Gadgetopia

Java history was made today!: Java lovers rejoice. Today Java overtook C as the language with most projects on SourceForge! The standings quoted have Java at 16,738 projects -- a mere seven more than C++ and about a thousand more than C.

Microsoft Java Language Conversion Assistant 2.0 Beta "The Java Language Conversion Assistant is a tool that automatically converts existing Java-language code into Microsoft Visual C# for developers who want to move existing applications to the .NET Framework."

Java is the SUV of programming tools: You may not be able to get to this link because Harvard is getting hammered by people trying to read this. "After researching how to do bind variables in Java, which turns out to be much harder and more error-prone than in 20-year-old ...

weblogs.java.net: Following on the heels of Microsoft's GotDotNet.com blogs, Sun has created their own developer blogging community.

Microsoft, Sun agree to extend support for Microsoft's Java: Never saw this coming. "Microsoft will offer technical support for its version of Sun's Java programming language through September 2004, nine months longer than previously planned, under an agreement being announced Tuesday. The agreement is between Microsoft and longtime rival Sun ...

why weren't konspire2b and kast written using java?: konspire2b is neat thing that I'll write about later, but while browsing their site, I did find this interesting morsel. It's a little FAQ explaining why the system WASN'T written in Java. Interesting.

Java's Cover: Here are twleve reasons to hate Java, written by a guy who has never programmed it. "It could be that in Java's case I'm mistaken. It could be that a language promoted by one big company to undermine another, designed by a committee for a 'mainstream' audience, hyped ...

The Perils of JavaSchools: Spolsky goes ballistic on Java and the dumbing down of computer science instruction in colleges. If you don't deal with pointers and functional recurison, then don't even think about working at Fog Creek. As an employer, I've seen that the 100% Java schools have started churning ...

McNealy: Java won't be open source: Despite urging from competitors and open source advocates, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., will not open the source to its Java programming language anytime soon, said Sun CEO Scott McNealy during a news conference at the 2004 FOSE conference.

Apache group aims at J2EE applications: No more handing off stuff to JBoss or Tomcat Apache's doing Java natively. "Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, announced in an open letter this week the formation of the Geronimo project, which will work to create Apache-compatible software for delivering ...

Is DHTML Dead?: While being unabashedly pro-Microsoft, this article makes a good case that .Net apps can squeeze out DHTML, Flash, and Java applets for client-side interactivity.

Project Rave: One reason Visual Basic has flourished like it has is because it's always been backed up by a first-rate IDE that has made programming so easy. Sun is hoping to do the same thing for Java with its new "Project Rave" line of tools. The idea is to ...

Enigma Machine Applet: Here's a Java implementation of the Enigma encoding machine, used in World War II. While it's fun to play with, unless you know how Enigma worked, it's not going to make much snese. Simon Singh's "The Code Book" provides the clearest explanation of Enigma that I've ever ...

Announcement: Upcoming Content Revision to MSDN Subscriber Downloads: Microsoft is going to stop distributing a whole slew of programs in the wake of the Java settlement. It's trying to purge itself of anything that uses the current JVM. Due to a settlement agreement reached in January 2001, the following products ...

Mozilla Coffee: You can get Worldly Lizard, Lazy Lizard, Nervous Lizard, or Enviro Lizard. "Welcome Mozilla users! In an effort to support the worlds best browser and email client, RJ Tarpley's has agreed to donate half the profit of all orders from Mozilla users directly to The Mozilla Foundation."

Friendster goes PHP: This is good news. I hate to dis Java, but, well, I hate it. Always have. ...on Friday we launched a platform rearchitecture based on loose-coupling, web standards, and a move from JSP (via Tomcat) to PHP. The website doesn't look much different, but hopefully we can ...

MySQL Gets Functions in Java: Neato. First step down a long road to making MySQL just as functional as other options. Eric Herman and MySQL's Brian "Krow" Aker have released code to allow the DBMS MySQL to run Java natively inside of the database.

Cold Fusion: Enterprise ready?: We tend to dump on ColdFusion around here a bit, but I ve been interested in this discussion over at LinkedIn Answers. It started off with someone asking if ColdFusion was enterprise ready. I m surprised by some spirited and well-reasoned answers in ColdFusion s favor. CF has been ...

