EBGames start taking preorders for XBox360

EBGames have already started taking orders for the XBox360, even though its not due until November time.

The store is offering two bundles:

  • The ‘Utimate’ bundle: based on the premium package (which is to retail at $399 and include the 20GB hard drive), and includes 4 games and an additional wireless controller
  • The ‘Core’ bundle: based on the core system (which is to retail for $299), which includes 4 games an an additional wired controlller.

The initial launch prices seem pretty high, but we haven’t seen the launch prices for the PS3 yet, which may be even higher according to rumors.

Incidentally, I just posted this wirelessly from my PSP Web Browser (the first paragraph anyway 🙂

Case study: Become.com – a massively scaled Java application

This is a great case study of a large scale Java application for an online shopping service called Become.com.

Become.com’s system is a massive web search engine that crawls the web for goods being sold and offers comparisons between like products. The crawler engine is written in Java and indexes more than 3 billion web pages and generates index data of over 8 terrabytes of data over 30 distributed servers during a 7 day run.

The crawler code is written in 39,000 thousand lines of code running over 40 to 50 machines, with 180Gb of total allocated memory and running upto 5000 threads.

JSF verses Apache Tapestry

Phil Zoio has a great, very detailed article on TheServerSide.com comparing two web framework alternatives to Struts, JSF and Apache Tapestry.

Struts has long been the de facto standard web application framework, but over the past couple of years there have been many alternatives attempting to improve over some of the limitations of Struts.

One of the largest changes is many of the newer frameworks such as JSF and Tapestry are event driven and give more flexibility over Struts Actions. This allows you to tie client side events, such as value changes, validation results, form submits to server-side processing. JSF is also the Java EE 5.0 spec for ‘the’ web framework, and so will be supported on all the EE 5.0 application servers when they come out.

There has been a lot of noise over whether JSF may replace Struts – David Geary in his blog (author of Core Java Server Faces) gives a good set of reasons for why you should be considering using JSF instead of Struts for new projects.