Kev's Development Toolbox

Hot on the heels of Ruby on Rails (a very fast development framework for web/db based applications), Trails is a Java development framework in the same vein which allows for rapid domain based Java development.

The framework promises to allow developers to concentrate on the domain model and the logic, and then generates all the necessary plumbing code and wires it together using other frameworks such as Tapestry, Spring and Hibernate.

They have a demonstration video walking through the steps available on their site.

The JSR220 group have released Early Draft 2 of the upcoming EJB3.0 spec, available for download from the JCP site.

Gavin King also has an article on his blog listing the main changes from the previous draft.

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