Month: November 2005

The Microsoft XBox360 is due to start selling at 12:01am Tuesday (tomorrow morning). For a select few, Microsoft has been holding a launch party in a large hanger in Palmdale, CA, from Sunday 12:01am to Tuesday 12:01am – those at the event have access to around 500 of the new consoles to try out the launch titles.

John D Mitchell in his blog on java.net today talks about the concept of Coding Naked. No, not coding without your clothes on, but coding with the attitude that anyone can see your code at any time and therefore you shouldn’t be ashamed of anyone seeing your code.

I’ve worked on projects before were this was a written and and for some an unwritten guideline, but it’s interesting to have it expressed this way.

Another way of expressing the same concept: ‘Refrigerator Code’ – code that you are proud of and would take home and stick to the front of your fridge to say ‘look what I did today’

Maybe, according to an aricle in Wired.

OnJava.com has a great collection of interviews with four well known people in the Java world, and asks them each why they think Ruby could be the successor to Java.

• Bruce Tate has a book current published by O’Reilly, Beyond Java, that already gives his opinion of why Ruby is set to replace Java. His reasons? Ruby is the best of the alternative languages currently out there, but most important it has a driving catalyst in the form of the Ruby on Rails web framework, which is not only drawing a lot of attention, but is shoing how alternative approaches can drastically increase developer productivity.
• James Dunca Davidson, one of the original developers of Tomcat and Ant, has already used Ruby on Rails as the solution for client projets, and does not buy in to the idea that RoR is only for prototype/throwaway applications. He has implemented medium sized applications that have gone into production. The big selling point for him? Simplicity.
• Robert Cooper, OnJava.com blogger and Java developer, expresses his concerns with the Enterprise Java approach. Cooper says that the argument that Java has support for developing Enterprise applications is not a very compelling argument, as the features billed as ‘Enterprise’ are not needed in the majority of solutions.
• Bill Venners, the publisher behind the Java portal site www.artima.com, has recently added articles and information about Ruby on his website. His opinion though is although he feels Ruby has it’s place and it’s solutions, the Ruby on Rails framework has been over-hyped, and he currently does not believe the hype behind it