Kev's Development Toolbox

IBM have a good article on their Developerworks site comparing and contrasting the main features and usage of the main AOP frameworks for Java currently available.

The main frameworks their compare are: AspectJ/AspectWerkz, JBoss AOP, and Spring AOP.

As expected, Sony/IBM/Toshiba presented details of their upcoming ‘supercomputer on a chip’, the ‘Cell’, yesterday at a hardware conference in San Francisco.

The details are still somewhat sparse, but there has been plenty of websites discussing the details since the announcement yesterday. Summarizing from various articles, the details are:

• multiple cores on each individual CPU (one main core and 8 other independent cores)
• operating speed ‘in excess’ of 4Ghz, although probably around 4.7Ghz
• ability to process multiple processes across it’s cores, cores on other CPUs, either locally or remotely
• data throughput bus speed around 100Gb/sec, using new Rambus technology
• Single processor performance equivalent to 32 RS/6000 machines
• Single processor performance 100 times that of current Intel Pention 4 2.4Ghz CPU

Sony have announced that their Playstation handheld gaming device, the PSP, will be available in the US on March 24, 2005, for $250.

The device has already been available in Japan for a few months and has already sold 800,000 since December 12th.

IBM have released trial downloads for their Rational Application Developer v6.0 IDE product, based on Eclipse 3.0.

In case you were wondering where were versions 1.0 through 5.0, this is the re-badged Websphere Application Studio Developer (WSAD) product. It’s pretty full featured, new and improved, but unfortunately is not low fat – it comes packed with functionality and wizards for everything conceivable, including the kitchen sink.