Adobe's Finally Released Their Much Rumored Media Player: "Adobe Media Player"It's sweet. Built on AIR, it's a stand-alone "installable" Flash program that allows you to manage, search out, and watch FLV / H264 content inside of Flash. It's beautiful to use but my big gripe is that because it runs on AIR, there's no Linux version.They seem to have lined up some pretty big content-producers, which should make the deployment easier. I wonder if they're fixing to be to digitial video / flash video what iTunes is to music. A one-stop video content shop / hub.. Absolutely stunning UI - and it's consistent with some of their more recent stuff, including Colour and Adobe Photoshop Express. I wonder where they'll take this - I wonder if there's a way to share video playlists etc? Integration with Youtube.com just like Apple TV did?
With rich internet applications being all the buzz these days people are finding themselves pouring more and more interactivity onto their pages. Typically, this is if nothing else through a slew of external third party libraries, or as with Dojo and Scriptaculous and YUI, entire frameworks! Taken one at a time these various scripts – used sparingly and perhaps compressed – don't cause too much a burden on your server or the client during download. Right...
Alright -- this one bugs me to no end. Have you ever worked with Hibernate, and some sort of Java remoting API on Java 1.6? That could apply to ALMOST anyone. EJB3 users (me!). Spring HttpInvoker/Hibernate3 (me!). RMI/Hibernate3 (me!). They all count. Did you get a bug whereby a remote client complains (err, blows chunks with a ClassCastException) about not being able to set a field on an entity/POJO that makes use of Hibernate's "lazy" initialization across the wire? You did? Were you going to tell me about it? I mean, come on. I thought we were friends. I upgraded Ubuntu and JBoss on my dev machine at home to be able to test. Amazingly bad things ensued. I spent a good hour finding a bug that I was sure must be afflicting other people. After all, it's essentially a bug in JBoss' EJB3. And Hibernate. And Java. And RMI. I don't know but it seemed rather hard to pin. It was a bug in Java 1.6. I don't know why, I don't know the details. This lone result (which eluded a lot of my google searches -- which means this was so minor an issue that even Google didn't find it!?) suggested a workaround and I - ears burning - jumped at the completely ridiculous, nonsensical solution. Because... it was just crazy enough to work. A few update-java-alternatives later, I was back on Java 1.5. I re-ran my tests. IT WORKED WHY WOULD IT WORK? HOW WOULD THAT EVEN BEGIN TO BREAK? Everything's fine now! Hurrah. I can have my hour back, too? No? MySQL got bought by Sun. Oracle bought BEA. I understand the BEA acquisition. Oracle's Application server sucks rocks. BEA is the gold standard and Oracle has cash to burn. Simple economics: don't innovate what you can accquire quicker. But why would Sun buy MySQL? Sun is pitching it as a rounding-out of its stack -- now they have the language (Java!), the database (JavaDB for embedded, MySQL for enterprise), the server (Glassfish) and the tool chain (javac, Netbeans, and the recently retired Sun Java Web creator, etc.). Does this put them in the line of sight of Oracle, which has a better database and a better application server? Why didn't they buy the company supportig Postgres, which is a better database (well, that is, I define "better" as being more readily deployed as a replacement for Oracle. Neither have particularly good clustering, enterprise features, but Postgres comes closer in terms of portability.)? Is Sun betting on the up-and-coming InnoDB database engine replacement (whose parent company Oracle owns, a propos) Falcon to make MySQL an Oracle killer? Even a Microsoft SQL Server killer? And of course, what does this mean for the PHP/Lamp community? MySQL's crossed over. It's got an air of "enterprise" to it from Sun's purchase. More so than even their teamup with SAP. More so than MySQL's oft-public proliferation and succcess storeis. This database, which until recently didn't support constraints in a useful way, is now Sun's. Will they keep making releases available for free? Will they switch to the commercial model completely? Will this again jeopardize the MySQL /PHP extension's status? Heck, does this mean that the Java MySQL driver will get some love? I can't wait to hear more.
This is sort of Java-related, but as it's used in some way by all of the major java web frameworks, it's worth noting that Dojo 1.0 has been released! As for me -- I've been knee deep in amazingly cool code. I've not had a chance to take too deep a look at Spring 2.5, but it seems promising -- particularly the renewed support for alternative configuration patterns. Maybe Guice is stirring the pot? Also, I've noticed that the benefits of grids are increasingly popular. I'm very interested in grids -- they're useful for process intensive applications like search engines, and almost anything that can be represented as a directed edge graph. Microsoft's Dryad seems to be a graph based implementation of a the grid computing paradigm from Google, 'MapReduce'. That is, where as MapReduce is just one type of algorithm distributed over a grid, Dryad is a way to express algorithms, distributed over a grid. Sounds amazing.
Yesterday (2 hours ago) was the last day at my job, and closes one chapter on my life. I’m thankful for the experience. I will begin the next - undoubtedly amazing -chapter of my life Monday, and am no less than gitty at the prospect.
Apple's got Safari available for Windows (is this a surprise to anyone though?). The site wasn't as funny as when iTunes came out and the website had something to the effect of, "Hell's frozen over: iTunes for Windows." Good news, nonetheless!
With all this hype about JavaFX (!) since JavaOne (so much came out of that conference and has been by and large ignored because of JavaFX. This is most true with the prospect of 1-2 MB downloads for the JRE, the so called "Java Kernel"), I've decided to take inventory of the Java desktop landscape again, and see what's changed/grown since I've developed anything large with it. The desktop has languished behind the server in Java, often to the chagrin of the desktop / client-side developers who made the platform grow in the early, primordial java applet days.
In recent posts, I've blogged about my ambition to get a J2ME archetype up and running, and finally, I can present the fruits of my …quest! You thought I was going to say “labor”, eh? The nice part about the world is there are so many other people better positioned to beat me (or you) to the finish line. Case in point: the pyx4me project project has done an incredible job of wrapping Antenna, providing a JSE-based emulator, providing framework classes and of providing a working support for different things and of providing useful examples.