IBM is planning to announce that they'll be donating the Java-based Cloudscape database to the Apache foundation, to be released as open source. Most business applications require some database functions like storing and looking up price or customer information, whether in a Web page or a laptop program. Cloudscape is ...

Internet language runs real, virtual Mars rover: Spirit runs on Java. I wonder if Beagle was running .Net? Java, the software developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1990s as a universal platform for Internet applications, gave NASA a low-cost and easy-to-use option for running Spirit, the robotic rover that ...

Being Popular: Here's an extremely long but interesting essay from Paul Graham about how to design the perfect programming language. He has no plans to do this, of course, but in considering the question he covers a lot of ground on why certain languages have thrived and others haven't. For ...

Sun Won't Join IBM-Led Java Tools Alliance: This is really too bad because Microsoft's history in the programming IDE market is so strong that all the other vendors really need to stick together. Sun Microsystems and IBM continue to battle over Java as Sun Wednesday officially declined to join the ...

log4php - log4j ported to PHP!: Log4j and Velocity were the only two things I liked about Java. Smarty can replace Velocity, and now Log4j is covered too. Log4php is a php port of Log4j, the most popular Java logging framework...Supports configuration through xml and properties file... Supports File, RollingFile, ...

Are All Programming Languages The Same?: Python wins with Perl and Ruby close on its heels. Fair enough. Des Traynor wondered if this table was valid, so he performed a simple test: he provides examples of a tiny "read a file and print it to the console" app in Java, ...

Sun Embraces Open-Source Database: The only experience that I have with Berkeley DB is thought Movable Type, which uses it as its default data storage system. Odd that suddenly they would get a big contract with Sun. Good for them. "Sleepycat Software Inc. will announce on Wednesday that Sun, of ...

EditPlus Text Editor, HTML Editor, Programmers Editor for Windows - Welcome!: A while back, Cory Doctorow had a little love-in for BBEdit, apparently the greatest text editor for Macs ever made. Well, after mentioning it a number of times over the years, it's time I did the same for the ...

Fastest web language: Interesting thread over on Spolsky's forums on the perennial question: which Web language is the fastest? Some points that jumped out at me (all from different posters): Once you scale up to the point at which performance actually matters, the database is usually the bottleneck. Using efficient ...

TyperA - test your typing skills: How fast can you type? I got 54 words per minute. Neat use of Java.

The PHP Scalability Myth: A well-reasoned and well-written argument for the scalability of PHP as opposed to Java. The theory is that even though Java may be faster to execute, J2EE has so many layers and abstractions that the end result is about the same. PHP is less architected, and ...

Much like my selfish use of this space to ask for a GMail invite, I'm now asking for a software recommendation. I'm building a Web site for our local Christian school, and we need a Web calendar. I'm not going to roll my own, so we're looking for open-source or ...

I've installed hot-rodded Linksys routers in a couple of places now, and while they work great, there was one feature I missed from the Cisco PIX box I had used previously: the handy GUI that the PIX provided to manage firewall rules. The GUI on the PIX was very ...

Grokker - A New Way to Look at Search: Grokker has encapsulated their client-side tool into a Java applet which you can use for free at their site. Looks almost exactly the same as the installable version.

InfoCentral: About five years ago, I wrote an application for my church to track people and families. I wrote about it here. I open-sourced it, and it got adopted by quite a few organizations. I went to check on it today, and I find that the site is still around, ...

oreilly.com Online Catalog: Head First Java: Although they're well-known for their text-heavy "animal" books, O'Reilly has released the first in the "Head First" series. Look at the sample chapters you'll either find them refreshing or infuriating.

FreeWebArcade.Com: Here's a great collection of a free Flash and Shockwave-based games (I think there's some Java in there too). I spent too much time this morning playing perfectly faithful implementations of the classics Frogger and Missile Command. I still suck at both of them.

Nokia to release Perl for smartphones: Right now the only options for Nokia phones are C++ and Java. This should open up scripting to a whole new class of developers. Nokia will make an internal version of the Perl scripting language for Series 60 smartphones available to its developer community...

PrettyPrinter.de, an online pretty printer for PHP, Java, C , C, Perl, JavaScript, CSS: Here's a nice little service that will clean up your semicolon-and-bracket-type code. It's well-done, but I'd like to see it sniff functions and alphabetize them. Via Simon in a comment to this post.

