Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Wednesday June 30, 2004

Slashdot and Project Looking Glass; Everyone Has an Opinion

Okay, so I'll admit I look at /. from time to time (though not nearly as much as I used to). I guess in some ways it was very much the first such blogging outlet to gain noteriety. Good proof points for this assertions are the wealth of products and links to things that say "First post!". In many cases it seems people opine with what they've been lead to believe over the years- whether or not their opinion is even interesting. This, of course gave rise moderation, meta-moderation and what not, but I digress.

I looked over there just now and there are a huge number of posts with erronious info. Lots of Looking Glass posts about 'waste of CPU' and bloated Java and the perrenial C/C++ comparison.

Luckily there are some saner and more knowledgeable voices out there as well.

Speaking from experience, Project Looking Glass, for the most part, just exploits the fact that most modern PCs have 3D hardware sitting around collecting dust, waiting for someone to launch Quake or the like. It works quite well on even mid-grade, two year old laptops with cheap Intel graphics chipsets. The whole goal with the project is to rethink how we can make use of these resources to get more done. It would seem to me this is exactly the kind of thing the /. crowd should be into.

I just hope the opportunity to innovate doesn't get lost in the anti-hype of those looking for their two minutes of fame by posting uninformed opinion. . .

p.s.: I still haven't had my first post :)
Updated wirelessly from my Treo... ( Jun 30 2004, 08:54:32 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Tuesday June 29, 2004

Day Two Well, day two started off with a headache. It's gotten better, but I still feel pretty tired. Had a great (and expensive) dinner at Roy's. I've been eating too well here- I'll have to back off when I get back home.

I've not gotten to too many sessions, but:
- Groovy is, well, groovy
- SVG has come a long way
- Creator is pretty darned cool

No fancy dinner tonight- I'm going to go check out the "Tiger's Children" BOF, among others. I hope to find something a bit healthy, yet quick.

More later. . .
Updated wirelessly from my Treo... ( Jun 29 2004, 06:01:07 PM PDT ) Permalink

Monday June 28, 2004

JavaOne Final Setup So, I'm standing out front with a couple systems for the pavillion while the festivities begin. I wonder what I'm missing...

Attendance looks to be about the same as last year.

There were projections of 'project lookingglass' on the side of a couple of buildings last night. I tried to take some photos with the phone, but the quality was just a bit lacking :)
Updated wirelessly from my Treo... ( Jun 28 2004, 09:21:10 AM PDT ) Permalink

Sunday June 27, 2004

First JavaOne Blog

Okay, so after a brief vacation to honor my Grandparents 70th anniversary, I'm now at JavaOne. Well there was a brief day or two of getting cerebral about software and Java with a bunch of people much smarter than me.

Now I'm sitting in an alumni round table thing-- two out of four of them were leading the cerebalism. :)

Topics so far for those that didn't find out about the event:
- Eliminating the XML configuring/building nightmare
- simplification
- thoughts about J2EE and simplification withthings like ejb 3 and hibernate
- Operator overloading and unsigned arithmetic

from the Q&A it seems the community still sees all of the things missing as something Sun shoud provide. Ironic given some of the other things people say sun should do with Java.

For instance,someone just asked about other languages on the JVM. And once again the answer is "please, go out and write them". (and I'd typed the paragraph entry before that comment was made)

That's my entry for now, more updates from the floor tomorrow.
Updated wirelessly from my Treo... ( Jun 27 2004, 06:51:28 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Saturday June 26, 2004

Test of blogger Just a quick test of mo:Blog, a pretty cool little PalmOS app for updating your blog if you have a device with wireless capabilities. I hope this works!

Sent wirelessly from my Treo... ( Jun 26 2004, 06:31:44 PM PDT ) Permalink

Tuesday June 15, 2004

With network speed

Okay, so we all, at one point in time or another, get frustrated by not being able to get at something you need right away. Every once in a while, for me anyway, a nice counterexample comes along to show how quick stuff moves on the the net.

My friend and colleague, John Clingan, had an interesting exchange with Jon Udell who was somehow involved in the "Unix is Dead" article in Byte around 1990. Anyway, these two haven't ever spoken or emailed that I'm aware of, but they've been talking back and forth to the world through their blogs. This all happened in a matter of a few days.

Then, if one counterexample isn't enough, someone posted a link to my blog on the UUASC mailing list. I intentionally hadn't posted it there myself to see how long it'd take. It was about one week.

No matter how annoying it is when you can't get at something over the network, or it is taking longer than you expect, we all have to step back and admit things move much faster now than they used to. John in the past wouldn't have even had access to some way of publishing his thoughts. Now, because the software and the network, they found each other and published their differing perspectives in a couple days. I didn't expect that kind of speed at all.

I very much like Jon's comment about Analysts being part time Practitioners and vice versa...

Wednesday June 09, 2004

What's old is new again...

