May 31

RE: Why Google Maps Wins

Google, Tech No Comments »

Scott Andrew thinks he knows why Google Maps wins:

It occurs to me that the real winning feature of Google Maps is not its DHTML-goodness, its endless scrolling surfaces, its Ajax underpinnings nor its satellite photo views. Rather, the winning feature is the user types the address into a single input box. No more entering street address, city, state and zip into separate boxes. You don’t even need commas, AFAICT.

Good point. I always liked how in England I would just get asked for my house number (18, 213 #B, etc) and postal (zip) code. With that information you can calculate every location in England.

If we could really push the whole zip+4 then we can get the same affect. Right now if I put in my zip+4 to Google Maps, it just gives me the high level of the 5 digit version.

More Google Maps / UK hacks here

May 31

JVM support for AOP in JRockit

AOP 1 Comment »

It was nice to read Jonas Boner talk about the session at JavaOne 2005 on AOP in the JVM.

This will be the first time ever to show an enterprise JVM – BEA JRockit – with native AOP support. Alex Vasseur and myself have been pushing for this idea since the early days of AspectWerkz when we joined the JRockit group, and it’s finally taking shape, with now support for AspectJ 5, the de-facto standard for AOP in Java.

Credit should also go to Joakim Dahlstedt, the CTO of JRockit, who has been playing a leading role in the design and implementation.

We will talk about the current problems with bytecode based weaving (multiple agents, double bookkeeping, performance etc.) and then discuss how these problems can be solved through native JVM support. We will show a prototype of our implementation, go through the programming model and run a live demo.

Having native AO support in the VM will be very cool indeed. Microsoft has some features itself in their research VM called “Phoenix”.

May 29

Football: England 2, US 1

Sport No Comments »

I went through a timewarp yesterday. Along with family, we trekked to Chicago to see the English football team play the US at Soldier field. As soon as we were there we got transported to Little Britain. Every accent was english. British soccer jerseys (a bunch of people switched their England shirts for Liverpool ;) were all over.

The brits really know how to have a good time. I love hearing the chants throughout the game. On the US side all you hear is “Goals. Goals. Goals. For the Red, White and Blue” blaring from the speaker system, versus gems such as:

“Are you Scotland in disguise”

or:

“Stand up, if you hate Arsenal”

or:

“Who ate all the pies, who ate all the pies, you fat b*d, you fat b*d, YOU ate all the pies”

To the game itself, England are very lucky to have won the game yesterday. The US is unfortunate. Most of the pressure came from America throughout the game really, and Calamity James lived up to his reputation. England looked more likely to score on the breaks though.

I often feel that the US team is very solid, but they lack that LITTLE bit when it comes to the final third. It was the same again, as all rights, they should have been able to win 3-2.

May 27

AOP and Ajax

AOP, Ajax, Java, Tech 2 Comments »

Technorati peaked my interest when it found the same entry regarding AOP and Ajax.

AOP and Caching

I was recently developing a new AJAX based system for picking a drugs from a long potential list. Specifically, there are two drop down lists – picking an element from the first select list makes the page look up the entry from the server.

In itself, this is rather unexciting, but i got a chance to code is in what is IMHO a rather elegant manner:

I used JSON for the javascript-server client communication, and spring+hibernate for all server side interaction. Now, at this point, we are still talking a decent implementation, the part that I really liked was using AOP for method level caching.

May 25

RE: Why Standardize BeanShell and Groovy?

Java, Tech 3 Comments »

RMH has written a new entry, in which he gives his thoughts on Why Standardize BeanShell and Groovy?.

I am not trying to bash the JCP, or Groovy, or BeanShell.

However:

  • I do not believe that standardizing anything before there are multiple parties involved that need to put a standard touch on it
  • I believe standards should come on very late in the process, to clean up and make common ground (concurrency, not EJB)
  • Although I can see how some “management” like the notion of standardization. It isn’t a cure. We are seeing a lot of interest in Ruby, and it isn’t a “standard”. It just happens to be scratching an itch. If JRuby was 100% done and solid, then a whole lot of people would be using it. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is standardized or not.

So, first, make something that is very usable and useful. Maybe later in the day it will get standardized, but why are we putting so much into that?

Just my 2p.

May 25

Package Naming: To use “com.” or not

Java, Tech 14 Comments »

We were taught to avoid conflicts by using a package name such as com.adigio.subproject.package. This is much better than just using a project name such as “web.” for sure.

However, I keep running into packages such as com.mything.* where mything isn’t a domain at all that the owner owns.

So now, we have moved the namespace clash down a notch.

Do we need the com package anymore? Would adigio.* really be so much worse?

A large part of me thinks not, and as long as we are not stupid and do not pick generic top level packages, we would be fine. This seems to work OK in the other language camps :)

In fact, in some ways, I always liked the fact that: Net::FTP and Net::HTTP could actually be written by different parties…. and that is managed in a different way.

Do you like the com package? (or .net, or .countrycode, etc).

Think about how much package renaming we wouldn’t have to go through in open source (net.sf.* -> org.myproject.*). For example, if Hibernate was just hibernate.* to begin with.

May 25

Netscape 8.0: Getting attacked by all sides

Tech, Web Browsing 1 Comment »

The new Netscape 8.0 is getting hit from all sides:

Mozilla Firefox

Ben Goodger has written that Netscape 8.0 is unsafe.

He also talked about the new Google hire Brian Ryner, who is known for his XForms work.

IE

Over at the IE Blog they give you the fix needed to get XML support working again with IE. It seems like Netscape got a bit naughty:

We

May 25

High speed trains in the midwest

Personal No Comments »

I really hope I get to jump on a train in Madison and end up in Minneapolis or Chicago :)

All aboard

Last month, the transportation departments of eight Midwestern states proposed the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative. This $7.7 billion proposal would connect cities like Indianapolis and Minneapolis through a Chicago hub via 110 mph trains. Last year the feds spent over $30 billion on highways.

[via nuvo.net]

May 25

BeanShell JSR? Do we not learn?

Java, Tech 5 Comments »

RMH pointed me to a new JSR 274: The BeanShell Scripting Language.

Now, I am VERY much in support for getting various languages running on the JVM. I think that is the future for Java as a platform. I would LOVE to see JRuby kick ahead, see Groovy come to 1.0, and any other cool DSL that would allow us to express ourselves in a different way on the Java platform.

However, what is with standardizing these languages? In my opinion it made NO sense for Groovy, and I thought we had seen this.

Best of luck to the BeanShell guys, but wow.

May 23

Apple on Intel

Apple, Tech 1 Comment »

Remember when the first talk of Mac OS X came out? There was the whole “Yellow Box”, “Blue Box”, etc etc.

The point was that the OS would run on Intel as well as PowerPC. Everyone thought that would be very cool indeed. But it never happened.

Now Rumors have come up again.

Finally a Mac that can run on nice fast dual processors that don’t burn up?

Bring it on :)