Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
Google’s anticipated but surprising annoucement last week was that they have launched an Open Source project hosting service.
There are already a number of projects hosted, so worth checking out if you’re looking for some dev APIs for a given task. The project so far seem more like tools and APIs for developers than end-user products, so this may turn out to be a useful resource. A major competitor to SourceForge perhaps?
Boeing will be using Linux to run the surveilance and other mission computing tasks aboard modifed 737s which are sold to the US Navy for locating and tracking submarines.
The Linux distro comes from Wind River Systems, which specializes in embedded systems development and tools.
eWeek has reviewed Ubuntu Linux 6.06LTS and awarded it’s ‘Analyst’s Choice’ award, for being easy to install and use, the current best Linux distro in terms of usability, and has the best software update and install mechanism of any other linux distro so far.
Having used Ubuntu on my laptop for the past couple of months, I have to say I agree. In particular their software update mechanism is superb, if not a little like Windows Update, but it does the job of keeping everything up to date – one less thing to worry about.
According to this article on eWeek, , Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s senior VP of Server and Tools business, believes that ‘Microsoft’s .Net platform has outpaced Java, particularly the Java Enterprise Edition, over the past five years to become the development platform of choice for enterprise development.’
I find this hard to believe and would like to see what figures he is basing this statement on. Java usage on large enterprise has never been stronger and is increasing all the time. I rarely hear any mention of any .Net projects, and only know of one or two people (actually, just two) who are actively working with .Net.
Do a simple search around for ‘Java’, or ‘C#’ and/or ‘.Net’ and see what sort of results you get. I guarantee you will find plenty more activity going on connected with Java than you will find .Net. Also, take a look on Monster.com or your job search engine of choice and see what jobs are currently out there. Again, way more Java than .Net.
Tiobe keep a track on the relative populatity of a whole list of programming languages on their site here. They also base their figures on searching the web to collect together figures for available engineers, courses and third party vendors. Their figures are currently showing Java in the top spot with 22% market share, and the closest .Net language, C#, down in 7th with only 3%. Quite how Microsoft gets to believe they have 60% share on enterprise application development is beyond me. This figure seems way out of line with common knowledge.