First of all, a big thanks to Marc Fleury and Gavin King for coming to our LA JUG meeting last night. I'm sure they tune into my blog all the time. :)

Hopefully the slides will be posted soon off of the LA JUG website. To quickly summarize though, Gavin is the founder of the Hibernate project. He's also participating quite a bit in JSR-220 which will probably be EJB 3.0.

The reason for the title of this entry is that years and years ago, I remember looking at a draft of the JSP 0.92 specification. Way back then the idea whomever wrote that spec had was to use Java Beans (not EJBs) for the component model. Then the developer would progammatically control transactionality and such within the code they develop. Then things like the EJB spec including CMP (or the idea for it anyway) and things changes significantly going into JSP 1.2.

Marc's theme was to treat all of these components that reside behind the JSP/Servlet tier as POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). Then through the use of annotations/metadata in Java 1.5, ascribe different aspects (think AOP) to these POJOs you've described. For instance, if you need something to be an entity, you can 'inject' an entityManager into a POJO using the @inject annotation. What this does is takes the developer out of the daily routine of coding to the current EJB specifications with all of it's home/remote interfaces and different facades for encapsulating how things are done. Instead it's replaced with a simple to read, easy to understand way for developers to declare what they want to happen. There are some other neat things like removing the need to write DTOs (Data Transfer Objects-- a TLA [three letter acronym] that describes all of those mountains of code that we write for moving data back and forth between Servlet/JSPs and the EJB containers). EJB 3.0 should also be picking up some of Hibernate's other great features, like very much simplifying O/R mappings and addressing common challenges in implementing such code. It also should give EJBs some more OO concepts that were lost with the component approach, like polymorphism.

Now that I reread that, I've kind of summarized in the reverse order of the presentations last night (Gavin went first and really described the moving from EJB 1 to EJB2 to EJB3, very coherently describing the problem), but it seems to help to take Marc's description of the problem and then translate that back into what EJB 3.0 will do.

Marc picked up where Gavin had left off, translating what EJB 3.0 will do into the POJO theme and describing how the EG is focused on simplifying J2EE development for the next release. He then made mention of how JBoss's 4.0 architecture implements this kind of thing.

Finally, he closed with a discussion of JBoss the company, and their thoughts around open source software. It was definitely food for thought-- I'm sure it's well described on their website.

Both Marc and Gavin are great guys and the LA JUG guys had an opportunity to share a beer or two with the JBoss folk at the local eclectic watering hole. Both are good guys-- if you're in the Silicon Valley region, I think they're on tonight at the SV JUG. I'd imagine they'll be at JavaOne too, so you can likely catch them there. It was clear to me that they're focused on how the applications work and how developers interact with these systems when building apps. Gavin in particular would at times get quite cerebreal; for example on how transactions are somewhat broken, in that there isn't a concept of an 'application transaction'.

It'll be interesting to see how this all works out. The only reason I want to reserve judgement is that to me, EJB 2.0 gave developers a framework to code to that would make transaction management and scaling things with lots of multithreaded access someone elses problem. EJB 3.0 seems to put this back in the hands of the developer with annotations. That, of course, means the developer needs to think about where the transaction is occuring and where to begin and end things. I don't know that this is a bad thing, but history with other languages has shown us that making the developer responsible for certain aspects of programming just tends to introduce errors. Still, EJB 3.0 looks to be much more accessable, and it doesn't matter how well/not well EJB 2.1 did things if it was limited to those who spent a significant amount of time understanding how it worked and coding to it's particularities in moving things about between containers.

In the end, Marc said, and I'd agree, that while the future looks bright, EJB 2.1 is where it's at today and you can still get plenty accomplished with that. 6 months from now we should all get to play with this stuff a bit more, and hopefully we'll find not too many more changes are needed to make it useful :).

Monday June 07, 2004

And now for something completely different...

Yes, this is an introduction entry. I figured it's only appropriate to begin with such an entry. I chose the more interesting title in order to be a bit more unique.

I would challenge the audience of this blog to the bit of trivia the title purports to be, but that would be too easy for an audience of programmers and Unix geeks.

So, just a quick note about me. As of a couple weeks ago, I've been working for Sun for 4 years as a Systems Engineer. SEs at Sun are all over the place, and no two of us have the same job really. For that mattter, as I move from helping one customer to another, my job tends to change. Sometimes you're working with a really technical customer, and sometimes things get bogged down in politics or religion [I'll rant about this one later :) ]. Nonetheless, it's been a good move for me and I'm pleased with how the last 4 years have progressed. for the most part.

Back to the intro...

I support a wide swath of customers in the Southern California and Southern Nevada area. Generally these customers are commercial in nature-- a mix of ISVs, utilities, manufacturing and even the casino gaming type folks. It's a lot of fun. I really enjoy working with ISVs-- that tends to keep my skills the sharpest. Though, sometimes the job is winning the hearts and minds based on things other than suitability for the application.

I'm also involved in a couple of local organizations. The UUASC and the LA JUG. I'm enjoying this stuff as well.