Nov 26

IBM and BEA Sitting in a Tree…

Tech No Comments »

IBM and BEA came out with an interesting announcement today. It seems that they got together and worked on some specs for three areas of the application server:

  • Service Data Objects: Which is kinda like ADO for our world
  • WorkManager: Which allows us to pass work to someone who can create new threads!
  • Timers: This seems fit inbetween the J2SE timers, and the EJB timers. It is a Timer which is managed by the app server

A lot has been read into these “joint” specs:

1. BEA and IBM are going to take over the world… and Sun isn’t invited
2. BEA and IBM want to kill smaller app server players
3. Hey, don’t most JSRs get started via vendors? What is the big deal?

The other point that has been brought up is the fact that these types of tech are in J2EE Connectors 1.5 (JSR 112), and the Timers in J2SE 1.5. Maybe this was a chance for these guys to vent that they weren’t happy with what they got?

I do think it is very good to having these two vendors sitting around the same table and working on standards for their technology. That is definately a good thing isn’t it?

Read more: IBM and BEA Partners in Crime, Announcing Joint Specifications

Nov 23

Thought Inc is not involved with JDO 2!

Tech No Comments »

On the JDO 2 expert group, there has been talk about Thought Inc telling customers/potential customers that the JDO 2.0 expert group was having troubles figuring out how to do OR mapping, so Thought representatives were helping the JDO 2.0 expert group understand how to do it. This is TOTALLY UNTRUE. The truth is that Craig Russell received a reply to his request for them to join the effort which basically said “We already know how JDO 2 should be. So just pay us and we will write the spec for you… oh and if you don’t we may sue you”. Members of the JDO 2 expert group are totally open to having Thought Inc as part of team, but they have been quite ridiculous. So, if you hear Thought Inc employees telling you lies about their involvement with JDO 2… remember… they are lies.

Nov 18

Blogging your way out of a job

Tech No Comments »

I read “Of blogging and unemployment” and felt bad for the ex-MS employee who lost his job due to putting a photo up of some Mac G5 packages on the Microsoft campus. That is worthy of getting him the sack? geez.

Nov 16

No Fluff in Denver

Tech No Comments »

I am enjoying speaking at the Denver No Fluff. As always it is a pleasure to hang out with a lot of smart people. I got a chance to observe a couple of good talks too. Dave Thomas is fantastic, and I really enjoyed listening to him talk about Mock Objects, and Decoupling. He does a really good job at really explain things, and getting into harder to explain areas. He had a great set of slides talking about creating methods on objects that express extent, and making sure that you don’t have “Train Wrecks” like:

order.getCustomer().getAddress().getState()

but rather have:

order.caculateTax()

This way you have decoupled your Order from the mess below (what if you change your interface so a Customer has a MailingAddress and a BillingAddress?)

This morning I heard Erik Hatcher’s talk on Lucene (he is working on Lucene in Action for Manning). Lucene is such a great piece of technology, and it is really interesting to see Nutch, the open source google-a-like.

In my last blog on the Chicago No Fluff I talked about the bizarre things that happened… mostly to do with Jay and his driving. This time everything is going smoothly ;) I went to see Matrix Revolutions with some of the speakers, and then had fun playing an interesting game called “Mafia”. I really do enjoy this small symposiums where you get quality time with people.

Nov 10

JTunes: Open Source Java iTunes

Java, Open Source, Tech No Comments »

I was surprised to see an open source (LGPL) Java clone of iTunes has been put up on SourceForge.

JTunes uses JRendezvous from strangeberry and javalayer as mp3-player from javazoom. (The DAAP-part is from the iLeech Project.

Nov 10

Dave Bradley (IBM) makes fun of Gates (who is sitting next to him)

Tech No Comments »

Dave Bradley, an IBM engineer, had a smile on his face as he poked fun at Bill Gates. He talks about how he developed ‘Ctrl-Alt’Delete’ but then says that “Bill made it famous”. As the camera pans to Bills face and everyone chortles, Dave then comes back and says “I mean when you made it NT logon Bill”.

I wonder what Bill was thinking? . o ( How many billions do I own Dave? )

View the footage

Bill is also getting hit at in Another Bill Gates Meets Satan Story

Nov 08

RSS feeds with ads in them

Tech No Comments »

I am seeing more and more RSS feeds with advertisements in them. Most of the time the ad has been a separate rss <item>. As annoying as that can be, at least I can just nuke that one item (I use my email client as my news reader… so each item is basically like a separate email).

The Infoworld feed however, puts ads in the RSS content itself. This confuses many RSS readers as they think that since the content has changed, the feed has been UPDATED, and hence you end up with a ton of duplicates! What a pain.

I know a lot of sites are trying to work out how best to use RSS, as it is a very different model than we are used too… but come on!

Nov 08

Bringing Java into Perl

Java, Perl, Tech No Comments »

Ahh, so now when I really want to hack some scripts, but have all of this Java code on the business tier, I can just use Inline::Java :) I can play in the loosely coupled world of Perl on the script side… and have all of the benefits of the well designed Java business objects :)

Or I could use Jython. Or BeanShell. Or …..

Read: Bringing Java into Perl

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; use warnings;

use Inline Java => <<'EOJ';
public class Hi {

String greeting;

public Hi(String greeting) {
this.greeting = greeting;
}

public void setGreeting(String newGreeting) {
greeting = newGreeting;
}

public String getGreeting() {
return greeting;
}
}
EOJ

my $greeter = Hi->new(”howdy”);
print $greeter->getGreeting(), “\n”;

Nov 05

Matrix Revolutions

Personal No Comments »

I am going to be dissapointed again aren’t I? :( All the reviews are painful. You know it is going ot happen, but you just HOPE that they pull it out after the second movie. I was hoping that you would find out that Neo & Co are actually machines themselves (else how could Agent Smith be around etc), and Zion is actually a Plato’s cave for machines that we humans setup after WE BEAT THEM. But it seems from the reviews that there isn’t anything really special like that… just lots of “great action”. Oh well. I guess I will still see it.