Recent Posts

Eric Amstrong has published a nice summary of some of the main topics that caught his attention at this year’s JavaOne. The topics are listed as:

• Scripting Languages on the JVM
• Improved JRE Insallations
• Java Quick Start Service
• Java Modules
• Java 7 Language
• Java 7 Tools
• User Interface Testing with FEST
• Sun ID System
• DITA Pod
• Writing DSLs in Ruby

and I have highlighted the ones of particular interest to me. Eric’s article is a good place to start on an exploration of the technical session video casts when they become available.

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Dion Almaer has provided a nice new portal to the Google Tech Talk Showcase of tech videos that are hosted on Google Video. I’ve been picking these up from a search feed that looks for the engEdu tag on Google Videos and watching the videos for a couple of months now. Dion’s new showcase site now puts everything in one place. Of course, there’s also an RSS feed that in Google Reader shows you the videos right there in your feed.

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Dion Almaer blogs about the Google Developer Day which took place at several locations worldwide on 31st May. I stumbled upon the announcement of Google Gears yesterday among the growing collection of YouTube videos recorded at the various events. Expect to see follow-ups and links to comments on this event and the technologies announced at Dion’s Google Code Updates blog and reviews of some of the key videos here.

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Charles Nutter has today blogged that JRuby 1.0.0RC3 has been released and that this is expected to be the final release candidate before the release of 1.0 which will follow later this week. Time to try it out I guess!

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I’ve just ordered RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby (Published May 2007, O’Reilly Media Inc). I plan to have at least one lecture on REST (representational state transfer) and up to now the only definitive reference was Roy Fielding’s PhD thesis. I was going to buy this book anyway but an interview with the authors and a free chapter available was made available yesterday on InfoQ prompted me to take action. For more on REST see also the RESTWiki.

Just published on InfoQ is a video recorded at last year’s Java and Object-oriented (JAOO) software engineering conference. Rod, Enterprise Java guru and original developer of the Spring Framework gives a “state of the union” statement on Enterprise Java in which he states that progress has been made but we still have a ways to go. In particular he points to the need to put Domain Objects and Domain Driven Design at the centre of our enterprise applications and argues for an architecture that in some sense inverts the traditional service-layered model of enterprise applications. It would appear that AOP and dynamic languages will have a large contribution to play in achieving this. It also acts as a fairly low-key but nonetheless visible advertisement to the version 2.0 release of the Spring Framework.

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Version 2.0 of the RTS Specification (JSR 1.0) was announced in one of the Keynotes at JavaOne 2007. In Podcast #124, The Java Posse interview Greg Bollella and Dave Hofert of the Java RTS team. The interview gives a nice overview of what real-time means in the Java context. I’m now looking forward to the release of the recorded lectures. (The slides are already available.) You have to join the Sun Developer Network to access these, but registration is free.

While I’m here, let me recommend that every who’s interested in Java should tune in to the Java Posse podcast!

MS Frontpage was long known (and often derided) for its tendency to walk all over web standards. It looks like this is about to change. Best Tech Videos On The Net (which incidentally is a great place for finding new Tech Videos) has just published a set of videos and demos from Microsoft MIX07. One of these that I’ve just watched concerns how the new version of Microsoft Visual Studio (ORCAS) can be used to create great-looking AJAX web sites (tied to .NET of course!). I found the video particularly compelling because of the way MS now embrace standards-driven design and proper separation of *Style* from *Content*. For example, the HTML shown in the demo was properly marked-up XHTML 1.0 Transitional and the styles where kept out of the markup. But even better, there’s a visual designer for CSS that shows the padding, margins and styles all linked to views of the tags, style properties, and live display. This stuff apparently is in Microsoft Expression and if so, it will make that product a really compelling replacement for Frontpage. It’ll be even more so if Microsoft has recognized that not all web sites are based on ASP.NET! But I guess I’ll have to evaluate the product to see if that is true!

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Another hero on video. This time Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the WikiWikiWeb, interviewed by John Gage of Sun Microsystems at the Computer History Museum. As well as Wiki, Ward discusses other key developments, such as Class-Resources-Collaboration (CRC) cards, Software Design Patterns and Extreme Programming.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-7739076742312910146&hl=en-GB

While doing some vaguely formulated research today (it is a Bank Holiday so vagueness is allowed!), I did a search for Wiki on Google video today and came across this video of a presentation by Jeremy Ruston (developer of TiddlyWiki) recorded (I believe – the video description is a bit unclear) at a meeting on social software held in Vienna last year. You can’t see the slides, but it is clear that, for documentation, Jeremy has no love for the standard office tools and makes a good case for wikis and in particular TiddlyWiki.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=772332146705420259&hl=en-GB

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