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JSP Buzz: Vol. III Issue #9

JSPBuzz -- May 14th, 2002

05.14.2002

Table of Contents
  1. IBM to Lay Off Up to 9,000 Staff
  2. Akamai Confirms IBM as Java Partner
  3. Judge Saris defers GNU GPL Questions for Trial
  4. IBM Turns Face to Sun
  1. What Does Web Services Mean for the Client?
  1. This Is Your Father's IBM, Only Smarter
  2. JSP Standard Tag Libraries, Part 2
  3. Improving Java Application Performance
  4. Study Sees IT Worker Shortage in 2002
  5. Sun Should Open Source Java, Says IBM Standards Guru.
  6. Compressing XML for Faster Wireless Networking
  7. An Interview with Robocode Creator Mat Nelson
  8. Java Pros Sign Up For Virtual Bot Battle
  9. Splitting and Manipulating Strings
  10. Chapter 15. The JDOM Model
  1. RC2 of Mozilla released
  2. Commercial Support of Jarkarta Projects
  3. Macromedia Introduces Dreamweaver MX
  4. Macromedia JRun 4 Release
News
IBM to Lay Off Up to 9,000 Staff
Digital Mass May 10th 2002 
IBM is laying off 2.5 percent of its staff due to continued slump in the technology sector. Overall, this is part of the general economic indicators that point to slow year for us in the tech business. While some indicators are looking good, things are still bad enough that as programmers we still need to be careful.
Akamai Confirms IBM as Java Partner
The Register May 9th 2002 
The interesting news in this article is not the fact that IBM will be doing quite a bit of J2EE work for Akamai. Rather reading deeper in the article and finding Akamai, is building both J2EE and .Net web service based systems. The reality of the new world order is the fact that more companies will be using both systems.
Judge Saris defers GNU GPL Questions for Trial
Free Software Foundation March 2002 
Old News, but good news in that the court system has supported the GNU GPL to be an enforceable and binding license.
IBM Turns Face to Sun
Infoworld  May 3rd 2002 
IBM has put forth a proposal to now include Sun to the WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization). This puts Microsoft as the only entity opposed to including Sun in WS-I. Its politics mixed with SOAP Opera in the software world. Excuse the bad pun, couldn't resist.
Rambles
What Does Web Services Mean for the Client?
Casey Kochmer 
This ramble is sparked from the following article.
Web Services Mean Fatter Clients
Over time, as programs get more mature I think it is possible more work will be done on client machines. For this to happen, several options are possible. The first option is that client side applications need to get better at working with the Internet. However for this to happen the mentality of building of browser base applications needs to fade a bit. Not likely to happen soon with the large experience pool of building browser based applications.
The second option is that Applets get better support in the community. While Applet based applications have become popular for corporate based web solutions, it isn't popular for public sites. Applet extended web sites in fact seemed to have fallen out of favor. If I am wrong in this let me know. However, I still only know of only a handful of public sites which use Applets as a way to correlate and collate data on the client side. The problem is that currently Applets are one of the few ways to easily embed Web service calls into a browser client side page. However, in the current situation such applets are oversized, unless extreme programming hacking is done to customize a few libraries. Likewise Microsoft has an alternative web service client software, however, it is only supported in Explorer, so I don't see this is a viable alternative to Applets.
The third option is we embed the Web service data in a XML packet within a browser page. The only problem is again, either client side processing needs to get better, Applets need to get better support, XSLT needs to get better support, or the browsers need to agree on some standard to working with embedded XML data. Most likely a common browser interface will be through XSLT/XPATH/XQUERY, but this option is still years in the making.
Of course, It is possible to remove Applets and use a REST style architecture, where the web service call is more of a simple HTTP request to a resource. However, this style of architecture is too young, and the current Web service hype has the REST architecture on the back burner for now.
The article suggests a final alternative of using peer to peer technology. However, peer to peer is just a way to shuffle information from machine to machine. Peer to peer doesnt address the problem of actual client side processing. The real sticking point of fatter clients is the lack of a decent common client side processing environment.
Because of all of this I think it will be at least 3 years and most likely at least 5 years before we see fatter clients as this article suggests.
Oh well...
The question: Is this the case? Initially not, in fact web services might have the opposite effect to start with and push more work to the servers rather than the client. Why? Web services make it easy to integrate business rule engines and other centralized logic repositories. The fact is I am discovering is that Web services pushed quite a bit of logic I used to have on my client pages back up to the server. This was something that I didn't initially expect!
