Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
Sapphire in Steel is a project to bring a commercial plugin for Visual Studio that will enable Ruby on Rails development with Microsoft Visual Studio.
The plugin will enable code syntax highlighting, wizards for setting up MySQL connections, as well as full interactive debugging support in Visual Studio.
I expect this will appeal more to existing Microsoft developers who want to experiment with the Coding by Convention approach popularized by RoR.
Mastering Enterprise Java Beans published by Wiley has long been in my opinion one of the best books out there on EJBs. The lastest book on 3.0 is no longer written by Ed Roman, but two of the previous co-authors from the 3rd edition, Rima Patel Sriganesh and Gerald Brose now together with Micah Silverman have just published ‘Mastering Enterprise Javabeans 3.0’ which in following with the previous editions is available as a free download from TheServerSide.com.
Romain Guy, a former Sun intern now known for his involvement with the Aerith demo shown at JavaOne and interviewee on JavaPosse, has an interesting blog post on his site about the current state of the Java desktop support.
He makes an interesting point that the majority of Java developers in the US are Swing developers, not Java EE, and yet EE gets all the attention (possibly because this is the space where the big buck projects are, both for developers and tool vendors). I find this an interesting statistic, but I’m not sure where he gets this information. Maybe it’s just because I work in an EE world, but I rarely come across any Java developers who have experience with Swing.
However, I agree that Swing needs to take a close look at the simplification efforts going on in the EE world, as it has a lot to learn (not just the list of needed features that Romain lists). With the current trends towards Rich-client applications and web developers trying hard to squeeze out more and more from an already over-stressed browser client platform, the current trend seems to indicate one of two possible directions, either a) there is going to be an increase in Java desktop apps as developers realize it is considerably easier to build a rich client application using an API set that is designed to do exactly this (instead of trying to do unnatural things with Javascript and CSS), or b) the browser is about to evolve into a true rich client platform with a new browser released that provides the ability to build true rich client applications.
Since option b) is less likely to occur without the backing of a major company to push this into the mainstream, for the short term I think we will see an increasing number of Swing projects. However, the possibility that some company (or open source effort) will release a ‘rich client super platform’ does sound like an interesting option…
Microsoft have signed a deal with ATI, who already supply the video hardware for the XBox360, to supply add-on hardware for 360 users to be able to play HD-DVD disks.
This add on will be in direct competition with Sony’s PS3 which will come with a BluRay DVD player included as standard out of the box.