As I worked with Paul Kulchenko on his article, The Evolution of SOAP::LITE, I realized that much has changed since I last looked at this technology.

You might want to read the entire text because Paul discusses his own SOAP evolution that includes his authoring of the SOAP::LITE module. But the one thing I thought you might be most interested in now are his views concerning the direction of SOAP. Here’s what he has to say:

The direction SOAP is moving

More complex systems are being built on top of these basic levels of interoperability. SOAP development is moving in two orthogonal directions: creating extensions using SOAP extensibility and implementing complex conceptions.

The most important extensions that will influence future of SOAP are: SOAP Messages with Attachments (describes how to wrap SOAP message into MIME envelopes together with various attachments, like images or binary objects), SOAP Security Extensions: Digital Signature (describes how to implement XML Signature specification in SOAP to add security features on protocol level), and encryption (based on XML encryption, that brings other security features, like confidentiality to the SOAP level).

Complex implementations include routing through several SOAP processors (intermediaries), reliable messaging, and asynchronous processing are also planned. Recent specifications from Microsoft and IBM are trying to address these aspects. SOAP-RP from Microsoft describes message paths that two-way message exchange, and WSFL from IBM defines usage and interaction patterns for web services.

Of course there’s lots more happening with SOAP than what’s listed here …

Yesterday, I wrote about rumors that Microsoft was going to announce some kind of .NET port to Linux. The rumor mill wasn’t too far off: read all about it here. Although there is no indication that the license will meet the Open Source definition, I’m glad Microsoft is taking these first steps.

Related link: https://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2780203,00.html

Once again, stories of Microsoft porting .NET to Linux are starting to surface. Although I’ve heard this one before, I’m an eternal optimist, and I hope that we hear some kind of announcement tomorrow. For no shortage of irresponsible speculation on whether we’ll see .NET on Linux (or any other non-MS platform), see my weblog.

Related link: https://www.perl.com

This week we’re re-launching Perl.com with a new design, one that’s more like the other sites we publish: ONJava.com, ONLamp.com, XML.com, OpenP2P.com and the O’Reilly Network itself. We’ve changed the design to showcase more of what’s going on behind the home page — archives, resources, columns and news — as well as to allow some features that are standard on other O’Reilly Network sites, such as weblogs and pointers to What’s New.

You’ll find the same content coming to you every week on the site: the Perl 5 Porters summary, reports on the development of Perl 6, Larry Wall’s monthly Apocalypse columns, Damian Conway’s follow-ups to Larry’s opinions, and one or two Perl features or tutorials each week.

I’m also pleased to announce that Simon Cozens, who’s been keeping us up to date on P5P and P6 development, and has been filling in a bit on the newsletter of late, will be taking the reins as managing editor starting this July. Simon just finished exams at Oxford, and is taking a well-deserved week of rest on holiday in Japan.

Schuyler Erle, O’Reilly Network hacker extraordinaire in residence, will also be around, as will be Nat Torkington, O’Reilly editor and conference planner for our upcoming Perl and Open Source conferences in San Diego.

You’ll also find the same ads on the new site that we had on the other — and I won’t kid you: there may be more to come. I know many of you wish it could be otherwise, but the cold economic facts are that we can’t publish Perl.com or any of our other sites for free without advertising income. The fact that advertisers are beginning to take the site more seriously as a place to put their message across bodes well for Perl, and for the future of Perl.com.

Take a look and let us know what you think in the talkback feature below or by dropping email to me at dave@oreilly.com. If you’re going to the Perl Conference next month, let Simon or I know in person. We’ll gather up your feedback and sift through it when we tweak the site to come up with Perl.com v. 2.1.

Thanks for reading and I hope you continue to enjoy Perl.com.

David Sims
Editorial Director
O’Reilly Network
dave@oreilly.com

I’m suspicious of my recent affiliation with the O’Reilly Network. First I read about Chris Halsall’s “Death of a Palm” Then I come home and what do I find? My trusty Aiport Base Station is dead. Suddenly it seems like an episode of the Sopranos around here.

