Kev's Development Toolbox

NASA are using a Java Application to plan the movement of the current Rover on the surface of Mars. The app allows them to plan and project the path the Rover should take, by displaying current imagary and allowing the controllers to zoom in/out and pan around within the images.

An online version is available to the public which although does not directly control the Rover, it allows the public to visualize the images and plot paths the same way that the NASA controllers are using the same software.

The Middleware Company has launched a .NET community website, TheServerSide.net as a sister-site to www.theserverside.com which is for J2EE technology.

The Editor-in-chief for the new site is Sacramento-local Ted Neward.

A Chicago Federal judge has ruled against Microsoft for the Patent infringement filed by Eolas.

Eolas has the Patent rights on the technology for ‘plugins’ in a Web Browser, which Microsoft has now been found guilty of copying.

Microsoft has 30 days to file an appeal, but in the meantime must pay $45 million to Eolas.

This PDF here on the JBoss site gives an overview of the new features and changes that are being worked on for JBoss 4.0.

Most interesting changes, apart from the obvious implementation of J2EE 1.4 new features, include:

• the continuous mention of Hibernate – not surprising as Hibernate is now managed under the umbrella of the JBoss Group. ‘CMP refactoring to use Hibernate’ – this is an interesting change. This sounds like the CMP implementation under the covers will actually be using Hibernate as the Persistence mechanism. It would seem to me that with 4.0 if you are considering using CMP you might as well cut out a layer and just use Hibernate itself directly.
• AOP features, including markup to indicate a POJO is to be accessed remotely (will greatly simplify development of distributed components?)