Aehso’s Output

On the AccuRev homepage they state:

AccuRev supports open standards and SOA-based development tool interoperability across Microsoft Windows, Linux, and UNIX platforms.

(emphasis mine)
I have to admit, this piqued my interest (actually my initial reaction was ‘wtf?’ but I digress).  Searching to figure out what SOA-based development tool interoperability is, I am now guessing that this is a reference to the Eclipse ALF (incubating) project.  ALF is a CruiseControl type framework that integrates various commercial SCM repositories, build management, testing and code scanning tools etc. via a BPEL-based orchestrations that control the overall “Application Lifecycle Framework”.

Unfortunately, ALF appears to be getting no love from the big players, which is a bit of a shame as we could all do with something a bit more sophisticated than CruiseControl+Ant for integrating and controlling large scale builds.  A Web Services API integration is, I think, a valid way to tie these types of systems together.  

After reviewing the ALF demos, I am actually a little surprised that the entire scope of what ALF is trying to achieve is managed under the Eclipse.org umbrella.  I can see a place for an ALF tools project in Eclipse.org certainly but I am surprised that the whole ALF server-side architecture appears to be being designed and developed in the same project.  I really don’t really see the connection between Eclipse.org and the design or implementation of service interfaces like the ALF Event Manager WSDL.  Projects like STP and WTP for example work to integrate with open standards like SCA and JEE but ALF does not seem to have that type of clear seperation between tools and target runtime implementation. 

Perhaps I am missing something but a recent interesting discussion on the eclipse.technology.alf newsgroup (Subject: Upcoming validation release review) raised these and other related concerns about the scope and deliverables of this project seems to re-enforce this observation.  It will be interesting to see how this all pans out.

Wow, I just noticed the complete list, there are 21 completed James Bond fims! (source: wikipedia)

The strange thing is, I’ve seen them all and I never realised there were that many - I always figured there was maybe 10 or 11 of them. They’re all so similiar in a, err, James Bond type of way. And check out those $ figures, $3.8billion+ in total box office (to date) from a combined budget of < $800million, and that's not counting the TV re-run revenue. No wonder they keep on pumping them out!

1. Dr. No
2. From Russia with Love
3. Goldfinger
4. Thunderball
5. You Only Live Twice
6. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
7. Diamonds Are Forever
8. Live and Let Die
9. The Man with the Golden Gun
10. The Spy Who Loved Me
11. Moonraker
12. For Your Eyes Only
13. Octopussy
14. A View to a Kill
15. The Living Daylights
16. Licence to Kill
17. GoldenEye
18. Tomorrow Never Dies
19. The World Is Not Enough
20. Die Another Day
21. Casino Royale
22. Bond 22 (work in progress)

The java modularity train-wreck-to-be is still ploughing full steam ahead.  The recent publication of the JSR-277 Early Draft has resulted in a some very sharp criticism.  Lots of posts aggregated in this great post but Patrick Beno’s review is one of the most comprehensive I’ve read. 

InfoQ have just gone and stoked the flames further with post where their questions (solicited from the community) met with laughable responses from the JSR-271/JSR-294 spec leads.  Honestly, the companies and individuals represented on the ECs for this JSR should be asking themselves some hard questions about whether they want to continue to associate themselves with this mess.

I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a while back for the various reasons already expounded by many ex-Blogliners. That said, Google Reader still isn’t perfect for me, and I sometimes think about switching back. Two things are bugging me:

• I have (many) feeds organized in various hierarchical folders and I routinely switch between the Expanded and List View during each session, depending on how feed items are unread. When doing a “bulk-catch-up” of all the items from several feeds in a folder I find it incredibly difficult to quickly scan over the chronologically ordered list of items. Does anybody else find context switching from feed to feed while scanning the item titles mentally taxing? I’d love an option to sort controls in the list table header, then I could do “”Sort by feed, then chronologically” and relax my brain a little. I know can get individual lists by jumping from feed to feed but I want to have my cake (one big flat list) AND eat it (scan item titles without incessant key pressing/clicking).
• The List View paging implementation is a bit slow isn’t it? Sometimes I want to skip over a whole bunch of items but I get stuck waiting a few seconds for the “Loading the next 20 items…” AJAX request to be completed. How about prefetching the next 20-40? Meanwhile my list scrollbar is always visually the the wrong size and in the wrong location. Invariably, I am not at the end of a short list as it usually indicates. In fact, I generally do not know if I have scanned over the complete set of entries without checking to see if it trying to “Load the next 20 items…” again. And what is it doing pinging all of those feed URLs while loading? I would have thought the great Google “sharks with frickin’ laser beams” back end could easily cache and supply the feed entry titles, and descriptions, maybe sending off AJAX requests to the original feed whenever I move my mouse over/near a list entry (if it needs to get enclosures etc.)

Anyhoo, rant over, if anyone has any tips, I’d be more than appreciative…

Sun’s GPL’ing of Java SE, Java ME and Glassfish is definitely interesting - Tim Bray has some interesting commentary from the inside, no doubt slightly sanitized! Kudos to Sun for going GPL, thereby enabling it to be shipped with the GNU/Linux distributions. I am sure there are those in the OSS community who will remain suspicious.

Plenty of other questions yet to be answered, the governance model of the new OSS projects will be critical - it’ll be interesting to see that is set up (Eclipse.org style perhaps?). Interesting to note that Sun are retaining the TCK code (to retain control of Java brand compliance) and they are not changing the JCP. The latter decision is very interesting as if the specification process is still tightly controlled by Sun then that leaves limited latitude for the implementation project to go in other directions.

Once the dust settles, Java ISVs around the globe should be ready to re-validate their software platforms and distributions. Questions now exist about the viability of some GPL-licensed J2SE, ME and EE projects and their future viability. It is bound to impact Apache Harmony , a project largely driven by IBM (who predictably have reacted by suggesting that Sun should contribute their Java technologies to Apache.org - haha). And no doubt this will make GlassFish more competitive with JBoss. I’m sure this also impacts the ME space - interesting to note that the GPL nature of the license means any derivatives for other embedded platforms also have to be GPL’ed.

Interesting times…