To be honest, it took me a few minutes after arriving home to notice that something was amiss. After all, the base station doesn’t move much. It usually stays put in one spot on the wall. But when I opened my laptop to download mail and there was no airport connection, I knew something was up. A quick look up at the base station filled me with dread. Instead of greeting me with a single green light (as it has every day for the past year) it was calling out to me with a red light alternating with 3 amber lights. Uh-oh.

I tried powering it down, then back up again to no avail. Then I heard a slight hissing sound emanating from the case. The hissing sound alternated with the pattern of the lights. This was a bad sign. It has been something like 15 years since I dabbled with my old breadboard set, but it sounded like a dead capacitor to me.

Sure enough when I opened up the base station, I found a couple of capacitors with their tops all discolored and bulged out. And when I powered up the unit without the cover on, I verified the hissing sound indeed came from the broken parts.

It didn’t take much digging around on the net before I found evidence that this is not a solitary death, but a pattern of mass suicide. Since I had built several nifty electronics projects as a child, I ran out to Radio Shack and picked up the parts needed to make the repairs that were necessary.

The operation seemed to be a success and all voltmeter tests passed, but the patient had already suffered brain death. When powered up a single amber light tried to shine, but then faded away permanently. I still don’t know if the system had fried itself into a grave, or if I had burned out some circuit with my rusty soldering skills. But I wasn’t able to get to a point where I could get a sign of life from it again. I’m left with a heap of parts to add to my dead and outdated hardware collection.

Maybe it was its time to go. I checked my records and it was exactly thirteen months ago to the day that I bought and first used the base station. Normally I’m not superstitious, but with other recent events around the O’Reilly Network, you can understand if I have my doubts now. In any case, I’m off to research what my next base station should be. And, against my better judgement, I’m starting off at the Wireless DevCenter.

How is your Airport Base Station holding up?

Mac OS X 10.0.4 is now available via Software Update. For the geeky among you Mac fans, the build number for this release is 4Q12. Several improvements to OS X appear to have been made in this release.

Apple’s OS X website claims the following improvements:

• USB improvements
• Additional support for iTunes CD Burning
• Improved battery life for PowerBook G3 users
• Improved Classic
• OpenSSH upgrade
• sudo upgrade
• Support for the new 17″ flat panel display

In the few short minutes that I’ve worked with the update, I can report that OpenSSH (a tool that I use day in and day out) has been upgraded to version 2.9p1. Darwin, the underlaying UNIX kernel and BSD based system, has been upgraded to version 1.3.7. Window minimizing (the genie effect) and some other graphics operations seem to be slightly improved, though window resizing is still not anywhere approaching smooth on my PowerBook G4.

Digging through my file system (it seems that most of the components in this update were built on June 8th and 9th) and the installation package, it looks like we also have improvements to the various video drivers (both ATI and NVidia based), PPP (including PPPoE), AppleShare, Printing, several of the core frameworks (Carbon, CoreFoundation), and the Installation Framework. Tantalizingly, it looks like some files that are related to DVD playback and recording have been updated with 10.0.4. But, there is still no DVD player and inserting a DVD only mounts the disc onto my desktop and no more.

Of course, take this “unofficial list” as just that: “unofficial”. It’s the result of my poking around in the system to see what seems to have changed. Your mileage may vary.

Bottom line: This looks to be another in a series of updates to address the various issues OS X. I’m happy to see Apple continue to ship updates as they can even as they work to give us 10.1 later this summer.

What have your experiences so far with build 4Q12 (10.0.4) been?

The fog machine seems to have kicked in. With the purplish-green
lighting, there is something of a purple haze.

The overhead screens are showing a series of slides, mostly from
TechEd exhibitors and sponsors. Microsoft is letting IBM run one of
their ads for their Unix servers. And the room’s pretty
full. Cool.

BillG is on stage now. He’s talking about smart devices, open
standards for data exchange (XML, of course). He goes on to digital
productivity: collaboration, brainstorming, screen sharing, finances,
photos, games, music, etc. Looks like he’s getting ready to tell us
how .NET will unify all these activities.

Next comes a history lesson, broken down by decade: 70s
(mainframes); 80s (file sharing, PC); 90s (HTML, Web). He says we’re
now in the XML era, and that XML is a protocol that can support the
new P2P applications people want to run. Interesting that he doesn’t
say we’re in the “Windows” era - it’s something he would have said a
few years ago. The interop story is still being told here.

On to another slide with more chronological progressions: platforms
and languages. He starts with the PC and MS-DOS (BASIC), next is the
GUI and Windows (Visual Basic), and finally the Internet/Internet
Explorer/IIS (Visual Studio, Visual Studio .NET).

Donkeys on the Hood

Time for a cutesy demo - they’re running the old QuickBasic href="https://dilbert.edu.solvesborg.se/~ynde6/gwbasic.html">DONKEY.BAS.
BillG hits a few donkeys, and then it’s on to the latest version, href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/donkey.asp">Donkey.NET. There
are two important improvements over the original: Donkey.NET is
rendered using the Revolution3D
graphics engine, and the goal is to hit as many donkeys as
possible instead of avoiding them. BillG doesn’t hit so many donkeys
as he did in DONKEY.BAS, and it’s time to use web services to download
different target models: Bill chooses the Pirate over the Rabbit as
his target. So, instead of running over cute bunnies, he’s
running over peg-legged pirates desperately trying to flee him on
their one leg… quite gruesome. I can’t wait to play it.

Next, we see a timeline of the XML standardization. The interop
message comes through again, but he makes a point to tell us that
Windows will compete to be the platform of choice.

Web Services

Another web services demo. Can’t get enough of those web
services. We’re seeing how to build an app with Visual Studio .NET - choosing “Add Web Reference”
leads to an option to search for published services using Microsoft’s
UDDI directory. Then you get a look at the WSDL, and can add it to your program. After you
add it, you can invoke it as though it were something you imported via
“using” or “Imports”. Intellisense kicks in since you added the Web
Reference:

Dim wsFlight as New net.scandinavian.FlightService
myResult = wsFlight.GetFlightStats(FlightNo, DayOffset)

That was simple. Cool.

Summary

Aside from a few interesting announcements and
a video game, there wasn’t much in the way of new information in Bill
Gates’ keynote. It was encouraging to hear the interop story repeated,
but we still need to wait and see. The big unanswered question is
will non-windows platforms be first-class players in Hailstorm? Wait
and see, and give them hell if it doesn’t come to pass.

Read about day two here.

If you’ve had a chance to read any of Chris Halsall’s “Linux on a PDA” articles, you know what a terrific writer and smart technology guy he is.

Chris and I started working together two years ago when I was the managing editor for Web Review. He came over to O’Reilly Network when I took the job here, and he’s helped me build the Network to the decent site it is today (along with lots of other folks!).

Chris and I share two interests in particular: Linux and Palm PDAs. Our work together in these areas has yielded quite a few articles over the years.

When I asked Chris to write a series of pieces on Linux PDAs, he jumped at the opportunity, and we’ve published articles on the Agenda VR3, the iPAQ, and the YOPY.

But recently, there was a tragedy in Chris’s technology family. He chronicled the event in the article, Death of a Palm.

Being a fan of the Palm OS and its devices, I was concerned about this unfortunate event, and wrote about it in the latest O’Reilly Network newsletter. If you don’t receive the newsletter, you might enjoy reading the text here …

Intro to Death of a Palm

The circumstances surrounding the recent death of Chris Halsall’s Palm PDA remain circumspect.

Yes, alcohol was involved. And there had been some tension between
the two of them, especially since Chris was spending more and more
time with the Agenda VR, the iPAQ, and then the YOPY.

The crowded, noisy room where the tragedy occurred provided ample
distraction for possible foul play. Yet the official explanation is
merely “suicide.” All that now remains of Chris’ Palm is a little
rectangular chalk outline on the barroom floor.

Was the Palm’s demise a simple accident? Or was its passing the
inevitable last chapter in a chain of events that included the
testing, holding, and yes, even coveting, various Linux PDAs?
Read “Death of a Palm,” and decide for yourself.

This is not the first such incident I’ve heard of … do we have an epidemic on our hands?

