Brennan’s Blog

I seems that Apple has cracked open the door for third party applications on the iPhone. I hope this means that at least third party XHTML/AJAX applications will be possible. Many of the the mini applications (widgets, dashboard, gadgets) which have become popular over the past year are basically just mini web applications. They render their layout and graphics with standard XHTML, CSS and images with their behavior provided by an enhanced superset of Javascript.

While it may seem limited to networked applications, it will soon be possible to create web applications which work offline with local storage just like a "real" application. Such an application could locally store your preferences such as your zip code and weather data so that when you look at the weather forecast it does not always have to connect to the internet. Since the AJAX explosion there have been a greatly increasing number of tools to support development with Javascript so it is becoming easier every day to build these kind of applications.

But we can now consider using Java and .NET for these mobile applications which could eventually include the iPhone. It seems inevitable anyway. I think it is no accident that Silverlight was ported to work on MacOS X with a very small footprint. They clearly want to make it possible to deploy Silverlight applications to mobile platforms as well, and since the iPhone is running an OS which Apple claims is pretty much the same as MacOS X it may be trivial to extend Silverlight to the iPhone.

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Last week Microsoft announced Silverlight with cross-platform support for Windows and MacOS X. This was unexpected. And somehow they shrunk the runtime down to 4MB and met a goal of getting the installer to run in under 20 seconds. It is really an amazing feat and I am anxious to see what people build with it.

Today Sun announced JavaFX, a scripting friendly version of the Java platform which may compete on the same ground as Silverlight with a emphasis on the mobile market. Given Sun's track record I seriously do not expect much. I tend to believe that you will sooner see Silverlight applications on the new iPhone than JavaFX. I heard that at a recent Microsoft conference that Macs were everywhere. I think Microsoft may be warming up to Apple for some reason. Maybe they know that Apple will soon own a large portion of the mobile and home entertainment market and want to hedge their bets by having their hands in both cookie jars.

But what about SVG?

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The next meeting for the WJUG will cover Software Development Techniques.

In this session, learn five of the techniques I've borrowed along the way. We'll discuss The List, code reviews, code change notifications, daily meetings, and tech leads. These techniques are often abused, but when used properly they can make a huge difference in how you develop software. Take this opportunity to add these practices to your toolkit.

No matter what platform or language you use this should be a useful session. On a related note, I just purchased Mythical Man Month which covers this topic extensively. It is a special anniversary edition with revised commentary after the original book named "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays in Software Engineering" was published back in 1975. The lessons covered in the book are still valid today.

I came across a mention on Digg.com about Java 6 being released. The official press release shows that it was released yesterday. Yet, I am not seeing any mention of the new release at major news sources like CNN and ABC News. I cannot even tell if Sun had a launch event for this release. The mere fact that the news did not hit Digg.com until the day after should be an indication that this was not considered a major event by many.

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A fresh post on Slashdot called "Java To Be Opened For Christmas?" has an active discussion going right now. It appears the coming open source release of Mustang (JDK6) has sparked musings over the future of Java.

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I came across a post on Java Lobby while browsing Digg.com. It explains that Azureus, a popular BitTorrent client, has shown that Java is a major liability with sluggishness being a primary concern. The suggestion reminded me of my own performance problems with Azureus but also LimeWire, a Gnutella client which is also written in Java. I remember times when I attempted to run searches with LimeWire and it would not only run slowly, it would cause the whole computer to become unresponsive. And that was on my snow iBook, a Mac. So the performance issue goes beyond Windows.

You could dismiss the performance problems with these software packages in the early stages of the projects but it comes to a point where attention and effort is put into tuning performance. Given that these clients have been around for a considerable amount of time it must be something which cannot be tuned at this level.

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Fantastic! This has been a long time coming. The past few years I have watched the Java community go back and forth on the how Java should be managed. The heated discussions about the Java Community Process and the timeliness of the Java Specifications Request implementations has left a good deal to be desired. And true to the tenants of open source, alternatives emerged to scratch that itch. For JSR #12, the JDO specification, you can see there was a 5 year delay from the inception to the implementation. During that time the Java community did not wait around for a robust implementation of the "developed by committee" solution. And Hibernate emerged as the de facto standard for O/R mapping as it beat out other open source solutions like Castor.

Another example of open source beating the JSR process to the punch is Java 1.4 Logging versus Log4j. When the official logging implementation was finally released the open source alternative was already deeply rooted in the Java developers toolkit, it included more features and it was backward compatible to Java 1.2. The official logging solution required Java 1.4 which hindered adoption.

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Three of the Java User Groups in Wisconsin will be presenting CruiseControl by Al Wick from SpiderLogic. CruiseControl is an open-source build automation tool which assists with automated unit testing and integration builds. It is a very powerful tool and Al has had extensive experience with it over the last 3 years. He even created a GUI to help make configuration of the system easier! The announcement covers all of the details. He will be in your neighborhood, so don't miss it.

I was compiling some Java code which includes some unit tests early this morning and my newly installed Norton AntiVirus 2005 kept on warning me that a Trojan was being detected and it was trying to connect to Java 1.4.0. I found this was odd since I am running Java 1.4.2_04. I dug around and found that the Windows Environment Variables for JAVA_HOME and PATH were still referencing an existing 1.4.0 installation. I was annoyed that the Java installers were not smart enough to update these values, so I took care of it manually.

I had Norton AntiVirus installed only because recently my supposedly secure PC was overcome by Spyware. My usage on the machine is limited to 3 activities: playing Halo, coding Java with IDEA and browsing a few websites with Firefox. It is a Windows 2000 box and I do not use MSIE or Outlook. I was baffled on how the Spyware got onto my machine. I actually use my iBook for most mail and web activity. Occasionally I will open up Windows Media files but I scanned all the media files on the machine with Norton AntiVirus and it was clean of known exploits. Then I was given a tip that I had to upgrade the Java Runtime due to a security exploit for Java applets in web browsers, including Firefox. Secunia reports 2 advisories on the problem: one and two. These exploits affect Java 1.3.x and 1.4.x runtimes and SDKs. Everyone should upgrade now.
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Last night I attended the Wisconsin Java Users Group meeting and Erik Hatcher presented Tapestry. I have been working with web technologies a long time and I have experimented with many templating and web publishing systems, so I was curious how this fairly popular application works. I have mixed thoughts on it...
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