SWAINE'S CAFE

Black. No Sugar. Extra Caffeine.

December 2006

As I contemplate an early-January trip to Prague, the European capital known as the birthplace of NetBeans, this Java platform-plus-IDE has been in my thoughts.

The evidence is that I'm not alone. Jonathan Schwartz recently posted a world map of NetBeans downloads on his blog, with the number of downloads represented by color intensity. Looking at that warm magenta glow in Eastern Europe, I could almost forget that it's probably going to be colder than an unexpected icicle down the back of the neck in the Czech Republic in January. A lot colder, I imagine, than India, where DDJ editor-in-chief Jonathan Erickson will be hanging out. The official Website of the Czech Republic brags about an area just a few km south of Prague that is fondly known as "Czech Siberia" for its unusually cold weather.

NetBeans, though, is apparently hot. Not so much as evidence of this fact as in a spirit of "isn't that interesting?", I note that NetBeans author Geertjan's blog discusses how the NetBeans book is being written in NetBeans and also offers some background on the truly interesting NetBeans Lexer API.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to trip preparations: packing my long underwear and reading Kafka.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 04:34 PM  Permalink |

Given that JavaPro proclaimed 2005 the Year of Ajax, it's almost surprising that the mix of technologies described by that acronym are still hot. But so it seems.

For example, in the past week: The jMaki project has released the version 1.0 beta of the jMaki Ajax framework for creating Ajax web apps using Java, while DWR's 2.0 RC1 release introduced reverse Ajax functionality. On IBM's Developerworks site, Bruce Tate has an article for Java developers promoting Ajax on Rails. And Gary Horen argues that new Ajax runtime frameworks make Ajax a more realistic way to develop rich user interfaces for Web applications. DevX did a roundup of said Ajax frameworks. And that's just a quick sampling.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 11:25 AM  Permalink |

If you were more paranoid than the level-headed codemonkey that I know you to be, your second reaction to Sun's releasing of Java under the GPL would be 'Yeah, but what about GPL v3?'

Sun's General Counsel blogs on that very question, and sounds reasonable enough. The justification for any attack of GPL v3 paranoia is the unfolding story of the Microsoft-Novell mutual indemnification society and the reaction of the GPL community, especially Eben Moglun's assertion that GPL v3 will be crafted to explicitly forbid whatever it is that Microsoft and Novell have done, and assertions here and there that this could kill v3.

In the light of this, it's nice to see that Sun seems to be on track with the evolution of the GPL.

Or am I being insufficiently paranoid?

Posted by Mike Swaine at 01:20 PM  Permalink |