Related link: https://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,44623,00.html

Would it surprise you to know that the human genome, despite announcements to the contrary, is not quite complete? “Genome scientists know very well that they’re in the midst of the most difficult part of mapping the human genome: assembling it after they’ve torn it apart.” This, among others, was the topic of note at “Beyond Genome 2001,” this week in San Francisco.

Monday began with a keynote from Paul Flessner, Senior VP of .NET
Enterprise Servers. He talked about using XML web services in the href="https://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=enterprise">enterprise.
He first put forth a definition of a dream enterprise, which mirrored
the story Microsoft has been telling us for some time now: all your
customers, partners, and employees are connected through href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/windnadesign_guide.htm">common
application services and a common data model. Then, he put forth
his definition of reality: a bunch of heterogeneous stuff (different
platforms, languages, etc.). For me, the dream enterprise is the
promise that Microsoft didn’t deliver on. I’m glad they didn’t, since
I believe that diversity of hardware and operating systems fuels
innovation (and makes life more interesting). I’m twice as happy to
see Microsoft accepting the world as it is.

Flessner went on to explain the various ways in which web services
will save the day. There’s nothing new in that - we’ve been hearing
how XML and web services are going to unify href="https://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Component_Frameworks/Comparison_and_Critique/">that
which could never be unified. Within the last year and
a half, I developed two href="https://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/nontrivial.html">nontrivial
XML-based applications, and I think the industry
might have a sensible solution in XML.

We heard a customer success story, and then Flessner went back to his
slides. In a slide about .NET, Web Services were represented as pink
triangles. I hope that catches on - I wonder if the Visio 2002
templates will use pink triangles for web services.

A Few More Success Stories

I’ve never gotten the value of these customer success stories. I
guess it depends on your audience - when I learn a new technology, I
want to drink of its technical details and understand every aspect of
it. Then, I form a judgment as to whether it’s something I want to
use. For example, I think href="https://www.apple.com/enterprise/">NEXTSTEP is a great
platform, even measured against the capabilities of current operating
system/object model/development environment combinations. I think
these customer success stories provide comfort with a little dose of
peer pressure - this guy bet his enterprise on it, why don’t you?

If you want to get developers excited about this stuff, don’t focus
on how fast it is, how many seats it supports (this stuff is
important nonetheless), but tell us how much fun it was to
develop. Maybe that’s the difference between TechEd and the PDC (this is my first TechEd, and I’ve never been to the
PDC).

Benchmarks

Then he got into SQL Server benchmarks. I’m jaded and I don’t like
benchmarks. If you want to do benchmarks that I’ll be interested in,
set it up in an arena, gladiator-style, for all to see. Form tag teams
made up of the best href="https://www.microsoft.com/sql/default.asp">SQL Server, href="https://www.sybase.com/">Sybase, href="https://www.postgresql.org/">PostgreSQL, href="https://www.oracle.com/">Oracle, href="https://www.mysql.com/">MySQL, and href="https://www-4.ibm.com/software/data/db2/">DB2 data base
administrators (DBAs). Have them go at it, tuning their machines,
sweating furiously under the floodlights, until one emerges
victorious! Lather, rinse, repeat - hold the games every year. Better
yet, how about a database Olympics - each database will earn the gold
in different areas, and the users will know the strengths and
weaknesses. But I get sick of benchmark wars, be it operating
systems, databases, or anything.

Mobile information server

Microsoft announced the href="https://www.microsoft.com/miserver/default.asp">Mobile
Information Server today. They showed us an interesting mobile
application where a task was assigned to a developer and relayed to
his mobile phone. Although there was a glitch in the demo (some
trouble refreshing a web page), it showed how the developer was able
to complete the task, update the task management system from his
phone, and have that completed task propagate to the desktop
application.

I like the idea of having certain types of information
centralized. For example, I’d have no problem with Microsoft or
Netscape storing my bookmarks on their server. I don’t want them
stored on my computers - it’s a total hassle to keep moving bookmarks
between machines.

