Related link: http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000802.shtml

Google buys Pyra, of Blogger fame.

That’s so cool. Right on, Evan. Evan laid everyone off from Pyra in 2001 (? I think), and then just never quit himself. Mark Jacobson at O’Reilly used to tell me about how hard he was working to make something, anything happen with Blogger. And now here he is hitting a grand slam. Excellent.

I’m looking forward to the launch of Bloggle.

Related link: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030213.html

Robert Cringely’s column this week (2/13/2003) has some very interesting things to say about the future of Sun Microsystems.

Only time will tell if Cringely’s hunches prove correct, but his thinking echoes my own thoughts about where Sun is headed. I think they’re in for some bumpy times ahead. The next couple of years should be interesting times indeed for Sun, Solaris and Java.

Related link: http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/development/java/story/0,10801,78…

I tend to agree that client-side Java is far from dead. I’ve thought this for quite some time now, and this has been reinforced by my current project where we are developing a very large Swing GUI with good success.

Petreley points out the existance of many open-source development environments, written in Java, as evidence that client-side Java is not dead.

I’d like to add another reason. I think that the hype surrounding web applications has been subsiding for at least a year now. Whenever I’ve been asked to create an HTML web application for a client, they want to cram more and more fat-client features into the browser. Things like verification in text fields, complex tables, tabbed panes, etc…

The problem is that HTML is HORRIBLE for rich GUIs like this. When you want rapid data entry, client-side validation, sorting and filtering on tables, and things like tree views, it is hard to beat a GUI toolkit like Swing.

Let’s start with a simple admission: I’m against the war in Iraq. I think it’s going to happen, and I think it’s probably going to be a good thing, but I still think it’s a bad idea (because of the ‘probably’ in the previous sentence).

The problem I’m running into is that I can’t really explain why. There’s so much information out there, and so many points of view, that to read and credibly understand it all, to truly make an informed decision, is impossibly hard. Even figuring out what should be read and understood, and what can safely be ignored as either silly or redundant, is ridiculously difficult.

Over the course of a typical week, I have maybe 2 or 3 hours to keep fully informed on world events. I don’t think that’s terribly different from people who lived in earlier ages had. But it’s woefully inadequate in the face of the information age– Instapundit alone produces more than 2 or 3 hours worth of reading a day (though it’s a very nice site that prunes out a lot of the noise). There’s more than enough stuff to read; and verifying most of it (even the “reputable sources” make many mistakes) is a gargantuan task.

This is, I think, the point of elections– vote for someone whose judgement you trust, and then let them make the decisions. I think that was the whole point of choosing “electors” who then selected “representatives” who made decisions. You delegate the important decisions that require a lot of information and nuanced thinking to someone who’s up to the task, and then you let them go do their job.

In a perverse way, representatives should be like systems administrators. You hire them, you set some goals, and then you wait and see if the mail server stays up.

But this doesn’t seem to be what’s happening, and it’s not what’s been happening for the past 20 years. That all the information about government and policy and world politics and …. is on the internet and easily available is a very good thing. But assuming that people have read and digested it all and thought through all the consequences is not. Overnight tracking polls, where I find out that uninformed people making split decisions in response to an unanticipated question now approve of policy x by a 2 to 1 margin, do not improve the quality of governance.

On the other hand, watchdogs on government are necessary. Right? DMCA, the “patriot” act II, the continued erosion of the bill of rights, these are all bad things and indicate that government cannot be trusted to simply do the right thing, and that we cannot confidently delegate the difficult decisions.

All of which is making me into a quasi-libertarian. If government is smaller, and has incredibly strict boundaries it cannot cross, then delegation begins to work again. And it’s easier to make sure it doesn’t transgress.

But that feels like giving up.

(as a sidenote: when people I respect for their technological edge start blending their politics into what used to be technical forums, it’s not necessarily a good thing. I find Cafe Au Lait’s recent political edge really jarring).

Comments on how goverment, or people’s behavior, should evolve are welcome. Iraq-specific comments and flames are not.

Related link: http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030205S0007

The Big 3 Web Services players are Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, according to this InformationWeek article and Gartner Research. “In 2003, most systems integrators will turn to Microsoft .Net, IBM WebSphere, and Oracle. In September 2002, Gartner wrapped up a survey of 44 consulting and systems-integration vendors in North America. Microsoft .Net was targeted by 58% of the systems integrators as one of the top three Web-services products to ramp up delivery capability, according to Cantara. IBM’s WebSphere garnered 40% and Oracle came in third at 31%. Sun, Cantara said, was a strong fourth.”

Sun is indeed fourth as it integrates WS-I with Java 2EE 1.4. Enterprise Java developers will be allowed to develop, integrate, and deploy Java 2EE API like EJB along with Web services specifications such as WSDL and UDDI. BEA Systems should be fifth. Both Sun and BEA have also developed a sophisticated meta tag method for allowing Web services and JSP developers to use tags to build enterprise applications using or incorporating complex enterprise Java API (i.e., EJB, JMX, etc.). Sun’s JCP has several JSR’s on this while BEA is already implementing this in its WebLogic Studio IDE in the form of JWS (Java Web Services) Tags. JWS has been around for nearly a year, and could be the reason that BEA went with WebLogic Studio (formerly Cajun) over WebGain Studio (formerly Visual Cafe).

Sun and BEA are still major players that could at least give Oracle some problems. They both have the tools to compete with Oracle. IBM still has the cash. Also, IBM along with Microsoft will always take the lead in Web services given that these two companies have been the innovators and driving forces behind most of the Web services specifications we see from the W3C and others, including SOAP.

Microsoft’s .Net and the IBM-Oracle-Sun-BEA support for Java based Web services can be best described in terms of market support by the following: “Large companies, which are more likely to have mainframe legacy applications, are turning to Java/J2EE to layer on Web services atop the infrastructure. Java is more popular in large-scale activities such as enterprise resource planning, Cantara notes. Smaller companies, which can start with a clean slate, more or less, find .Net more attractive and are most likely to use it for Web services related to E-commerce.” Of course, whether it’s .Net or Java flavor, Web services are still based on XML. It’s just a matter of preference regarding the infrastructure that’s already in place, comfort level, and costs.

What do you think of this research. Do you prefer .Net or Java? Would you use both?