Top Ten IKONOS Satellite Images for 2004: There's something innately powerful about a satellite image. Here are the best of 2003 with a neat little Java viewer. Space Imaging, the world's leading provider of Earth imagery and related services to commercial and government markets introduces its top 10 images from ...

GWT is Open-Sourced: This is cool, but I had no idea the GWT was that complicated. The Google Web Toolkit has been open-sourced. The toolkit was developed internally and can be used to create products like GMail and Google Maps. It allows you to program in Java and let the ...

Teaching my kids to program: If you had to teach your kids to program, what language would you pick? There are some conspicuous absences from this list. I don't care if any of my three kids ever grok the difference between an abstract class and an interface or between a ...

What is the Best Way to Handle a GPL Violation?: There should be a Web site solely to track GPL violations. It'd be a nice way to keep everything in the same place. When you find that somebody is violating the GPL by distributing your code or a derivative of ...

We talked before about the new API extensions, but that pales in comparison to the single great thing about Firefox 1.5. Here it is -- You can now punch the monkey without fear of commitment. Since they improved pop-up blocking, including pop-ups spawned from Flash and Java, you can now ...

Information for Developers about Changes to Internet Explorer: The Eolas patent decision has spawned the dreaded IE update. Changes will need to be made, especially if your sites use Flash. "Developers who build ActiveX controls, Web developers who use ActiveX and Java Applets on their Web sites, and developers who ...

Sun's Mad Hatter takes crack at desktop Windows: They demoed this a LinuxWorld today, so it's back in the news. "Mad Hatter, which Sun first disclosed a year ago, is Sun's effort to dislodge Microsoft and its Windows/Office combination from the desktop PC. Like StarOffice, Mad Hatter will include a ...

Java Developer's Journal - Is J2EE Too Big for Its Own Good? "I question whether Sun's current monolithic approach to the Enterprise Edition is either appropriate or effective: (1) Big projects tend to move at the speed of the slowest task. (2) Coping with problems caused by unstable and changing ...

Sun to unveil MS-displacing software for business desktops: This is good to hear. "In a move aimed squarely at Microsoft, Sun Microsystems on Tuesday will unveil a suite of software for businesses that want to dump or just can't afford the Windows operating system on their companies' desktop ...

The Universe Within - Interactive Java Tutorial: I saw this several years ago, but had never been able to find it again until MetaFilter posted a link today. Very cool View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in ...

Google Presentations Released: Google has just added its Power Point replacement, alongside its Word and Excel replacements. The first impression is that Google Presentations does all it’s supposed to do (and without resorting to Java or Flash, at least judging by the parts I checked – it’s DHTML/ Ajax technology). ...

Sun Policy on Public Discourse: Tim Bray, XML inventor and all around tech God, has published blogging advice for his colleague's at Sun. I wouldn't call this a policy, it's just some good advice. In general, "sucks" is not only risky but unsubtle. Saying "Netbeans needs to have an easier ...

Parrot virtual machine: I found this in this post about the future of Perl 6. Parrot is something like Java s JVM or .Net s CLR, but for multiple, dynamic, open-source languages. Parrot is a register-based virtual machine being developed using the C programming language and intended to run dynamic languages efficiently. ...

A while back I posted something about NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft, and its hoped-for rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1; well, it looks like everything is a go -- so far anyway -- and that rendezvous will happen early tomorrow morning. Thus far the images that NASA's put up on the ...

Visual Basic Use Eroding, APAC Devs Gaining: The level of decline for VB.Net here surprises me a little. I'm not surprised to see VB6 go down, but there seems to be a marked shift to C# over VB.Net. This years' results show a "dramatic erosion" of support for Visual Basic ...

Google enlists help for Google Phone: Will this be the first official announcement of the GPhone an item that everyone is talking about as if Google has official acknowledged it? Google today plans to announce the formation of an open phone coalition, with the goal of developing an operating ...

Language Wars: Spolsky has a fun post on how to pick a language for your next Web app. [...] the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of ...

geeXP: this may seem kind of silly, but there s probably some validity to it. geeXP is a new approach to managing your projects and tasks, in a fun way, that rewards you for making progress on your own projects. Think of it like a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG, where you ...

