Octavian Tanase's Weblog: In the pursuit of development 2.0

IMHO opinion the '08 Java One had many themes. The event took place right after the OpenSolaris launch and unlike last year when Sun introduced JavaFX, this year the conference had Java + You as its motto. My take is that Java is poised to become more of a consumer brand. It is not hard to see why. Java is part of every day life wether we realize or not. Phones, entertainment devices - PS3 (Blue-ray), desktops, web apps, etc. Basically all the "screen" with which we now interact leverage Java.

NetBeans has been focusing on dynamic languages, especially since there is an opportunity to run Ruby, Python, PHP on the JVM. It is likely for this trend to continue, since Sun is a position to offer optimized deployment for applications that use dynamic languages. This is true now more than ever since most of these languages leverage MySQL and Sun will do its best to tune the database on Sun systems.

The most entertaining session that I attended was Todd Fast's. That were I learned that 1.0 developers are an endangered species Thanks God that I am now in management. I should also hedge my bets and become a casual developer. All I need is a 2.0 development environment and I ready to go.
 

NetBeans is widely distributed nowadays. You can get it from java.sun.com as part of the Java SE or EE bundles, as well as from netbeans.org. Ubuntu makes it available in Universe (starting with Hardy) and the community contributed NetBeans to the Debian repositories (for more details on the Linux distributions that include NetBeans, take a look here).

The latest open source product that makes NetBeans (version 6.0.1) available is OpenSolaris (2008.05). I am in the process of kicking the tires of the RC2, that was recently produced in anticipation of the Community One event which takes place next month in San Francisco. I am still struggling with the OpenSolaris install, however I have an atypical configuration: MacBook Pro, partitioned with Boot Camp; I am trying to install in a partition where I previously installed Windows Vista.

Here are some of the issues that I am running into:

<snip from installation log>
Set fdisk attrs
fdisk: fdisk -n -F failed. Could't create fdisk partition table on disk c5d0
Couldn't create fdisk partition table on disk
Could not create fdisk target
TI process completed unsuccessfully
 </snip from installation log> 

On Tueday I attended the SNAP Summit 2.0 in San Francisco (thanks to Ryan) . The usual suspects (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, RockYou, etc.) attended and either presented or were part of the panel discussions. There was a lot of focus on attracting new developers by making it easy for them to monetize their investment (software). So how does one make money? In a nutshell - facilitating adds in some form. All you have to do is build an application that becomes viral. That sounds simple enough, but how do you achieve the viral growth for that application? Here are some thoughts:

• Viewer focus
• Simplicity
• Novelty
• Universal Applicability
  

I heard one of the presenter say that virality is all about action. That thought resonated with me - an application, or feature has to "speak to me" in order to catch my attention.
There was a lot of guidance on how to build applications that are "personable" and have all the attributes that would make users adopt them and share them with others. What, I felt, was missing is guidance for choosing a development environment for building such applications.

On other news, it seems that Yahoo joined the Google's Open Social initiative. Perhaps this is an anti-Microsoft play, since Facebook has Microsoft's backing.

 

I have not been doing any development on Windows for a while. I thought I'd give it a try and build some web application using different open source technologies to compare my productivity and think of where to invest in toolability. David Van Couvering, recently, mentioned to me the XAMPP bundle, so I decided to start with this Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl.