Steve's Radio Weblog

Javaworld Starts Charging

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 02:31:27 GMT

JavaWorld is now charging $49.99/year to view any content more than 1 week old. They must be going downhill fast, and now they just want to make themselves more irrelevant by creating a barrier to linking to any of their articles. There hasn't been much of interest on JavaWorld for a while anyway, so this won't be too big of a loss.

Database Refactoring

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 01:58:26 GMT

An interesting database refactoring article by Martin Fowler. It mostly discusses the overall process but not the specific low-level refactorings.

MS must carry Java

Tue, 24 Dec 2002 00:48:22 GMT

Microsoft ordered to carry Java. A U.S. district court judge orders the software giant to include Sun's version of Java with the Windows operating system. [CNET News.com]

I can't see this decision helping Java. It has not been decided yet which products will have to carry Java, but even if every copy of sold next year contains it that still leaves millions of existing copies that don't. This ruling will still have the survive the actual trial and all appeals before developers can depend on having a copy of Java in Windows. Even if every copy of Windows does have Java, so what? It is not the lack of a JRE that has kept Java from becoming popular on the client. There is no chance of that until Swing apps routinely run as well as native ones. I have to larely agree with Alan Williamson that the ruling sets a terrible precedent and does not really solve anything. It seems more like a way for McNealy to publicly embarass MS and any benefits to Java are secondary. Couldn't Sun have gone to Dell, HP, and Gateway and given them the JRE to bundle on every new computer. That could have had almost the same effect without resorting to the government to solve Sun's problems.

Selling Java Components

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 04:26:52 GMT

BEA partners to expand Java component market. BEA Systems has partnered with ComponentSource, an online software exchange, in a bid to expand the market for prewritten Java components and make the development language more competitive with rival technologies from Microsoft. [InfoWorld: Top News]

This seems pointless. With the number of quality open-source components available in the Java world, I can't see there ever being a significant market for Java components. BEA seems to be betting on it, but Java is never going to be VB.

JVM-compatible Languages

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 15:19:16 GMT

Languages for the JVM.

A great list of Languages for the Java VM which includes over 160 entries. [James Strachan's Radio Weblog]

It's a shame Sun doesn't publicize these kinds of things. Their policy of always equating the language with the VM is one of the major mistakes they have made in promoting java. It should have been the Java Programming Language for the Something-Else Platform.

JSR 201

Thu, 05 Dec 2002 02:24:01 GMT

JSR 201 and Non-Disruptive Language Extensions.

Looks like there's a new JSR in the JCP, the following will be added to J2SE 1.5:

Enumerated Types.
An automatic conversion of primitives to their object wrappers.
Enhanced for loops.
Unqualified constants.

[::Manageability::]

With these, plus the metadata JSR, Java is pulling in most of the good ideas in C#. Since the two are so similar, they could go into some kind of feature-matching feedback loop for a long time to come. It's too bad that 1.5 is at least a year away, and that it will be another two years after that before these changes start to come into widespread use.

Swing vs. SWT

Sun, 17 Nov 2002 15:42:50 GMT

Carlos on SWT vs. Swing and IDEA 3.0.

One other observation, is that IDEA can be more innovative on the GUI side, that's because Swing is definitely more maleable than SWT. SWT may be fast, however Swing is more agile, and just possibly with all these 2Ghz machines and up, it just won't matter.[Carlos Perez on SWT vs. Swing and IDEA 3.0]

This is a good point. I'm a GUI guy at heart and I've worked extensively with Swing. I really like it and Carlos is right, it is very flexible and extensible. With faster and faster processors and more and more memory, the performance problems with Swing will become less and less apparent. [Blogging Roller] The performance issues will eventually go away, but the problem with Swing will always be that it will never look quite like a native app. Emulation of changes to the Windows controls is always going to lag significantly behind the real thing. Developers don't seem to care much if their IDE looks like a native app, but it seems to be more important for the general-use market.

Standard IDE JSR

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 02:53:06 GMT

Oracle joins Eclipse. Vendor also set to announce Java IDE standards proposal [InfoWorld: Top News] I'm not sure I see how this will work. Trying to come up with an API that will allow GUI elements to work on both SWT and Swing doesn't seem possible. It almost seems like this is an effort to kill SWT. Of course it will be years before the API will be finished and implemented in any IDEs.

Neuros MP3 player

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 15:28:40 GMT

Cool new $399 digital audio appliance for Win users. The Neuros MP3 Digital Audio Computer looks bitchin', for Win ME/98/2K/XP users. Debuts in January, 2003:

Link
[Boing Boing Blog]

This looks great, but with FM to MP3 recording, I can see the lawsuits coming now.