Links
This Is Your Father's IBM, Only Smarter
Erick Schonfeld  May 2002 
Hmmm this issue of the buzz seems to talk a bit about IBM. Looks like IBM will be building a J2EE powered system for EBAY. The article is very interesting as it gives insights to the marketing of the various big companies. This article also highlights some of the reasons I feel IBM, next to Microsoft, will be the real major player in the web services market place. In fact IBM might be one of the few reasons Java will survive Microsoft's onslaught against Java.
JSP Standard Tag Libraries, Part 2
Sue Spielman May 8th 2002 
Part two of a series reviewing the JSP Standard Tag Library code kit.
Improving Java Application Performance
Nagendra Nagarajayya and J. Steven Mayer May 2002 
This article is a discussion on improving time sensitive Java code by reducing garbage collection times. A good article as it discusses in depth how the garbage collector works. It is interesting as it also covers how the garbage collector has changed over time. Even though most Java programmers wont need to cover this information in the depth provided, it is a solid article to read.
Study Sees IT Worker Shortage in 2002
Tiffany Kary May 6, 2002 
A study that says jobs might be easier to find in 2002. I disagree. What I suspect things have bottomed out, and what the study sees, only suggests to me that the market will not get worse.
Sun Should Open Source Java, Says IBM Standards Guru.
 May 3, 2002 
Well of course IBM is going to be saying this, after all this is their new business model (as shown in the earlier link). This is just a sound byte article. I find it funny, which is why I included it. Should Java be Open sourced? Probably, but that is a debate I rather not get into, as it is mute until Sun feels it is in their best interest to release control of Java.
Compressing XML for Faster Wireless Networking
Sun May 2002 
This is a review of performing compression on XML using WBXML as the means to perform the XML compression. If you are dealing with low bandwidth, or are having problems due to large XML files being transferred between locations, then this article is worth reading.
An Interview with Robocode Creator Mat Nelson
IBM May 2002 
An interview with the coder responsible for Robocode. You will also find links to Robocode in the article. Robocode is a training tool and a game to help programmers learn Java.
Java Pros Sign Up For Virtual Bot Battle
ZDNet May 10th 2002 
Interestingly if you think Robocode is a minor game. Think again, more than 120,000 developers have already signed up for a Java coding competition which will see the finalist's virtual robots battle it out in August.
Splitting and Manipulating Strings
Bob DuCharme May 01, 2002 
A simple article for programmers new to XSLT. The article reviews the basics to working with strings within XSLT.
Chapter 15. The JDOM Model
Elliotte Rusty Harold May 8th, 2002 
This latest chapter of Elliotte's book focuses on the core node classes in the org.jdom package: Element, Attribute, Text, etc. It discusses the methods of each one in detail and shows you how to use it. It introduces filters and many other techniques for navigation. And as with all the chapters, it points out the rough spots where JDOM can burn you if you aren't careful. This chapter's far and away the most up-to-date coverage of the very latest JDOM version you can get anywhere.
Products
RC2 of Mozilla released
Mozilla May 9th 2002 
Mozilla 1.0 is almost here. The final 1.0 release is scheduled for two weeks or around May 23rd.This is the last release before the 1.0 release.
Commercial Support of Jarkarta Projects
Multitask  
This is interesting a company is offering pay for services to support clients in a variety of Open Source projects. These projects include:Struts, Ant and Tomcat among other. While I feel the listservs are an excellent place for support, this might be a good option for larger companies. Be aware this is an Australian company working off of Australian time zones.
Macromedia Introduces Dreamweaver MX
Macromedia April 29th 2002 
Macromedia has announced the latest version of Dreamweaver MX. This tool offers an single environment for Internet development, with support for both JSP, PHP, ColdFusion and ASP.Net. If your company needs an integrated environment across many platforms then this is a tool to examine.
Macromedia JRun 4 Release
Macromedia May 13th, 2002 
The latest release of Macromedia's Java application server focused on providing a fast, reliable J2EE 1.3 compatible platform. JRun 4 is designed to be an approachable, complete solution for developing and deploying robust Java applications on time and on budget. JRun 4 brings Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE platform) compatibility to a new level of affordability by offering a complete solution including clustering and web services integration in a single product.

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