SWAINE'S CAFE

Black. No Sugar. Extra Caffeine.

July 2007

O'Reilly's OSCON is going on this week, and despite the O'Reillian fetish for languages that start with the letter P, there will be a number of Java-related sessions, including Java SE Chief Engineer Mark Reinhold reviewing the first eight months of OpenJDK.

O'Reilly himself (Tim, not the falafel fetishest) opens the conference by discussing what he calls the six (mutually perpendicular?) axes of Open Source: license, architecture, reusability, remixability, control, and community, or as Larry Wall (who will be there once again exploiting audiences' tendency to mistake him for Weird Al Yankovic) would probably truncate them: License, Architecture, Reusability, Remixability, and Yaddayadda. The Axes of Larry!

Or not. Other Java sessions at OSCON will apparently address everything including the kitchen sink.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 01:49 PM  Permalink |

At the beginning of the month, IBM released Project Zero, 'an incubator project started within IBM that is focused on the agile development of the next generation of dynamic Web applications' that includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP and APIs for developing REST-style services, and since then it has taken quite a beating.

At issue is IBM's licensing policy for Zero, which is explicitly not open source. But Zero is 'being developed openly using a Community-Driven Commercial Development process,' IBM says, so some clarification seems needed.

You could check out the faq or the podcast, in which we learn that it's all good and cool and great.

Or you could see what the Groovy people think, or get the lowdown from the server side, or a PHP perspective and see if it flips your bucket, but I'd guess you're more interested in what Java programmers think about it.

A consensus seems to be forming, and it isn't positive.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 06:21 PM  Permalink |

I was reading an email Saturday morning from Brian Egge of ThoughtWorks, the company behind CruiseControl, the Java-based continuous integration product (OK, family of products, of which the flagship product is Java-based). Coincidentally...

ThoughtWorks is based in Sydney, and I happened to be watching Live Earth Sydney as I read Brian's email. Naturally, I Googlemapped the locations. Looks like the office is about 4K away from the stadium. I started drawing all sorts of conclusions from this meagre little bit of map detection, until I realized that Brian could well be living in Palo Alto.

We are well into the era of the officeless company. Even DDJ is as officeless as a Web 2.0 startup. That Sydney location might just be a mailstop.

Here's what Brian wrote:

Hi Mike,

I enjoyed your article about builds in the latest issues of DDJ. I thought you'd like to know that ThoughtWorks was early to the idea of a continuous build server, but late to the idea of selling an enterprisy type product. Well, we've come out with Cruise Control Enterprise to serve the customer base who want to pay for something.

For a tidy sum of money, one can get 24x7 support and more.

Cheers,

Brian

Posted by Mike Swaine at 01:30 PM  Permalink |

According to the Cook Political Report, iPhone is mulling a run for President. In Black Rock Desert, racer Andy Green has set a new land speed record driving an 8GB iPhone. Rosie O'Donnell has been replaced on The View by iPhone.

And speaking of Java, which iPhone birthmother Steve Jobs won't do, did you see this study, which was reported at JavaLobby, and which describes a porting experience in which 'a .NET application actually performs better after being cross compiled and deployed on WebSphere than it does running as the original .NET application'?

If the devil is in the details, cross-platform performance comparisons are invariably demon-infested, but this result is interesting enough to make one want to examine the details.

Sometimes, though, the devil is in being too detailed.

There's Java in that light switch, so why not in iPhone, Steve? iPhoneiPhoneiPhoneiPhoneiPhone.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 02:26 PM  Permalink |