Do your href="https://www.microsoft.com/net/hailstorm.asp">Hailstorm-esque
centralization with something simple first! You can’t do this with my
TODO list, because you can’t guarantee that I’ll be online when I edit
it. If I’m using my bookmarks, you can assume that I’m online
somehow.

Make it so my bookmarks find me when I fire up any computer: my
laptop, my Palm, Power Mac, or desktop PC. If I add a bookmark on my
Palm, have it instantly available on my desktop. It shouldn’t matter
whether I’m using Mozilla, href="https://www.opera.com/">Opera, href="https://home.netscape.com/browsers/index.html">Netscape, href="https://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.htm">Internet
Explorer, or Konqueror! If
you could pull this off, I’d be impressed. Then, maybe users would trust you
to centralize everything else, like our medical records and high
school transcripts.

Read about day one here.

Now that I have recovered from JavaOne, I have been once again exploring the terrain of Cocoa. And in the process, I’ve been digging deep again into Objective-C. In a previous weblog I discussed a few of the differences between Objective-C and Java. Now I’m going to take a look at a couple of things that are annoying, and sometimes painful, about working in Objective-C. Especially when coming from a Java background.

First up, Objective-C is based on the strict ANSI C standard. This means that you are limited to declaring new variables to the top of a block of code. What happens in practice is that the following code (a snippet that all Java programmers have used a bazillion times and have automatically programmed into their fingertips) will not compile:

for (int i = 1; i < j; i++) {
    // do stuff
}

Instead, you need to write your code to look something like:

int index;
for (index = 1; index < j; index++) {
    // do stuff
}

This looks innocent enough in the example above, but most methods have a page or two (hopefully not more!) of implementation. In real life, the example looks more like the following:

int index;
// Lots of code in method…
[[NSColor whiteColor] set];
NSRectFill(rect);
for (index = 1; index < j; index++) {
    // do stuff
}

Declaring an index a page before the for loop that uses it is quite annoying. Or declaring any short-lived variable too far from where it is being used is a sure way to run into readability problems. At WWDC it was mentioned that this problem will likely go away as the C support is upgraded. Until that happy day, there is a work-around. Simply open a new block of code with curly-braces. Here’s an example:

// previous code in method…
[[NSColor whiteColor] set];
NSRectFill(rect);
{
    int index;
    for (index = 1; index < j; index++) {
        // do stuff
    }
}

The second issue is one that is not picked up the by the compiler. It is the accidental case of using an `=` assignment operator in an if(condition){} statement instead of the `==` comparison operator. There have been at least three cases in the last few days where the following code caused non-obvious problems in my programs:

if (answer = NSAlertDefaultReturn) {
    sp = [NSSavePanel savePanel];
    [sp setRequiredFileType:@”expenses”];
    answer = [sp runModal];
    // …
}

The above code will compile just fine, but trying to figure out what is happening at runtime can get a little tricky. Even if you have a hint of the problem, having to scan pages of code looking for a single missing ‘=’ character can make your eyes cross.

Are these issues enough to keep me from further experimentation with Objective-C? Nope. Not at all. But they do constantly annoy me as I explore the language and the Cocoa frameworks. They take a little bit of the shine off of an otherwise enjoyable experience. Just enough to make me really appreciate some of the polish that the creators of Java put into the language and its semantics.

Are you a Java programmer taking a few baby steps into Objective-C? If so, what have been your experiences?

• Whistler Server will be called Windows .NET Server and will ship with the .NET framework and ASP.NET.
• RPG and FORTRAN for .NET will be available soon.
• Beta 2 of Visual Studio .NET has shipped.
• The Microsoft Shared Development Process. This process uses design preview and review to involve other organizations in the design of Microsoft technology, including extended Hailstorm services. Apparently, the core Hailstorm services are being designed using this process.
• Microsoft is confident that the release of Visual Studio .NET “will take place this calendar year.”
• .NET Peer-to-Peer samples are available at GotDotNet.

Related link: https://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/nextgen/beta.asp

Visual Studio .NET Beta 2 has hit the streets. MSDN Universal subscribers can download it immediately, while others can order it on CD or DVD. If you just want the .NET Framework SDK without Visual Studio (and as a much smaller download), visit this link.

