John Vlissides, best known for his contribution to the ‘Design Patterns’ book as one of the ‘Gang of Four’ coauthors of the book has passed away.
Microsoft hold Wake for the death of Exchange Server 5.5
This has to be one of the strangest press events I’ve heard about – Microsoft held a Wake for the ‘passing’ of Exchange Server 5.5 in a bar in London yesterday.
Oracle buy InnoDB – storage engine for MySQL
MySQL is one of the more interesting open source databases in that it allows you to select a different storage engine under the covers for each database. One of the most common and most robust storage engines (in that it supports transactions whereas some of the others do not), is InnoDB.
In a surprising move, Oracle purchased the company behind InnoDB and with it the InnoDB storage engine. What this means for existing users of InnoDB at this point is anyone’s guess, although Oracle are thought to most likely to keep the database engine open source. If they don’t and they use it as the basis for their own proprietary products, there will surely be a group that will maintain the open source code line for InnoDB outside of Oracle so that the open source version will continue to live on.
WebWork web framework to merge with Struts
The developers of OpenSymphony WebWork have announced that they will be merging their project with Struts.
This may be the next best thing for both frameworks, especially since JSF is likely to become the framework of choice once Java EE 5 app servers come out with support for JSF (as JSF is part of the EE 5 spec).
This should be a relatively easy merge of the two projects, especially since the two are both command based implementations of the MVC pattern (compared to other frameworks like Tapestry and JSF which are event based).