James Cook

Infragistics Joins the Java Community Process

James Cook — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:05:00 GMT

Yes! Infragistics is now an official member of the Java Community Process. Everyone involved with Java here at IG is incredibly excited. As a member we will be much better informed regarding developments in the Java world, with particular regard to Java Server Faces and portals. Over the next few months we hope to join a few of the appropriate Expert Groups as well, which will allow us to contribute to emerging specifications.

First Working Draft of HTML 5 Released

James Cook — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:46:00 GMT

Its about time!

The Consortium has also released a document detailing the differences between 4.0 and 5. It available here.

Some highlights of the new features:

two-dimensional graphics
control of embedded audio and video
persistent client-side data storage
interactive document (and partial document) editing
drag and drop API
a network API
and "event-source" tag for "catching server sent events"

Sun Acquires MySQL

James Cook — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:28:00 GMT

That's it really. Read more here.

Sun was touting JavaDB at Javapolis. JavaDB, which is basically Derby, is packaged with Java 6.

Food for thought.

Cloud Computing?

James Cook — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:03:00 GMT

This term has been floating around the internet for some time now, but a lot of people seem confused about what it means. Basically Cloud computing is simply the idea that the main functionality of an application is stored on a central server and accessed as needed by users, normally through a web browser using HTML AJAX etc. Its sort of like a 3270 terminal connected to a mainframe compter, except that its non-proprietary, and allows a much more sophisticated experience, with multimedia, colors and so on.

When the PC began to emerge in the 80s "cloud computing" was already a decade old in the Unix world. PCs, which were originally simply too weak to participate in networking in any meaningful way, ran in isolation, forcing the user to rely on applications stored, first on floppy disks and later on their personal hard drives. Of course the main problem with hard disk storage is that hard drives fail, and while various backup/recovery schemes are available, for the average home user, data loss through hard disk failure (or corruption via viruses) is still a major problem.

In the past year, Google has attempted to address this problem by offering various commonly used applications (spreadsheets, personal calendars, presentations etc) for free from its web site. Since Google's profits are tied to how much it can charge for advertising, and that in turn is tied to how many people visit its site every day, it makes perfect sense for Google to develop and give away these applications. Two nice side benefits of this are:

Google takes on the responsibility of keeping the data backed up
Your "stuff" is readily sharable across the internet with anyone you care to share with

Compared to professional office applications, the Google suite is very simple but as Josh Bloch, chief Java Architect at Google, points out In this video interview, 90% of Microsoft Office users use only 5% of the office suite's abilities. Assuming that Google has already provided 5% of the functionality of its for-sale competition, they should be able to keep most of us happy. My wife and I already use Google to share personal calendars and a spreadsheet-based track of our day-to-day expenses.

Some have argued that trusting your sensitive personal (or business data) to a third party like Google is insanity, but to me that's like keeping all your money under your mattress because you don't trust the bank. Consider the total amount of time you spend on your computer during any given week, and then consider how much of that time is spent on the internet. To rephrase this, ask yourself how much time you'd spend on your computer if it had no internet access. If you're like most of the people I know, the answer is "A whole lot less." If you shop online, or if you use social networking sites like FaceBook, you've already "told the internet" quite a bit about yourself. Not that any of it is publicly available, but you're trusting the controllers of those servers to protect your information, just as you trust the bank to protect your money.

All of which creates some interesting challenges for anyone marketing a for-sale office suite. For Microsoft in particular, loss of market share in the Office Suite line could be problematic. As they revealed a few years ago, they make healthy profits on Office, as well as on their operating systems, but everywhere else, they're losing money.

JVM Clustering

James Cook — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:09:00 GMT

Load balancing across J2EE servers has long been a problem for administrators. While offloading some services to an EJB container is one partial solution, many development teams do not want to take on the responsibilities of developing EJBs. Recently,...(read more)

Java and Ruby

James Cook — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:06:00 GMT

Java's a programming language, right? Actually no, not really. Java is more like a platform-neutral environment for coding. The source code syntax we call "Java" is secondary. Many developers don't realize it, but Java is specifically structured to allow...(read more)