I woke up and cracked open the sliding glass door. I was kind of surprised at how cool the breeze was, considering that I was standing in a hotel in Atlanta. Around noon, though, it got very hot, and I had to close the door. That’s OK, because it was time to head over to the conference center for registration.

Arrival

I arrived just before 1pm, and the line for registration was incredibly long. Once the line started moving, it moved quickly. Conference staff supplied us with bottled water, and I found plenty of fruit on the way to registration.

A Sea of Bandwidth?

I was looking forward to the 802.11b support at this conference, but I was slightly disappointed that the 802.11b support is limited to certain lounges (as well as rooms adjacent to the lounges). I was hoping to bathe in a sea of bandwidth.

On Hobbyists

VMware was giving away copies of their software. I lined up and got my copy (only the Windows version was available). I bought a copy of VMWare for Linux back when they still had the hobbyist license. I’m bummed out that they still don’t do this. The hobbyist license recognized that there are two types of users: those who need the program to work all the time (and need phone or email support), and those (hobbyists) who can find workarounds when stuff doesn’t work. As a hobbyist user, let me report bugs, and I’ll wait for a fix or find a workaround on my own or via user-to-user support.

A Conversation

In the evening, I had a good talk with some Microsoft guys about Open Source. Of course, the conversation started out about Craig Mundie. I was asked how much truth there is in what he’s saying. I said there wasn’t much truth there, but blurring of the distinctions between open source and the GPL. Someone raised a concern about the C library, a library that nearly every program needs to link against. I pointed out that the C library is licensed under the LGPL, which lets non-free software programs (such as Netscape) link to the library at runtime. Section 5 of the LGPL license spells out the details of these terms, including the extent to which a non-free work may include portions of header files related to the library.

The conversation took a lot of turns, visiting embedded Linux, Mac OS X, and Apache. We talked about the difference between companies whose sole business is open source and companies who augment their core business with open source: if a big part of your core business is hardware (as with IBM and Apple), then open source software is a much surer bet. And in the current financial climate, sure bets are appealing. If you can dictate the hardware configuration, whether you are shipping a PC or a handheld, Linux or BSD is great, since you can tune the operating system to the device and never worry about hardware compatibilities. One of the reasons Windows is so darn big is the breadth of hardware that it supports. Windows XP has been especially impressive in this respect (and stable, even for a beta).

All that being said, I think companies like RedHat and Ximian will prove that you can have a business model based entirely on open source software. This is where the Microsoft guys and I diverged a bit. They believe that their model is the best for developing software quickly and reliably (don’t laugh until you’ve used the .NET Framework for a few months - it’s quite well done). Although Microsoft’s model can and does turn out quality software, I think there’s plenty of room for open source to do so (and in different ways).

Chatting with the Microsoft guys was a pleasure. First and foremost, I found them to be intelligent and open-minded. This didn’t surprise me, since I’ve talked with people from Microsoft before. I mention this because it challenges some stereotypes that people have about Microsoft employees. Second, the conversation led me to think about many of my positions, and I found ways to articulate them better (the fact that I had only one black and tan really helped).

More to come tomorrow: .NET, Web Services, and a few digressions…

Roger Sessions, the author of the article, maintains that .NET has more inherent support for language neutrality than Java. Sessions’ analysis indicates that there are no compilers for Java that support features such as cross-language polymorphism or cross-language exception handling. However, the analysis does not prove that such things are impossible.

Sessions offers five requirements for true language neutrality. I’ve seen nothing that indicates the Java platform was designed from the ground up for this, and I suspect that Sessions’ conclusions are right. Before I embrace those conclusions, I’d like to hear specific details on where the JVM falls short of meeting Sessions’ requirements. Such details would provide some guidance for anyone looking to implement a new language for the JVM or improve Java’s support for multiple languages.

Anyone looking for a potential dissertation topic need look no further :-)

Related link: https://wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,44446,00.html

An American Museum of Natural History’s exhibit, “The Genomic Revolution,” focuses on the social, ethical, and political ramifications of genomics more than the science. “We were worried that an exhibition simply on the technology would have been too much like a textbook. The social (issues) get people interested in the first place.”

