, these days, with the adoption of client-side Java for the Apple Mac OS X and the many wireless, handheld devices (i.e., Palm, BlackBerry, etc.) and cell phones (i.e., Erickson, Nokia, Motorola, etc.), the tide has clearly turned.
What do you think? Share your views on this here.
Related link: http://www.fatbrain.com
It’s official: RIP Fatbrain.com, as the Barnes & Noble.com division of B&N redirects Fatbrain.com visitors to the new (?) Barnes & Noble.com Professional, Technical and Business Bookstore. One of my other favorites was Egghead.com. Last year though, Egghead was apparently aquired by Amazon.com.
In a way, I always thought that a merger between Fatbrain.com and Egghead.com would’ve provided a combined branding and revenue stream for an interesting and potentially strong partnership. Such a partnership could’ve offered just about all the technical software and content a software geek could want, sort of like an Amazon for geeks.
Oh well, I guess we’ll never really know, now. Again, RIP Fatbrain.com.
Do you think B&N will continue where Fatbrain left off, when it was acquired by B&N? Please share your thoughts.
Related link: http://www.google.com/apis/
Looking for something to do with the new Google APIs? Here a project idea I don’t have time to do.
I was working on an project, called “googlyeyes,” using these apis, before I became too busy to continue on it. The idea was to have a utility that monitored all of my google searches, and re-ran them for me every day, informing me of new hits when they appeared. The API would easily work for this application.
This would let you discover new sites on your favorite topic; let you find new references to people with whom you’ve lost touch; let companies search for uses of their name; and so on. I’m sure there are plenty of other uses.
Someone less busy should tackle this…I’ll transfer googlyeyes.org to the best implementation!
Related link: http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=12826
TheServerSide.com’s Floyd Marinescu posts the following: “Mac OS X runs Pramati, Lutris, Trifork, JBoss and Orion — Apple has made a lot of progress with its Java support in the recent Mac OS X. Not traditionally thought of as a server/enterprise OS, that could soon change given that a number of J2EE app servers now officially run on Mac OS X, including Pramati, Lutris, Trifork, JBoss and Orion.” There’s also WebObjects, as Mac OS X makes the move to be a server-side OS.
Related link: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/office_ngo_preview.asp
Is this a legitimate preview into the upcoming Microsoft Office .NET? Well, decide for yourself after you look at Winsupersite.com: “A number of readers alerted me this week to a fascinating Shockwave animation that purports to demonstrate some of the online/subscription features of the next version of Microsoft Office, which will be called Office .NET. Code-named Office NGO (”Next Generation Office”) in the animation, this Office version will include links to a number of online services, including a secure My Office Web site; a consolidated email account with Web-based Inbox; Office .NET Notifications; online scheduling with a sharable calendar; Meeting Workspaces for viewing agendas, pending tasks, and related documents, SharePoint Team Services-based Team Workspace for sharing information with team members; and a set of online content such as templates, online training, communities, and the like.”
What do you think of this? What have you heard through the grapevine?
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