Daily Thoughts 5

• IBM to acquire SUN ?
  Its not really new that SUN is looking for someone with a big pocket to buy the whole shop. Among potential candidates are DELL, HP,.. and IBM, which seems to be more serious about the deal (link). What will it means ? I am not sure if I want to tune into the pessimistic mood, that you find in some forums (link). A lot of innovative and creative power will be grounded (or at least the financial backing of it). IBM has zero genuine interest in Open Source and IBM is NOT hip, they are old fashioned and ultra bureaucratic. Most of the (server) products will disappear (or merged into their websphere product line with usual high pricetags) and stuff like Netbeans will turned down (in favor of eclipse), aka “opened” to the community but disappear in irrelevance after a while. We wont know. I hope that doesnt create another Microsoft in the srver world.
• 456,520 downloads of Glassfish
  That shows the appreciation and adoption of the product in comparison to a number of other (propietary) products. Would IBM call it GlassSphere, Websphere Glass or whatever.
  Link
• Google Chrome Beta
  There is another beta available for download (link). Despite the rumors Google would trash the browser is still taking up. Certain features I really like, I guess it could take some shares of the user distribution in future. I dislike the persistent update application running in the background with an option to disable it. I still favor Firefox because of the huge number of plugins. I dislike its getting slower to startup and eats memory.

Daily Thoughts 4

• 100,000,000th JavaFX
  Last week Jonathan Schwartz celebrated the 100,000,000 download of the JavaFX runtime on his blog (link). I share his excitement about JavaFX technology out now to conquer the field of Silverlight and Flash. If not I would not invert time in picking it up ! But to paint a bit more realistic picture, there is no dedicated JavaFX runtime installer. It is included with the regular, actual JRE installer, or to quote from java.com “JavaFX runtime is integrated with Java download. During the installation of Java 6 update10 (jre6u10), users will also be installing JavaFX runtime.” (link). JavaFX piggyback in a way (a smart way), but thats fine, this way as a solution provider you dont need to struggle with extra plugin installer, your customer or user already has it (at least with an up-to-date JRE).
  The JavaFX SDK has supposingly 100,000 downloads.
• Netbeans 7 turns 6.7
  Release was initially the next release planned to hit the community, but the development team decided to release a version 6.7 in June (milestone release in next few weeks) and 7 at a later stage. I guess JEE6 support is among the reason to wait for 7. More info at netbeans.org (link).
  
• Android versus JavaFX
  The more I read about the background of the 2 technolgies, even they are very close relatives, the more I doubt there will be a JavaFX running on Android anytime soon. My personal guess: Some folks will offspring a project on Kenai or Sourceforge to get it running.
• Buying Android in Singapore
  One day after I ordered the dev phone from US, Singtel started to sell the HTC dream, which is an Android phone, here. Guess like the T-Mobile G1 it is locked. Good timing though. Lets see what is the retail price without contract (maybe not available).

Daily Thoughts 3

• REA
  We all know about RIA, aka Rich Internet Applications. But do you know there is also a REA ? Rich Enterprise Applications ! Not exactly sure what it means, but I am sure its like RIA pimp my boring business and office application. I came across the word on the Icefaces website.
• JEE6
  The latest release should have already hit the road in 2008, but JSR 316 (link) only now is under public review until February 23. I guess the step from version 5 to 6 will not be as dramatic as in the previous historic change from J2EE 1.4 (released 2002) to JEE5 (May 2006). But life becomes more easier or better more abstract. Just worries me that you need lots of experience to understand whats going on under the hood !
  Some work coming up for all the Application Server Vendor to become compliant again (most of them sit in the JCP commitee anyway), not to mention customer s who still use 1.4,  running behind the crowd with their systems! Time will reveal the roadmap.
  Lots of new books gonna delight us on JEE6 and J7 !

On Domain Names

My very first domain I “bought” (what is the proper term ? “rented”) somewhere in 1998. It was fairly easy because there wre many names to choose from (.de and .com), apart from company and citynames. We fast forward to today >> A netcraft survey states there are 188,000,000 websites (own domain name, not counting subdomains or myspace homepages) around.