The State of Perl: Here's a great essay on the current state of Perl and where it's headed, including information on Perl 6 and Parrot. Why do we use Perl every day? Because Perl scales to solve both small and large problems. Unlike languages like C, C , and Java, ...

If you've read this blog, you may have picked up on the fact that I'm a bit of an open-source advocate. I far prefer to use open-source solutions wherever possible. By and large, open-source doesn't get enough credit. I've run Linux and KDE as my primary work environment on my ...

say goodbye (again) to pop-ups!: Here's why a lot of sites have managed to get around Firefox's pop-up blocking lately. A lot of people have been reporting a new breed of pop-ups on the web. This increasing menace is rooted in the pop-up capabilities of plug-ins like flash and Java. ...

Get ready for the Rails buzz to reach a fever pitch: Ruby on Rails has made a 1.0 release. I can't believe that its been only two years since I started working with Ruby. So much has happened since that its hard to think that I was actually doing PHP, ...

Primate Programming Inc: They say that if you sat a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years, they would eventually turn out Shakespeare. Maybe, but could they get a Java servlet to compile? "Welcome. Primate Programming Inc. is dedicated to the advancement and gainful employment of non-human ...

GroupOrg - Features: Yesterday I mentioned that the PHPCollab project had forked. Today, I find out that my very own open source project, InfoCentral, which I handed off to someone else two years ago, has forked. There has been quite a bit of drama surrounding InfoCentral lately, with the guy ...

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years: Apparently I've learned nothing in nine years. Next year should be wickedly productive. Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, ...

IE, Flash, and patents: here comes trouble: Zeldman highlights a big problem with this Eolas patent ruling. Technically, rich media is now no longer allow to play automatically in the browser window. This means that Flash movies cannot start without user intervention. "Besides paying over half a billion dollars to ...

Dave's post from the other day reminded me of another great game with a weird name; Sokoban. (and wouldn't you know that the Wikipedia entry hits at number 9 on a Google search, further reinforcing Deane's Standard Reference theory!) On the surface it's a fairly simple game... Sokoban (Japanese for ...

Gravity Monkey has come up with red|blue, a little app for your Java-and-GPS-enabled cellphone. The app connects out to the FundRace.org campaign fundraising database, and provides a Democrat/Republican Geiger Counter that reads the political leanings for whereever you are. It gets even wackier than that. If you are usign a ...

Avoiding the web of costly content systems: An extremely well-written article that echos a lot of what I ve been saying lately: content management systems are more cost than benefit in 90% of instances. If you do implement one, only implement it on selected parts of the Web site the ...

We found a gem poking around on the corporate network the other day: a PDF of "The History of Programming Languages", a poster by O'Reilly that shows 50 programming languages and their timelines and interrelationships. Chris posted back in March about the progenitor of this chart, Éric Lévénez's Computer Languages ...

So it's 2000, and you're happily writing your web apps in ColdFusion. Then Allaire is bought out by Macromedia, the Sun sales rep drops by and takes your IT director to lunch, and now things are migrating to Java, your IT director has a snazzy leather jacket, and you're stuck ...

Exploring Emergence: A lot of you have probably heard about Conway's Game of Life. This link does a great job at explanating the theories behind the game step-by-step. Very well done. If you're ever "played" the game and wondered why it matters, wander through his "tutorial." For those that have ...

5K Competition "Since 2000, the hugely popular 5k competition has been challenging web developers to create the most innovative and stimulating work possible in less than 5,120 bytes. Entries for the 5k can include virtually any client-side technology in use on the web, including Flash, DHTML, Java, SVG, X3D, and ...

Sun Microsystems is releasing an early version of their Project Looking Glass desktop environment into the GPL. What if windows were translucent so that you could see the multiple windows you're working on at the same time? What if you could tack a note to yourself right on the Web ...

Build a Smarter Search Engine: This is an article from JavaPro magazine about building a Case Based Reasoning (CBR) search engine: "A man walks into a car dealership and tells the salesperson about his perfect car. It would be red, have four doors, a large trunk, 300 horsepower, side airbags, ...

David Heinemeier Hansson (of Rails) fame put an interesting post up on his blog the other day regarding Rails as a 'disruptive technology', but I think that his point also applies to a lot of other "fringe" development frameworks as well. The industry is being massively over-served by J2EE/.NET in ...

