Java Web Frameworks still too unnecessarily complicated?

This blog post on the O’Reilly site is a breath of fresh air. One thing we seem to be too good at in the Java World is making things too complicated. What’s more, we’ve a long history of it as well (think EJB 2.x implementation). While other HTTP based web frameworks are championing the simplicity approach (RoR, Grails etc), for some reason in the Java World we are going off in the other direction of making things impossibly complicated (JSF and Seam). Their promises are commendable, to enforce separation of concerns, enable maintainability etc, but the cost seems to be at a huge learning curve, and a negative impact on developers productivity.

At some point this is all going to come full circle and we’ll look back and thing ‘wow, what were we thinking?’, and I’m looking forward to that day coming sooner than later.

Rackmounted PS3s ready for online Warhawk gaming

This is an awesome sight. Racks upon racks of PS3s all hooked up ready to support the upcoming Warhawk game this month. I’ve heard that hosting centers frequently have pretty large server setups to support other online games, but they’re usually rackmounted Intel/AMD units, not consoles. It’s pretty cool to the the PS3 console itself being used to run the server software for online gaming.

1 in 5 XBox360s will fail. What does it take to get a PS3 to fail?

It’s now widely known that roughly 1 in 5 of all XBox 360s will catastrophically fail, most likely due to the motherboard overheating and the chips coming loose from the board.

So, if this happens to 360s under normal usage, what does it take to get a PS3 to fail? This website took their tests to the extreme: 0 degrees in a freezer for 108 hours, and 64 hours in a sauna at 120 degrees – all with continuous cycling of BluRay movie playing and game playing. And no failures. Not bad I’d say.

Visual demonstrations of Java SE 6 Garbage Collection

This is a great article that gives Flash videos of various VM configuration options and demonstrates the Garbage Collection behavior of the Java SE 6 VM when configured sub-optimally for a given application.

I don’t know if anyone has thought of this before but seeing the patterns develop as they happen via Flash videos is a great way to convey what is happening, that would be far more difficult to express with just words alone.