Neal Gafter has left Google to join Microsoft working on it’s dot net platform with Anders Hejlsberg. Oddly enough Anders was the father of Borland Delphi which I’ve used for over 13 years, who left Borland to go create C# and dot net. Now when I switch to java, one of the most well known Java pioneers moves to Microsoft to go work with him.
(Note : This post was written before the fallout over the Spring licensing issues which does reflect on the content of the post. However, I didn’t want to get drawn into that issue too much and dilute the point of this article. I have added some additional thoughts here)
In general, there are advantages to choice, but the whole 31 flavors of java development is mostly harmful. People are forgetting about flavour 32 which is to drop java and go use something where the vast majority of developers use the same tools, libraries, frameworks and products. Java becomes massively unproductive when you spend weeks or months examining frameworks and get stuck in analysis paralysis, and then grudgingly move on waiting for the gotcha moment where you realize you chose the wrong one. (more…)
Internet News is reporting that Transmeta is up for sale.The chip maker which first unveiled its products in 2000 was most noted for developing the Crusoe processor and employing Linus Torvalds. When first released, their Crusoe processors were most interesting because of their Code Morphing Software which allowed it to convert software instructions from one hardware platform into instructions that were native to the chip. This meant it could work as a hardware emulator for the x86 platform, and was used in numerous laptops. The complexity of the software on the chip meant that the hardware on the chip could be less complex which meant less transistors and therefore less energy and heat (and presumably faster hardware).
At one point there was much talk of seeing the Crusoe processor used to execute Java byte code natively, leading to grand ideas such as a native Java operating system. Rather than having to build a chip from scratch to understand Java byte code, the Crusoe processor just required the software to translate Java byte code into native code. It would be much easier and cheaper to develop initially without the need for a new chip design and manufacturing processes to build it making it slightly more feasible.
Since the company is up for sale, and the patents along with it, I’m guessing it’s not something we’ll be seeing any time soon.
A great source of computer graphics papers can be found here from the experts at Pixar, the folks behind great movies such as FInding Nemo, Cars, and the recent WALL·E. For those that don’t know, Pixar is also responsible for creating the 3D software PhotoRealistic Renderman (PRMan) that is used to create their movies as well as movies and commercials by other production studios. They are also responsible for the file format that can be used to define the scenes (Renderman Interface Specification).
They have released a number of papers that go all the way back to the 1980’s covering some of the fundamental of computer graphics, including the often sought after paper on the REYES architecture which is the primary rendering algorithm used by PRMan.
REYES (Renders Everything You Ever Saw) is an algorithm for rendering 3D graphics which can be distributed among many processors without the need to pass the whole model around unlike ray tracing and produces images with fast results. Even today it is somewhat of a rock star in rendering algorithms with many people still asking about how it works, and writing implementations of the algorithm. For some odd reason, most graphics books tend not to even cover this technique even though it is one of the most often admired and imitated algorithms. Part of it is the simplicity of the algorithm and the fact that it easily lends itself to being extended using texture and even displacement shaders as well as visual artifacts such as motion blur and depth of field blurring.
Some of the more recent papers cover the finer points of computer graphics built on the fundamentals such as soft reflections, hair rendering, deep shadow maps and distributed ray tracing. Many of the papers describe some of the technical aspects of achieving certain effects in their movies.
As a ray tracing enthusiast, I found a great paper on Ray Differentials and Multiresolution Geometry Caching for Distribution Ray Tracing in Complex Scenes. One interesting aspect of this paper is the possibility of introducing displacement maps and shaders into the ray tracing pipeline. Displacement maps or shaders modify the actual physical geometry of a surface as opposed to simply changing the appearance of the surface to make it look like the surface is displaced.
This is a great set of papers for those that are graphically inclined from some of the the best minds in the business.
Which planet? Earth that is. In Europe there is an ongoing court bid to halt turning on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The collider is the worlds largest particle accelerator running underground at the Franco-Swiss border in Geneva with a circumference of 17 miles. The concern is that when used, the collider will generate black holes which could grow exponentially to swallow the earth.
Of course, this isn’t the first time the planet has faced such danger. When I was 10, I tried to build my own particle accelerator which failed more miserably than the laser I tried to build from a cardboard tube, aluminum/tin foil, a 2 liter coke bottle, some vinegar and baking soda. it was going to be a carbon dioxide laser since they were used in manufacturing to cut through sheet metal, and at 10 years old, the first thing you want to do with the laser you just built is cut stuff up (also, at the time I couldn’t afford gems to excite the particles). I spent a lot of time as a kid reading my older brothers physics books which was great for my education but not so much for my bedroom.
Regarding the LHC, a safety report from 2003 verified that there were risks of micro-black holes, among other phenomena, and that there was no basis for any danger. This report was reaffirmed in 2008 by the LHC’s Safety Assessment Group.
CERN will be flicking the switch on September 10th 2008, I wish them more luck than I had with my particle accelerator, or as I affectionately called her “Ol’ Lightning”.
Updated 9/13/2008 : We’re all still alive!
Reading this post on Javalobby prompted me to go and dust off a post I wrote a while ago but hadn’t published regarding Spring and the revitalized EJB standard. At the time I was fired up by this post by Rod Johnson which seemed to be a large helping of FUD and insults. Nonsense such as suggesting that because some people were using app servers and some weren’t the age of the app server was over, like suggesting that because I want a shovel to dig a hole, we no longer need backhoes. This was interspersed with some irrelevant quotes from Gartner made to look like evidence and malicious comments about EJBs and their users. It seemed like the Spring folks were chomping at the bit to pronounce EJB dead when in fact, as evidenced by some recent posts, it is very much alive. In hindsight, it seems the Spring guys were trying to lay some marketing groundwork prior to releasing their own OSGI application server.
