The Goldfish Chronicles

See lots of crap asking Sun to open source Java, but I wonder if anyone has any plans on how to do it.

Would they keep the JCP?
Would they throw Java utterly open and ask Joy and Gosling to spend their evenings dealing with a noisy mail list?
Would they hand it over to an organisation [OSDL? ASF? JBoss ;)?]
Would they create a ‘Java Organisation’ a la Mozilla, Eclipse.

It seems that the most likely would be an Eclipse style system, based on the existing JCP structure. So really all the ‘open the source’ and letters from ESR mean:

1) Make the JCP communication public and remove the JCP NDA.
2) Remove the restrictive licences in the Java source code and show the C code.
3) Stop paying all the Sun people to work on JCP things in their day to day work, and tell them they have to do it in their evenings, while their work things become Java consultancy things.

Whenever I get a phone, be it mobile/cell, work or home, I seem to have to live with a long history of calls for people who used to have the number.

Bloody irritating getting calls for the ‘have a nice day cafe’ [amazing how many people phone me to tell me they left their wallet last night], and the latest is from some dj-talent agency, so I guess the prior owner was a dj or something.

My wife points out that the same happens in email. She bought worldciv.com a while back as she was a world-civ history teacher, and she receives emails for the previous owner every now and then.

Read Rich Bowen’s weblog where he said Firefox was impressive. I usually have Mozilla installed on machines, but bounce back and forth between it and IE [or Safari on the mac].

Wow. Firefox is impressive. Very impressive. Unless some nasty issue crops up, today marks the end of my IE usage except for grabbing binaries of firefox to install. It’s even good enough that every relative who is not a Mac user [safari’s cool] or an AOL user [too much pain] will get a recommendation to switch.

Along with the speed and lovely features, Mozilla/Firefox also won by being able to render a PNG with 000066 as a colour correctly, while both Safari and IE render it as a darker colour than 000066. If not for Mozilla’s success, I’d have blamed my png creation skills.

*************
In addition to the 0.9 simple-jndi release, I’ve also released a small
configuration system that can sit on top of a JNDI Context. I’ve used this
in scraping-engine and another project and it seems a nice concise way to
get configuration in a system.

It’s a part of the genjava multi-project, aka gj-commons.

http://www.osjava.org/genjava/multiproject/gj-config/
*************

It’s not intended to be everything to everyone, but it’s nice and simple and seems to do the job as far as configuration goes for me.

0.9 *cheer*

**********
Two new features in 0.9.

The first is that instead of every Context object being its own separate
memory instance, you may specify org.osjava.jndi.shared=true and have them
share the same memory instance to make it feel like a server is being
used.

The second is that the files may be accessed over http in addition to
local file and classpath. Probably mostly of use to applets and webstart
applications.

http://www.osjava.org/simple-jndi/changes-report.html#0.9
**********

The http feature is untested on servers that don’t offer directory-listing. I think this is it for simple-jndi 1.0’s feature’s, I just need to continue documenting and testing and finding bugs. 1.0 in 6 months is the hope.

Lots of various threads are merging into one while I watch an evolution program on Discovery. Evolution has two strategies, specialise or generalise. Most animals on the planets are specialists, generalism has been a major aspect in Human evolution however.

I’ve been reading Asimov’s 2nd autobiography recently in which he starts as a childhood prodigy and then matures [fails] into a generalist, though he does get lucky and discover he’s an expert at talking in public.

I thought I’d become a specialist in the last few years, going from someone who learnt a new language every few months, dabbled and played in many areas, to someone who focused on Java and things that support Java [Linux, databases], but reading Asimov I realise that I’m surprisingly [for me] falling into the trap of trapping myself in a box.

While I’ve been specialising in Java, I’ve also been generalising in History [Europa Universalis is a great game, and I’m currently reading about Polish history] and spending a lot of time experimenting with the development process.

I’ve just released 0.2 of Payload, a pretty simple self-extracting jar system.

The reason I say pretty-simple and not simple is that there’s an optional ability to do search and replace on the files as they’re extracted.

http://www.osjava.org/payload

It’s a part of a build and deploy system I’m piecing together around Maven at work, and I figured it might be of use to someone.

Robert Zigweid had some comments on my TDD rant, and I like one idea that came out of the conversation. As I create my interface-framework, which is effectively my public-API, the JUnit tests in fact form a contract-test, or API specification.

It possibly means creating NullImpl versions for every interface/abstract class, but it would be a useful milestone. It still wouldn’t be TDD, but it is a reason to unit test while doing top-down.