August 2006 – Page 6 – Kev's Development Toolbox

August 16, 2006

Sun drops ‘Mustang’ and ‘Dolphin’ Java projetc names to get ready for open sourcing Java

Sun will be dropping the project names they use for upcoming JDK releases to get ready for the open sourcing of parts of the Java platform. I guess this is to reduce confusion about what project name is what release.

So from this point onwards, the release formally known as Mustang will be called just JDK 6, and Dolphin will be just JDK 7. Both projects are already on java.net – JDK 6 is here, and JDK 7 is here.

For a small piece of Java history, check out this site which lists all the project code names for all the previous Java releases.

August 15, 2006

“Top Five Reasons to Like Glassfish” and “Could Glassfish become the next major App Sever?”

Gerrtjan has an interesting blog entry that I just came across from back in April that lists a few points that I wasn’t aware of with the Glassfish EE5 app server.

The most interesting of this points is his point #1 – ‘Glassfish is lazy’ – by this he is referring to a feature that the appserver only initializes the features you have configured and/or are using by your deployed apps. For example – if you deploy a webapp with no EJBs, only the servlet container is initialized, so you don’t pay a penalty for running small, simple apps on the server. So in this respect even if you are testing small webapps there may not be any compelling reason anymore to use Tomcat by itself?

There has been a huge amount of news coverage and blog posts on Glassfish in the past year, which prompts me to ask the question, “Where is JBoss?”. Since their buy out by RedHat they seemed to dropped off the face of the earth. Have their frequent and ‘full of themselves’ blog posts been tamed by corporate RedHat? Or do they have something up their sleeve that they have been working on that they are about to announce with great fanfare? Floyd Marinsescu on InfoQ.com is asking the question “Could Glassfish become the next major App Sever?”. Take a read of his post on InfoQ.com

August 15, 2006

1TB harddrive to ship later this year

Hitachi have announced they will be shipping 1 terabyte (1000 GB) hard drives this year for home and office PCs.

Drives currently on the market have reached the 750GB mark, so it is not a huge jump to get to 1 TB.

Just how many hours of TV could I record on my Tivo with a 1TB drive?

August 15, 2006

Sun announces open source plans for Java

At JavaOne this year Sun announced that they had plans to open source parts of the Java platform, although at that time the details were thin. This week, Sun have announced that they will be open sourcing two critical parts of the Java platform, the javac compiler, and the Hotspot virtual machine – both of these will be released to the open source community by the end of 2006.

Up until this year Sun has resisted community pressures to open source Java, over worries that the language and the platform may ‘fork’ into different branches of Java that may diverge in their language support and become incompatbile. This is not something that happens often in the open source world, and if it does it is usually because of good reasons, to address particular very specific needs.

It will be interesting to see how the Java platform evolves past this point, and longer term what this will mean for Sun and their involvement with the Java platform.