Aehso’s Output

Canola and the Media Streamer on the N800 are apparently both capable UPnP control points/players so I recently decided to set up a UPnP MediaServer on my Mac Mini, where all my media(photos/music/video) lives. I drew a blank though:

• MediaTomb - open source but I couldn’t find a universal binary anywhere.
• EyeConnect - the N800 could see the server, it did not list any available media content.
• TwonkyVision - music and photo streaming worked but I had no luck with streaming video and then the trial expired. It’s hard to justify buying commercial software when a major feature doesn’t appear to work in my environment.

Today, I notice the PS3 modders also have a list of UPnP Servers but alas nothing new there either.

Maybe I’ll have a go at building MediaTomb on OS X or maybe I’ll have to install Linux on my Mac Mini?

Update: I took the plunge and compiled and installed MediaTomb on my Mac Mini (using Apple Xcode development tools) following the instructions. There is a bit of prep work required to install the prerequisite zlib, libmagic, libjs, taglib, id3lib, libexif libraries though so this approach is not for the faint-hearted! I did hit a minor snag getting the MediaTomb configure script to use libjs v1.6 but resolved that with a little help from Jin. Streaming music and photos works great with Canola but some streamed DIVX-encoded AVI files won’t play - I’m assuming that is an N800 codec problem though…

Update 2: A day later, Jin announces that MediaTomb is now available via Fink. That should makes it easier for the rest of you to compile/install. Thanks Jin!

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…

This just blows me away - grab Democracy from the folks at the Participatory Culture Foundation, browse the various RSS feeds and end up watching content like this or this (yes, Democracy loads torrents too).  Then check out their sister site Video Bomb and if have your own content set up a Broadcast Machine or your own.

Awesome stuff, with quality free software and content like this, who needs broadcast TV?

So ApacheCon Europe ‘06 has been on in the Burlington for the past few days )anyone wandering around Donnybrook/Leeson Street in the mornings/evenings over may have noticed a “geek increase”. It was a bit smaller than I expected but the quality of the content was superb if one bears in mind that these guys are doing this stuff part time (well, some of them!). The sessions I attended were all SOA/OSGi centric and all were worth attending, from an educational point of view. A very partial summary:

• The OSGi/JSR#291/JSR#277 issue is still very much alive although some efforts are being made to try achieve some degree of compatibility by using a common subset of Manifest headers. However differences apparently already exist in the drafts (such as the version range specifier format used) It is pretty sad to see such open (or should I say JCP-closed) disregard for interoperability between two overlapping JSR. Both are due for delivery in Dolphin (Java 7), perhaps by then the whole Java platform will have been rendered unusable by the plethora of other overlapping JSRs and we (the users) will all have moved on to coding in Ruby.
  Actually, by then, it may not matter - OSGi seems to be gaining considerable traction. Tuesday afternoon had a whole afternoon of talks and discussion from Richard Hall (Felix), Peter Kriens (OSGi Alliance/aQute), Marcel Offermans (Luminis) and a round table discussion involving folks from Apache Maven, Felix, Harmony, Directory Server projects. It seems some efforts are being made to try get Apache Jakarta projects to OSGi-fy their Manifests (via capabilities built into Maven)
• Woden looks good. It’ll be the WSDL2.0 processor that all Java folks end up using (if you need to parse WSDL2.0 that is!). It replaces WSDL4J which is being put out to pasture (it must be, I logged a bug against it over a year ago and still no feedback!)
• Axis 2 apparently has WSDL2.0 HTTP binding support with some restrictions (messages must be “IRI style” compatible). I’m not sure if one even needs to declare a HTTP binding in the WSDL, it seems to be automatically available for all services that have SOAP endpoints.
• Apache Synapse looks nice, in a cute kind of way. I’m not sure I’d call it an ESB since it is really just a very thin routing framework that runs on top of Axis 2 - it doesn’t have any management interface per say and the overview might have been a bit forward looking with regard to the capabilities of the current implementation Synapse looks more like an endpoint intermediary that you one might use to implement specific tasks (XPath/RegExp based routing, binding conversion, logging, endpoint authentication & authorization, transformation (XSLT, E4X, POJO based). I’m not sure you’d host your service implementations on it.
• Apache Tuscany work is ongoing and I bet it will be for some time yet! I’m not certain of their claim that it will simplify the development of business solutions, if only because it is based on SCA which is turning into an absolute beast of a set of specifications - think “one spec to rule them all” type big, and with big specifications comes complexity, not simplification. From an implementation point of view, a huge problem is that the SCA specifications do not have either a reference implementation nor a compatibility test suite and according to Simon Nash and Jeremy Boynes (both of IBM) there are no current plans to develop either. Also it seems curious that the SCA specifications are not being developed under the auspices of an open body like OASIS, W3C or the OMG - why not? Some would say the overall approach seems incredibly vulnerable to repeat the mistakes of CORBA. It will also be interesting to see if any convincing response is given to Ron Ten-Hove’s recent critique of SCA.

All this talk of Oracle acquiring JBoss (or even Red Hat) and IBM acquiring Novell/SuSe. Why isn’t anybody talking about the possibility of IBM acquiring Red Hat? Ignoring RHAT’s market cap of >$5.4Bn (affordable to IBM) it would instantly solve IBM’s problems and set them up for years to come - for the first time in 20 years, they would own their preferred OS distribution (It is worth remembering that IBM are probably the biggest contributers to the Linux/Apache/Eclipse-type OSS communities that exist out there - they do get OSS.)
IBM would also be buying control of the JBoss product lines and I’d imagine their Websphere group would relish that.
Either way, NOVL stock looks a tasty bet. Someone is going to end up buying them up, one way or another…