SWAINE'S CAFE

Black. No Sugar. Extra Caffeine.

September 2006

The largest event ever dedicated exclusively to the cluster of technologies known as AJAX is going on from 10/2 to 10/4 in Santa Clara....

Sun Microsoystems will be there talking about the ways in which Java is opening up to AJAX. Meanwhile, the 10th Annual JAOO conference is taking place 10/1 to 10/6 in Aarhus, Denmark. JAOO is a highly-thought-of non-commercial, non-academic conference for Java and Object Oriented developers.

Schwartzwatch Alert: Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has been talking with Robert Scoble again.

Then there's this: it's no Y2K crisis, but there is a little time-change issue that'll raise its head next year. As Sun points out, US Daylight Savings Time is changing in 2007.

Also: Elliotte Rusty Harold has just made his teaching notes on Java available in book form. He's going the Lulu route.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 05:00 PM  Permalink |

There's something about attending a major conference on a subject that engages you. You get to connect with others of like mind and get a little more obsessive about your obsessions than is generally cool. You get to wear those Spock ears or get into a shouting match over closures or bigendianness vs. littleendianness.

I remember, literally decades ago, when you could attend a few key shows like Comdex and the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco and find out about nearly all the hot new products and technologies in the personal computer sphere. As the PC universe expanded it took more shows, and more specialized shows, to reveal all the must-know stuff. Major hardware and software vendors took to holding their own developer conferences to explain the increasingly complicated mix of technologies they wanted their third-party developers to know about.
But there were always a few key shows that you had to attend if you wanted to get a whiff of what the more distant future might hold. Ben Rosen's PC Forum, later run by Esther Dyson. Stewart Alsop's Demo conference. Movers and shakers went to those conferences and often spoke unguardedly around the pool. Well, the PC Forum is no more. Kaput.
Demo keeps on, but if you're more interested in seeing emerging Java-based products, there's this week's Demofall Conference in San Diego. InfoWorld says it's going to be a big Java show.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 02:17 PM  Permalink |

The Ruby language and Sun's Jini are very different technologies for very different purposes. Last week, both were in the news, as proponents of one moved closer to Sun's bosom and proponents of the other -- um, got drunk? (We have the pictures!)

Last week Sun hired two key JRuby developers, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo. I should say the two key JRuby developers. There seems to have been some controversy about what they are going to be doing at Sun. Maybe it's settled now. Apparently there was no controversy at the 10th Annual Jini Community Meeting in Brussels last week over the crucial question: Why Brussels? Clearly it was all about the beer. One topic under discussion in Brussels struck an odd sort of parallel with Sun's adopting of JRuby: Jini's appeal to be adopted by the Apache Foundation. Not the same sort of adoption, but vaguely suggestive nevertheless of the relative positions of the adopted versus the natural child of Sun.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 05:04 PM  Permalink |

Nice essay in his blog by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on the digital divide. The gist of it was that a company Sun's size ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, that corporate responsibility and a long-range vision really do matter, and that it shouldn't all be about short-term bottom line concerns.

Of course, some might argue that tackling the digital divide is a job more suited to, say, this guy.

Note the photo, by the way. With technology executives Mark Shuttleworth, Dennis Tito, Gregory Olsen setting the style, I think that Steve Jobs and Jonathan Schwartz are no longer the style-setters of the industry. The astronaut look is in.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 02:14 PM  Permalink |

Sometimes I take my glasses off to see better. I find that reducing visibility can focus my attention on the important stuff, although I hasten to add that it works better for viewing websites than for, say, driving a car.

Taking off my glasses and squinting at IBM's Java Technology page, I see the term AJAX appearing boldly and frequently.

There are two multi-part articles on IBM's Java page labeled Editor's Picks, both about AJAX, and there's a link to an article on the plan of Sun to integrate a lot of external AJAX components into JSF. That AJAX is hot is not news, but it is interesting that Sun wants to impose some standardization and commoditization onto a loosely-defined and web-standards-breaking bundle of technologies dreamed up in the shower by a guy named Jesse James.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 01:53 AM  Permalink |