The twenty thousand odd people that were at JavaOne know exactly how I feel this week after the conference. In a word: Tired. There were five full days of 8AM wake-up calls for keynotes and 11PM BOF sessions and parties. At the end of it all however, it seems that the important take-away items from this JavaOne were not in the press releases or keynote slides. They were found between the lines, between the sessions, and in the after hours discussions.

For starters, just look at the attendance numbers. In an age of companies chopping their travel budgets, something like twenty thousand people managed to descend on the Moscone center. Sure, that’s down from twenty five thousand last year, but other conferences have been hit harder. I have been to some recently where you could hear the promoters crying over their balance sheets. Take-away: JavaOne remains the premier programmer conference and networking venue. Companies cut other conferences, but still ensured that their employees made it to JavaOne.

Next, while it became repetitive at times to watch one corporate executive after another pull out a device on stage and say, “This is a cell phone. It runs Java,” the sheer magnitude of small devices running Java made it clear that this was the year of J2ME. But, the buzz amongst all of my friends was the Compaq iPaq running Linux and a full J2SE environment. Take-away: J2ME is hot right now, but the devices are picking up the horsepower to run standard Java. And hackers don’t want to mess with all sorts of profiles, they want to Write Once Run Anywhere (WORA).

Possibly the best of the keynotes was on Thursday where Oracle’s Larry Ellison followed BEA’s William Coleman. Larry took turns praising the benefits of competing on standards and taking shots at both BEA and IBM. Take-away: J2EE is a rousing success, everyone knows it, and there is a healthy set of J2EE application servers to choose from.

Java on the desktop didn’t get much play at this year’s JavaOne. At least not officially. However, the underlaying buzz was there. Apple was present in force as a Gold co-sponser and was showing Mac OS X running the latest and greatest Java runtimes as well as Hardware Accellerated Swing and Java Web Start. The buzz from random attendees that I talked to was very positive. One person said that he hoped that Java developers would jump all over Mac OS X as a developer platform to reward Apple for all of the hard work they have put into J2SE. Take-away: Apple has done very well at overcoming the stigma of poor Java support that it used to have. We may yet see a renaissance on the desktop for J2SE and if we do, Apple will be there.

So, even though there were no spectacular announcements at JavaOne, if you dig deep the message is pretty clear. Java is mature and ready to go in the Enterprise, is picking up steam in cell phones everywhere, and is poised to make a come back on the desktop that was its original target. And even if we don’t see J2SE rule on the desktop, it is certain that the little devices are picking up enough power to run it instead of J2ME. There are no earth shattering revolutions taking place and even if it doesn’t make for good news, it makes for a good platform for developers to program to.

What was your take-away from JavaOne?

Related link: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/11/business/11GIAN.html

“It is a future in which everything is for sale, preferably by the month.” Subscription is the new (read: old) buzzword cropping up all over the place of late. Microsoft promises .NET/Hailstorm-enabled services and software-as-service across it’s product line. Salon Premium offers exclusive content and the opportunity to stop advertising at the wave of a wallet. Asked what AOL Time Warner’s company vision is, Chief Executive Gerald M. Levin responded: ‘”Subscriptions,” he said. Full stop.’

Tangentially, but relatedly: Do you find you spend more time on cable or the networks?

Microsoft has been working with some other organizations on an ECMA draft standard that would cover certain core portions of .NET. The information in this draft standard would be enough to implement a usable core of .NET on Linux, Mac OS X, or some other platform.

It’s possible that work is already in progress to bring .NET to non-Windows platforms. In September 2000, the ECMA TC39 group met to discuss the .NET draft standard. Some of Tony Goodhew’s (Tony is the C# Product Manager) responses may shed a little light on what is to come (emphasis mine):

Bill Gibbons: conventional wisdom has it that
standardization shouldn’t start until there at least
2 independent implementations. What is the situation
with regards to C# and CLI.

Tony: Microsoft is working on two implementations.

Bill: it would be good to see an implementation from another company such as HP.

Tony: we are interested in working with other companies to encourage the development of other implementations.

