Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
The JSR220 Public Final Draft spec for EJB3.0 was approved by the committee involved in it’s development, so expect to see final compliant implementations coming along soon.
JBoss are of course already there with their implementation integrated into 4.0.x of their App Server, and have been tracking changes to the spec with incremental releases implementing the latest version of the spec as it was written.
Allen Holub has a hilarious column in the April 1st copy of SD Times titled “The End of the World as We Know it”, in which Gates is quoted as having seen the light after buying a Mac OS X MacBook Pro, and announces that it’s pointless to continue with development of Windows since Mac OS X is so far superior to Windows in terms of stability and usability.
Not only this, but Gates admits they’ve been pushing bad programming practices for years with MFC and .NET, plus Visual Basic was the biggest mess of a language ever developed, and therefore all Microsoft products will be rewritten in Java.
This is a great article… 🙂 I couldn’t find a link to it online, but check in the back of the paper edition is you have one laying around (sorry I know this is old news, but I only just picked up my copy and started reading it…)
Gates has already said that he considers Google to be ‘a worthy adversary’, but in order to close the gap between the innovation and new development coming from Google, Microsoft has announced it will be increasing spending (presumably on research and development) by $2 billion next year.
Microsoft’s new IE release has annoyed Google, since it includes a search input field on the toolbar to allow users to search MSN – this is typically where the search input field is placed (or close to) if a user is used to using Firefox, or a browser toolbar plugin in IE, such as the one from Google or Yahoo. Google has made informal complaints with the US Justice Department and EC Anti-trust authorities.
There has been a lot of community pressure (and also apparently from inside Sun) to Open Source Java. I’m still unsure if this is a good idea. I think Sun have done a great job so far of shepherding the language’s development, and the Java language and platform really has developed in leaps and bounds since the first 1.0.x versions.
Jonathan Schwartz as the new Sun Microsystems CEO may have other ideas. He has already been involved in the Open Sourcing of the company’s flagship operating system, Solaris, and so may be thinking along the same lines for Java.
With JavaOne approaching, people are speculating whether he may be preparing for a significant annoucement regarding Java’s future.