techno.blog("Dion")

Man, is it just me, or is this J.One chick harder to get than J.Lo? :)

And boy do we moan when we get rejected. If my talk gets in I will bug Ted like it is 1999.

Sun blows me off… again….

The JavaOne drinking game!

Rejected by Sun

Rejected by JavaOne!

I made a prediction around Google AdSense and their usage of XHR.

I also see some interesting things revolving around offline clients with JavaScript.

One of the goals of RSSBling, was that Ben and I wanted to show that you could cut the plug and it would still continue to work. This is a problem that many people have worked on, including Adam Bosworth with Alchemy (where did that go?) when he was still at BEA.

With JavaScript, and the right signed code with permissions, you can actually really go offline mode.

Imagine if you could use GMail in offline mode? That would be killer. The biggest problem with that context is the size of the data, so it would actually be harder there than other apps where you could really just save out the state to disk in JSON format, and read it right in again later!

The old chestnut of “Java vs. .NET” has reared its head again (e.g. Java vs. Microsoft .Net debate rages).

I actually wished that one of the instant audience polls would have been:

How would like like TheServerSide to include other technologies outside of Java?

• Only Java Tech please! This is your niche! Have a TSS.NET conference for that stuff
• Other fringe tech, but from the point of view of an enterprise Java guy
• I have to work in a heterogenous environment, so would love a hard core .NET track. Besides. I don’t have to go :)

The reason I mention this, is that I think the community has chilled out from the days of “oh man, I hope .NET doesn’t take over!”.

Now, several years have passed, and J2EE is doing fine. .NET is doing fine too. We can live in harmony ;)

These days, a lot of developers work in the world of both Java and .NET. In fact, what does it even mean to be an “enterprise Java developer”.

Why, just today I wrote SQL, Java, JavaScript, ruby, Groovy, bash, and had to look at XML. Hardly Java only :)

Now the politics has died down, I think there is a lot to gain by having a conference where the camps mix. I enjoyed my time at MS Tech Ed last year, and learnt a few things.

Are we ready?

Justin Gehtland, co-author of Better, Faster, Lighter Java, has blogged about his experience porting an application running on a Java stack (Java/Spring/Hibernate/JSTL stack), to Ruby on Rails.

On speed of development

First of all, I

Ramnivas Laddad has got a two-part article series AOP and metadata: A perfect match, part of the AOP@Work series, in the queue.

He also talks about using annotations for compile-time, and strucural modifications to a program.

E.g., wouldn’t this be a nice way to simplify get/setters (a la Groovy):

public class Person {
@Property(ReadOnly) private long id;
@Property private String name;
}

It is going to be very interesting to see how these types of annotations get into the system. Will open source projects start building them? Will we wait for the JCP to standardize on them?

Adrian Colyer has taken Ramnivas’ idea and whipped it up using AOP (showing that you don’t need a custom APT (annotation processing tool)).

Since installing mt-scode for MoveableType, I wondered if there was a Java framework that would easily allow you to add CAPTCHA style authentication to our apps.

There is an open source framework: JCAPTCHA.

There is an article on the framework Use a CAPTCHA-based authentication module for J2EE Web applications

Spam has become one of the biggest menaces on the Web. Many community-based applications force authentication only to distinguish a valid user from an automated spam-bot, which can be overkill in some cases. CAPTCHAs help in differentiating between real users and automated bots. In this article, Anand Raman uses CAPTCHAs as weak authentication mechanisms for J2EE Web applications. He begins with a quick introduction to both the J2EE Web application security model and CAPTCHAs. He then builds on these concepts to implement a JAAS (Java Authentication and Authorization Service) login module using CAPTCHAs and integrates it with an application server’s existing security infrastructure. The artifacts are based on standard J2EE security mechanisms. Hence, the module can be reused on any J2EE application or across different application servers with some minor modifications.

We have been using Acegi security recently, rather than CMS, and it would be nice to plug this in over there.

I often worry about the images. On one site I had to reload 3 times to get an image in which I could actually read!

It was interesting to read that Netscape 8.0 lets you choose IE or Mozilla as the renderer.

You have to admit that this is kinda funny though:

It is interesting to see that you can lookup weather via Google now:

Search:

weather Madison, WI

weather 10024

It is interesting how rather than having “Google Weather”, or something like it, this feature is embedded into the main area. This fits in nicely with other features such as airport listings (sfo airport), and addresses.

How long until it becomes Ask Jeeves-ish and you can type in English (and it actually does do what you want)

Cameron turned me on to this movie.

The old annoyance of seeing 4 friends walking down the road on their phones, is getting matched by the white earplugs.

Resistence is futile.

And then Rob of Tangosol made it a double

I currently never see a Google Ad from AdSense. This is because I have installed AdBlock for Firefox.

I have blocked the iframe, and nothing from the google ad servers is shown.

How can Google get around this problem? One solution would be to use XmlHttpRequest:

• Have XHR go back to the servers to get the ad content
• Add this content to a <div> dynamically

Of course, this isn’t a solution. We could then block those div elements based on IDs. So, Google would probably want to randomly create div ids for the content.

Also, there are many other possibilities. The ads could change dynamically based on:

• Where you are on the page
• If you are mouse over a div with a given rel tag, the ad could change to something relevant to that area even
• “Those who were here, also went there”
• etc..