December 2008 Netcraft survery

I am not sure if this quantity really reflect an increase of quality or the increase of available information. I wish there would be a way to make statistic on how many sites are spam, redirect-sites or name-hogging sites. My personal guess is 50%.

Make an experiment: Lets say you want to register a new domain for whatever new company or product you just invented. Try to find an available domain name (.com / .net. / .biz /.info) ! You wont find any, either you randomly start hacking 10 characters on the keyboard.

Any word from the dictionary is taken ! Also any combination of dictionary words and words like:
system, systems,web,agile,new,log, net,123,24,360,my

It seems the big hogging companies like sedo running bots looking for unused words and combination’s and reserve them.

Most stupid web domain names that I came across:

9999999999.com
999999999.com
99999999.com
9999999.com
987654321.com
PointDoParking.com
thatstupidwebsite.com
mylifevest.com
greatestsiteever.com
webblurb.net

and so on and so on …….

Daily Thoughts 2

• Java 7
  is announced to be a major release hitting the road in 2010. Read a nice summary by Hamlet D’Arcy (link). At least we have release date now.
• JKDK 6u11
  Earlier this month both JRE and JDK released as minor release 11. (link)
• Singapore JUG
  Is it possible ? There are 3 JUG’s here but all of them are inactive or dead. (link at java.net)

Daily Thoughts 1

• Rich Client
  Some years back when networks were in place and we moved from a terminal environment to a Client-Server landscape, the client application (always 100% depending on the OS its running on) was used to be named as Thick Client or Fat Client. Today we still use frontend’s, either a browser or embedded in a browser as flash, applet,.. or as some kind of executable (eg. java clients are supposed to run as bytecode on virtually any OS). Latest technology gives us Adobe Air that breaks Flash free from the browser. So the basic concept is still the same (to some extend), but we are calling it Rich Client. Why this ? In the 21st century you dont want to use some obessity related technology ?
• Google Orwell 2008
  George Orwell’s (Wikipedia link) description of the future in his novel ‘1984′ (published in 1949) painted the picture of a totalitarian regime observing and surveilling everyone. It didnt really happen that way in the year 1984. But now, another 24 years later governments are more eager to track individuals (with the help of IT at large) activities on the web as well on the phone. But what is surprising, on top of that we are eager to provide all kind of personal information voluntary to all kind of online services like Facebook or now, Google Health. We are concerned about data security but we are passing our medical records to an online service of which we dont know how its going to be used in future. Did you ever spend a second on thinking about the possibility to delete this information. You almost can’t. Once a piece of information hits the web, it stays there. Even you delete it (but try to find the ‘delete my account’ button first) it is still in a cache somewhere else.

Daily Thoughts 0

Just thinking about adding some daily thoughts to the blog. Topics, questions, ideas,.. that come across my mind while reading about technology, testing, trying out, playing and designing solutions. Whatever is not enough for a full-blown essay and rather a one-liner ends up here. To keep for later or spark of a discussion.

• Green IT
  You realized for quite a while green becomes the dominant color in the IT industry ? Anything suddenly becomes green, goes green or is green in some context. How to verify green ? Is there a certificate or international recognized test to allow you to be green ? It is so easy to make some more green marketing strategies and everyone just feels so much better. I can sleep sound and safe because my webserver is hosted in a green hosting company.
• Cloud Computing
  Everything is in the cloud. Data, knowledge, applications, everything. I occasionally I ask myself: If everyone becomes an aggreagtor and consolidator, who will produce the content ? At some point mashing yahoo with flickr, amazon, facebook and xyz.net superfluous. Companies are still conservative and will not use cloud applications or data somewhere but not in your own serverroom to calculate your next salary.
• Grid Computing
  At the conference the other day someone (from a rather very big ..like worldwide big.. IT company) mentioned, enterprise applications gonna be obsolete and everything needs to be grid enabled. Applications would share resources all over the place. I guess that is not happening outside your serverroom if you conservative.