The discipline of PHP: This is over a year old, but it's a nice rant on people who complain that PHP makes for messy code. [...] PHP doesn't dictate a development methodology (unlike Zope or J2EE); so it's entirely up to the developer whether he wants to be sloppy, or ...

Content Tools Expanded: Interwoven is doing something with TeamSite 6.0 that has been on my mind for a while now. "...allows content management features, such as workflow and versioning, to be accessed from within Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Corp. .Net-based applications as WSDL (Web Services Description Language) ...

New XML Features in Microsoft Office Access 2003: I've talked before about how Access would make a handy client-side publishing tool, a la Radio or CityDesk. Just this week, I've been doing some Access user interface programming, and I've been impressed with how good it is in that regard. However, ...

Bill Joy to leave Sun: It's tough to overstate the importance of this. The man invented vi, for goodness sakes. After more than 20 years at Sun Microsystems Inc., cofounder and Chief Scientist Bill Joy is leaving the company, Sun announced Tuesday. Joy, once called the "Edison of the Internet" ...

A couple of years ago, I was trolling for Web design clients and I found a site that looked a little dated and that could use some help. So I sent the owner an email which was unintentionally a little condescending. I told him that his site was a little ...

PowerGREP: Windows grep Software: I know that search and replace tools aren't anything new, but PowerGrep is far and away the best one I've ever seen for Windows. PowerGREP is a powerful grep tool for quickly searching through large numbers of text and binary files, such as software source code, ...

I started working with Swish-E again recently. This is an open source search engine that, for my money, is one of the best deals in the open source world. A few years ago, I spent some time working with Inktomi Enterprise Search (now Verity Ultraseek) , but after a few ...

A few weeks ago, I read a good article on paper prototyping over at Jakob Nielsen's site. And then the other day, I wrote a bit about how overall application design and interface was more of an influence on an app's success than the actual code behind it. So, in ...

I've purchased a shrink-wrapped copy of Turbo Tax every year for the last five years or so. I was going to do it again this year, but Joe told me to try their Web-based version (same link as above). I've known about Turbo Tax for the Web, but I've always ...

IDevelopers show their independent streak, favoring Web-based apps: Big frameworks and multi-layered architectures seem great in theory, but I've yet to see them work really well in practice. This seems to be the feeling coming out of this programming survey as well. "Web applications rule the enterprise. That's the indisputable ...

The H-1B swindle: The H-1B program allows U.S. employers to apply for a visa for a foreign worker if they can't find anyone qualified to fill the position they need filled. The idea is that people shouldn't bring in overseas workers unless they've tried to find a U.S. worker to ...

Dynamic Tools for Dynamic Languages: After reading the "Programmers are Idiots" essay that Joe posted last week, I got to thinking about my situation. Am I actually a programmer? I came to the conclusion that no, I'm not I'm a scripter. I work predominantly on the Web, and while ...

Here s a request for all software developers building software that does batch processing: PDFMoto, Movable Type any program that re-publishes as a single event. Include functionality to allow me to call an arbitrary script before and after the batch process. There are a lot of things I may want ...

One kink I ve recently noticed in a number of scripting languages geared towards producing web apps is the utter lack of support for XML Schema. I m surprised by this, since a good Schema validator can save a lot of code when used properly. For those who may not be familiar ...

For this installment of This Old Blog, we'll be looking at the only kind of Modeling that anyone will ever ask me to do: Object Modeling with UML. Last time, we took a look at an idea for a new blogging interface, and discussed how it would interact with the ...

Differences in the "standard" coding style from language to language frustrate me. I get irritated that I have to change styles to fit in with the accepted norms for different languages. Traditionally, some use variable names with_underscores, some MixedCase some mixedCase with the first word uncapitalized, some use tabs, some ...

Note on December 27, 2006 A long time ago (2002-ish), I worked with Documentum. I figured out how to do something, and I posted it as this blog entry. The links to the attached files were broken for a long time, and I would get about one email a month ...

Day One was busy The Next Content Wave: Hypersyndication We started off with a keynote talk from Dick Costolo, who is the guy who created and sold FeedBurner and now works for Google. He talked about how far syndication has come. If you went to CNN or Gannett even ...