Jim Miller: Microsoft’s two implementations are
largely
independent, although there is some code overlap for
the class libraries.

Tony: we are working towards an open source
implementation, but we don’t intend to tag this as a
“reference implementation”.

…

Pamela: is CLI available on non-WinTel platforms?

Tony: Yes, but Microsoft can’t comment on this at this
time. Toby would love to see other companies involved.

Is Microsoft working on an open source implementation? It depends on what you mean by “working towards.” That could simply mean that they are trying to find someone else to do it. What’s this “non-Wintel platform”? My guess is that it’s either Linux or PalmOS.

Later on, on a public mailing list, Tony clarifies some of his comments:

“Additionally I was asked about open-source
implementations, specifically a
reference implementation. The sponsors of this project
are considering an
open-source implementation but have not made any
decisions yet.

…

Currently Microsoft has these frameworks running on all
the Windows platforms (Win2K through WinCE) and 1
non-Windows
platform. Unfortunately I’m not able to comment any
further on
the non-Windows platform.”

Fascinating… I wonder when we’ll know the whole story. Whether or not Microsoft supplies a cross-platform implementation of .NET, Portable.NET is a project to keep an eye on - that project aims to provide a highly portable implementation of .NET for Linux and other platforms.

Related link: https://cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6210768.html

CNET and the Wall Street Journal are reporting on a devious little feature of Windows XP that lets Microsoft add hyperlinks within the browser. In effect, the reports say, Microsoft is assuming the power to “edit” other people’s web pages, by making it appear to the user that these hyperlinks occur on the page.

This is somewhat similar to the Related Links button in Netscape’s browsers, except that Microsoft plans to incorporate those related links directly into the text of a web site. Unsavvy users may think these links were put in place by the web site’s author or publisher, giving Microsoft the power to hijack these unsuspecting souls back to Microsoft’s own sites or, as likely, sites of companies that Redmond strikes a deal with.

I’m often the Microsoft apologist around these parts, playing the devil’s advocate to my Open Source colleagues and taking the side of consumer acceptance. But this is certainly one of the most devious acts Microsoft has come up with in a while, and even I won’t be able to support it.

If you have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal online, you can also read Walter Mossberg’s report on smart tags.

Help! As resident Microsoft apologist around here, even I can’t come up with a defense for Smart Tags. I’m open to suggestions.

Related link: https://slashdot.org/articles/01/06/07/171242.shtml

From Andrew Tridgell, the fellow who brought ethernet to TiVo: “This software pulls together all the components necessary for viewing recordings directly off of your TiVo on a Linux PC. Windows and Linux users are also able to pull MPEG files directly from their TiVo for conversion into Video CD�s.”

Related link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/18016.html

“An ingenious . . . final year Industrial Design student at Brunel University has designed a unit that grabs the weather forecast, and burns it onto a piece of bread. Mark One doesn’t reproduce the full glory of weather maps - such as isobars and cold fronts - on your toast just yet, and instead displays an appropriate symbol: a cloud, sun or raindrop. But it’s seamless and doesn’t take any longer than a regular, or dare we say ‘legacy’ toaster.”

Related link: https://www.technologyreview.com/web/leo/leo060601.asp

“The flicker of fluorescent lights, long a symbol of institutional drear, may give new freedom to the handicapped . . . Talking Lights Cambridge-based MIT spinoff, is developing a local area network that uses fluctuations in fluorescent lights to transmit data.”

Related link: https://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/05/122240&mode=thread

Dan Ravicher, an attorney interested in Open Source and Free Software licensing issues, responds to Slashdot questions in “what amounts to a legal FAQ for Open Source and Free Software developers. This is important reading for anyone involved in any way with Open Source or Free Software development.”

Related link: https://search.jxta.org/

JXTA Search (nee InfraSearch), “a distributed search system, designed for peer to peer networks and web sites” came out of stealth mode today, taking its place in Sun’s JXTA P2P platform lineup. In addition to source, white-papers, and comprehensive protocol documentation, a live demo (including the O’Reilly Network’s own Meerkat Open Wire Service as a provider) is up and running at: https://searchdemo.jxta.org/