Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
Five months ago Google bought Upstartle, the company behind the Online word processor Writely.
This week Google have made the Online word processor available for users to sign up and start using the service.
The online word processor ands another online office app to Google’s quiver, which so far includes email, online calendar, online notebook, and a spreadsheet. Check out the list of their apps here.
Gilad Bracha, Neal Gafter, James Gosling and Peter von der Ah√© have written a proposal to include ‘closures’, a feature common in dynamic languages, in the Java 1.7 release.
Closures allow you to refer to blocks of code as a variable and pass references to them between methods.
Read more in Dejan Bosanac’s blog here.
There are currently two very real consumer electronics battles going on right now that may be on the scale of ‘VHS vs Betamax’. For the next-gen hidef DVD formats we may have to wait some time before we find out who is the the VHS and who is the Betamax, but both formats offer capacity for HD content and both are becoming available this year. Bluray has the added benefit of being included in a ‘trojan horse’ that is coming into your family room later this year, as part of the $600 PS3 (remember that a freestanding Bluray player is currently going to set you back $1000).
The other battle is LCD verses Plasma. LCD screens until recently have not been available in the large sizes that Plasma has been available in. Plasma screens may have a shorter lifetime than LCD though, and may suffer from fading and ‘burn-in’ over time, which LCD does not. Read more in this article here.
TheServerSide.com has some interesting comments this morning on an article published on uk.builder.com about whether Sun should merge it’s open sourcing of Java with the Apache Harmony project.
The issue Sun has to resolve right now is that parts of the Java platform it is about to open source were contributed by other third parties and it does not have the legal right to change the existing license and open source the code. Presumably between now and when it open sources the code, Sun must rewrite these parts of the code so that it is legal able to change the license.
Since the Apache Harmony project to develop an open source Java compiler and runtime is already well under way and the fact that they have written their version from scratch to be ‘bug-compatible’ with Sun’s version, would this be an attractive codebase that Sun could leverage instead of having to rewrite the pieces that they do not own?