Month: June 2006

JBoss World 2006 is currently going on in Vegas this week. This blog entry from a participant at the conference mentions a statement that was made about JBoss dropping JMX as part of the server architecture used to start and stop the server’s services. This seems like a drastic change since the JBoss architecture has revolved around JMX and up until this point everything has been exposed and controlled via JMX.

I expect we’ll hear more about what this change actually means shortly.

Rails is getting a lot of attention from people asking ‘so how does it perform?’, and ‘will it scale?’. This article by Stefan Kaes on InfoQ.com looks at some typical problems found in current Rails application code and how to rewrite the code to improve performance.

Hot on the heels of Google’s launch of their online spreadsheet web-app that has already gained a lot of attention in the press, Microsoft have described further details of their plans for ‘Windows Live’.

Windows Live is Microsoft’s latest attempt to gain traction in the web-application space, and their plans to sell online access to applications as an alternative to users purchasing and installing software onto their PCs.

This is not their first attempt – their previous attempt was the ‘Hailstorm’ initiative which came and went without hardly anyone noticing back in 2001. Were they too early with this approach before? Possibly. Then again, maybe customers are still not ready for subscription based online services. Especially if someone like Google is giving away a killer online spreadsheet – why would I pay to ‘rent’ one from Microsoft?

This almost sounds too familiar – are they being beaten at their own game? Remember when Microsoft starting giving away free copies of Internet Explorer? Look what this did for Netscape.

One interesting note in this article – the comment about deploying apps to a ‘rich client’ – “Microsoft seek to make it easier to write mashup applications that run on a “rich client,” or a full-featured Windows PC, rather than through a browser” – given the current trend to try and deploy rich client applications via the browser, this could be a step in the right direction – to offer a platform with support for rich client application deployment, but without the curent limitations of the browser (as we know it today)?

1.0 of the Seam framework has been released. The web framework integrates JSF with EJB3.0 and business rules using jBPM.

The framework also addresses the ‘multiple browser window’ problem with the concept of ‘conversations’. This problem is often seen but ignored in many web apps where if the user opens up another browser window with a Ctrl-N, the new window is in the same session. Unless the app handles this, the user can experience issues when attempting to create and/or update data from the tow or more windows.