Kev's Development Toolbox

February 17, 2006

Sun developers blog new Java SE 6.0 Mustang features

Here is a huge list of blogs from developers working on Java SE 6.0, discussing the latest features included in the SE 6.0 release.

There are some interesting new features, but a couple caught my eye:

Ability to have wildcards in classpath statements – similar to how you can define directory wildcards in ANT for including jars in your classpath. This is very handy.
Native Look and Feel improvements, so that Swing apps using XP and GTK Look and Feels are rendered even closer to what you would see on the native OS.
Sorting and filtering in Swing JTable – very cool.

February 16, 2006

Another interview with Ruby on Rails creator, David Heinemeier Hansson

David Heinemeier Hansson seems to be doing the rounds right now and appearing in interviews everywhere. Reg Developer have an interview with the creator of the Web Framework on their site.

The interview covers the usual big questions: will is scale, is it secure, is it suitable for enterprise applications? Hansson must have answers for these questions preprepared by now, as these are the issues everyone is asking. Other than the sites that Hansson has developed himself using Rails, I think time will tell and it only has to be a matter of time before a large enterprise project takes the jump and takes Rails for a spin. Like Hansson says in one of his replies, the answer on whether to use technology X verses Y is usually a political one, and it not necessarily decided on technical excellence alone. Like COBOL 20 – 30 years ago, nobody get’s fired for choosing Java.

February 16, 2006

JUnit 4.0 released

JUnit 4.0 has been released. It relies on Java SE 5.0, and uses annotations to mark tests.

February 16, 2006

Oracle made failed bid for MySQL

Hungry for acquisitions and in the same timeframe that Oracle successfully bought out Sleepycat, the company behind the BerkeleyDB database engine used on many open source platforms, news yesterday was that Oracle made a bid to also buy out MySQL, but the bid was rejected.

MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos said that he wanted to keep the independence of his company.

So what does this mean for Oracle and the Open Source database market? Does Oracle consider Open Source databases it’s largest threat to it’s own business, and being unable to compete the only way to stay in the game is to buy them out? Their current buyouts seem pretty focused on aquiring anything MySQL related, including the database engines that it uses under the covers – last year the first surprise was the buyout of InnoDB, the most widely used of the database engines used by MySQL. Now they also have BerkeleyDB from Sleepycat, and now we hear they are also gunning for MySQL itself. This cannot be a good thing – chances are if Oracle consumes all these companies and their technologies, sure they may stay around in one form or another, but I think the spirit of OPen Source with these products will be gone. And chances are they will be rolled into an exisiting or a new product with an Oracle badge, meaning the end of the original products. This is not good for users of the original products, who were most likely using them because they were open source.