The Cave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mozilla

Some examples of real UI design work, from the upcoming Office 2007. Impressive, and should be very instructional for many “UI programmers” who don’t even know of such concepts, let alone execute upon them. That probably applies to non-UI programmers, managers and others – UI work takes time, and there’s a lot more to it [...]

Perhaps so: One problem is that the “must understand” feature is intended to prevent dumb software from performing an action when it doesn’t know how to do it right. In reality, software tends to have bugs and developers tend to be optimistic, and thus there is no way to guarantee the software is going to [...]

Show me the interoperable, full and free implementations of WS-* in Python, Perl, Ruby and PHP. You won’t see them, because there’s no intrinsic value in WS-* unless you’re trying to suck money out of your customers. Its complexity serves as a barrier to entry at the same time that it creates “value” that can [...]

Wonderful quote from one of the JavaDoc scripting BOFs: “It’s not dead, just wonderfully slow moving”

Did you know this is legal? Bizarre, cryptic, but hey – perfectly legal. “SGML SHORTTAG” is the magic phrase you’re looking for. I learned of this from here.

Less is more?

Jim Driscoll lays out how Servlets came to be. Also mentions JSP and Tomcat.

TheServerSide post about GWT. More GWT writeup at JavaScriptSearch. And the rumor of GWT == Morfik is dismissed. But of course I knew that already, since I know GWT’s history (evolved from CPS).

Pournelle’s analysis of the outcome for the current immigration mess. I find it hard to argue with his logic.

 A synopsis of the responses during JavaOne’s Fireside Chat which Sun essentially blew off, ignored, or acknowledged they’re doing (and intend to do) squat about. Here’s a different writeup on the Fireside Chat (including the things Sun is doing something about).

Charles Eames writes The single, most important feature that inspires my enthusiasm about WS-* is that it has universal support from all the major vendors. Ah, there we are; major vendors. What she’s basically saying here is that if you’re silly enough to have invited one of these vampires into your home, you’ll have the [...]

Uhuh. This comment gets it righter.

More news including comments from Brendan Eich. Good stuff.

Very amusing.

Cringley predicts Sun is doomed.

Cringely predicts a dismal future for IBM.

Released. I saw some comments about XFire with a comparison here. Unfortunately I can’t connnect to the site right now. Will have to circle back and take a peek. Interestingly, Axis2 does not support JAX-RPC or JAX-WS: It is true that Axis2 1.0 does not support JAX-RPC/JAX-WS etc..That’s not by accident rather by design. We [...]

Just released.

Sun had an alumni-only event, basically an open forum Q&A panel session with Gosling and a half dozen other high Sun muckety mucks. Most notable comments: 1. Mobile US market is a mess, because of the telecom companies. Asia is open and vibrant, Europe is there, US is very fragmented and fractious. Besides the technical [...]

Attended the ‘pre-game’ show. Sat in on the web services day long marathon. Normally a 5 day course, even w/o labs it was a bit cut down, but all the meat was there. Excellent slides. SAAJ was nifty – it’s SOA::Message! OK, that’s unfair. SOA::Message is nicer Ask Joe. He was there. JAX-RPC provides the [...]

Morning. Coffee. Really lame Enterprise Ajax with Java Technologies session. Bo-ring. Not the best speaker either, and really hard to read slides. Mostly drank my coffee, pawed at the laptop and saw what the speaker’s cat looked like. Wandered off to Microsoft Atlas. Unfortunately, it was in the tiny room, it was jam packed, and [...]

JSON by Douglas Crockford (creator of JSON, back in 2001). (Still) very cool stuff. The ultimate data definition language/syntax. Has a standard MIME definition now – application/json. Interesting statement – it’s being proposed as a standard, with no version. It’s just JSON. “But…” What if there will be a future version? I agree with Crockford, [...]

PlotKit is a charting and graphing and drawing library, in Javascript, using MochiKit, that uses a variety of mechanisms to do its thing (whatever’s available). This is neat sheeeeeit. Forget SVG. PlotKit looks like the clear way to go. TurboGears also uses MochiKit. More proof of that Mochi Love

Perl vs. Python