This brings me to this latest post, one of a number of recent posts which sings the praises of EJBs and in this case asks the Spring developer “why not?”. It’s almost like the question nobody asks because the presumption is that the answer is obvious. It also touches on the issue of Spring and EJB developers not getting along which I think in part was fueled by the old arguments of Rod and Gavin who seem ‘passionate’ about their technology choices. However, there is still some animosity between the two camps years after those minor flame wars. I think part of it stems from the normal response of users being defensive, and therefore offensive or protective of their technology of choice because of flaws they are aware off even if they disagree with them, which is a normal response.
Disclaimer : I’m currently working on a Seam project and have been involved on the Seam forums. However, when I need a quick dependency injection library (especially for SE), I turn to Spring.
EJB users are having to defend a technology which has the appearance of being stodgy and has a terrible legacy even though its modern day incarnation is far more hip, cool and even Spring-like. Few negative comments about EJBs appear to be about flaws in the current implementation other than the fact that EJBs require a container.
The Spring users have to defend a technology that is in essence proprietary as opposed to standards based, and while the core Spring functionality (DI, AOP) is very good, a number of people believe that it is starting to spread itself a little too thin, and starting to suffer from the dreaded ‘Bloat’. It is now facing competition from EJB, a technology that is not only as easy to use and powerful but is also a standard, which, all things being equal, is a positive. If nothing else, being a standard will also give it a helping hand in being adopted in some of the more corporate shops.
While SpringSource haven’t implemented the standards, I’m sure there will be a Spring driven implementation of Web Beans (JSR 299) which could drag Spring kicking and screaming under the standards umbrella. If Web Beans gains traction and becomes the accepted way of defining components for web applications, then there is a chance people will choose the standards based web beans syntax over a proprietary Spring syntax and be able to swap out implementations. One advantage Spring does have is the ability to provide its core functionality on both desktop and web applications which unfortunately, isn’t a part of the Web Beans spec (yet?). This may provide enough reason for developers to avoid using Web Beans or at least limit it to pieces that will definitely be web based only.
I do like the fact that the only opaque part of Spring is the container. Other pieces like the transaction manager, data sources and so on are all transparent for you to see in your configuration unlike the EJB container where they are just bundled in and magically mess with your beans. This lack of apparent simplicity can also be a turn off for some people who prefer a simpler Spring solution over complex old EJBs.
In some ways Spring feels like that small cafe that worked really well, was cheap and served great food compared to ‘those chains’. They decide to open a couple more restaurants up, and the owner can’t run all of them so he hires extra help, and trains them, but they don’t always get it right, and lack the enthusiasm with personal service. He opens a couple more stores up and decides to produce a manual detailing every aspect of the recipes and customer service. Before he knows it, he is one of ‘those chains’, and the quality of food has gone down, and the prices have gone up. Not that I think every Spring project is prone to fail unless it is under the guiding hand of Rod. However, Spring has spread beyond it’s core functionality and expecting the same level of buy-in from developers, and from Rod’s post referenced at the beginning of this post, it seems they are even trying to Manufacture buy-in.
At one time, the Spring team would have criticized the inability to move a ’standard’ EJB from one app server to another, now they just expect you to deploy applications in their proprietary modules for their app server. They would have criticized the bloat of the implemented standards, and now if you want to use their web flow API, you have to include their Web MVC framework even if you are using JSF. I think this is a bit of a reach from the SpringSource folks. Just because I put my Dependency Injection egg in your basket, it doesn’t automatically mean I’m going to put my view technology and server choice eggs in there too.
The chaps over at Java Posse recently celebrated their 200th Podcast with a retrospective of their first 200 episodes since they started back in September 2005. In the last 3 years they have provided some great round ups of Java news and interviews as well as adding their own (usually!) informed perspectives. These guys have been a somewhat diverse group of developers considering they are all Java developers, often including news that is relevant to, or on the cusp of Java development. They often give their opinions on the state of the industry, alternative technologies and related technologies. Having been away recently, I’m a few episodes behind so I have a few to catch up on.
Great stuff chaps and here’s to another 200 episodes.
OK, I know in my original post I tempted fate by suggesting that my Hello World post might end up sitting in solitary on my blog, forever archived on google or the memory hole. However, I have been fairly busy.
I’ve been working on creating my own Wordpress theme which was interesting. It’s always fun taking a blank structured HTML page and using CSS to organize and bring it to life and hopefully making it look good. This page gives you a great introduction to Wordpress themes starting from the very basics and building up from there. Some items needed tweaking to work ok, but once I got the basics down, I started fresh (like the article does) with my own css layout and built my pages from there. It still needs some work, and it still needs some visual tweaks but overall I like it. Of course, next month I might just decide I hate it.
I’ve also been working on a rather long article comparing Spring Web Flow and JBoss Seam. I took the easy option and started writing it using MS Word thinking I would just port it to HTML or print to PDF. However, after a while it got rather large, and I started wondering how easy it would be to port to HTML and do I want to limit it to PDF? The answer I found was in using docbook to produce the document. Docbook is an xml like markup language for defining technical documentation. This page offers a great tutorial on setting up an eclipse project in which to edit and build your docbook source into HTML and PDF targets.
Regarding the article comparing JBoss Seam and Spring Web Flow, I am still working on it. It is complete except for the conclusion, although I am still proof reading it, and have been trying to do this over the past month or so. It attempts to draw some comparisons that are very relevant to the typical CRUD code that developers write every day, and avoids the simplistic Hello World projects that are often used to demonstrate and compare technologies. The article(s) compare frameworks in the context of a somewhat real world project involving CRUD, and master detail relationships. I’m hoping to have this completed in the next few weeks.
