Kev’s Blog – Page 398 – Kev's Development Toolbox

March 21, 2006

WD Raptor X 150GB drive review – RegHardware

RegHardware.co.uk have a great review of the Western Digital Raptor X 150GB drive. If you’ve been following the hard drive market for the last year or so, you’ll already know about WD’s 10,000rpm drives, that up until this point only came in relatively small capacities of 36 and 72Gb.

Until now. Now you can get a 150Gb drive with the same outrageous 10,000rpm spin spead and 15Mb cache – this is a drive that you’ll be hard pushed to match. Only a RAID 0 with 2 decent 7200rpm drives will come close to the performance of this drive.

Of course 150GB is still small compared to the 500GB drives currently on the market, but if you’re looking for speed, then this is the drive to go for.

March 21, 2006

Sun readies rentable CPU farm

Sun has been working on this one for some time now, but news is that a massive grid computing site (with more to follow) is almost ready for customers. The site offers 5,000 dual-core CPUs, and if the pricing plan annouced in September 2004 still stands then customers will be able to rent processing power by the CPU, $1 per CPU on a pay-as-you-go scheme.

March 20, 2006

Java SE 6.0 beta desktop integration demo

Mustang SE 6.0 currently in beta has a number of desktop integration improvements, most noticably the native platform API calls to leverage native platform UI look and feel. In addition to this, on the Windows platform there is a tighter integration with Windows desktop features, for example, splash screen support, SysTray support and ability to interact with Internet Explorer.

DevX have an article on their site that demonstrates these new features, complete with a downloadable demo to illustrate the new features.

The current Java SE 6 beta can be downloaded from here.

March 20, 2006

Next-gen web-app frameworks: JBoss Seam and Stripes

Unless you’re a newcomer to the Java world, you already know that nothing stands still with Java technology. There are a number of new web application frameworks coming onto the scene which take advantage of Java SE5.0 and EE5 features.

Stripes is a MVC framework which makes use of SE5.0 annotations – there is an overview here.

Gavin King also has an overview of the JBoss Seam webapp framework, which ties together JSF and EJB3.0. There is an overview on the Hibernate Blog here. Gavin’s example using Seam shows how simple it is to develop a webapp with Seam and implements the same webapp as the Stripes example as a direct comparison. The real benefits and main features offered by Seam however are in it’s ability to manage conversation state and integration with business processes, which are not demonstrated in this example.