Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
I was holding off moving to Netbeans 6.7 since it didn’t have JavaFX suport yet, but with 6.7.1, JavaFX support has now been added.
The UI for 6.7.1 has been polished substantially from the eye-candy icons and almost excessiveness in 6.5 – it looks a lot more crisp and not as cluttered as 6.5 did. I’ve only just downloaded it and started using it, so no other feedback right now – may post some more later.
The US Department of Justice has approved Oracle’s buyout of Sun Microsystems. They are still waiting for approval from the European courts.
Once the deal is buttoned up it will be interesting to hear where the combined company is going, and what if any changes are in the pipeline.
A couple of years back Ballmer said in an interview about Microsoft’s Mobile strategy “I like our strategy, I like it a lot”. Trouble is, whether or not Ballmer likes it or not, whatever that strategy was at the time, it doesn’t seem to have led anywhere that involves significant market share. Apple have whipped their butts with the iPhone, the Palm Pre although slow on the uptake right now is light years ahead of anything that Windows Mobile 6.0 can offer, and Google Android handsets are also being eaten up like hotcakes, and the major manufacturers don’t even have their Android phones on the shelves yet.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Windows Mobile is a pile of junk. It’s worthless. It pains me to say that because I used Windows CE PDA’s for years and absolutely loved them, and I so wanted Windows Mobile to be a evolutionary step forward for Windows CE, but it wasn’t – Microsoft broke it. Windows Mobile is unreliable, unstable, for most of the time on my HTC Wing, it’s practically unusble. Would I buy another Windows Mobile device? No, absolutely not. Complete waste of money. My next purchase will either be an Android based phone or an iPhone.
I read this post, ‘Not too stupid for polyglotism’, and was curious to read that some developers think they have/need to stick to one programming language to get their job done. Depending on what you’re working on, especially if you have a very narrow role in your development team or are focusing in a specific area, this may be true. In most cases though, you need to use the right too for the job. Just because you can program with Java doesn’t mean you should always program with Java. The reality is in most large scale systems development, you’re already using many different languages and you’re not even thinking about it. SQL to access the database, Java backend, HTML, CSS and JavaScript on the front end, XML for exchanging data with other systems – the list can be pretty long if you think about it.
While an interesting read, I would be cautious of working with developers if they think they cannot handle more than one programming language, because the reality is we have to use more than one language on most systems, to solve different types of problems – there is no ‘one size fits all’ programming language. Sure, there are general purpose languages, Java included, but there’s still a long list of tasks you would not use Java for – you should pick the tool that’s most appropriate for the job.