[digital:meditation]

Ever wondered how to get your computer to do more than just clicking on an icon, leaving you to enter some data into some application window (browser, mail client, …) and be more or less pleased at its overall outcome? Ever wondered how on earth to get your computer actually processing your data, solving your problems in a way more suitable for your every-day work? Maybe even tried to, careful as could be, get closer to the idea of “writing programs” for your machine but so far hesitated, scared by the overall complexity and skills set required to get this done?

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Whoever is reading this weblog more or less regularly will have noticed that I am an enthusiastic user of NetBeans for most of my development needs, and this holds true even now that, given a current project of ours, I have to switch IDE at least once daily, as we do a project based on Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform and NetBeans, as comes as no surprise, is not too good a tool for building applications which are more or less built atop the Eclipse RCP core (well, getting deeper into things and especially talking about RAP application deployment, you’ll figure out that Eclipse itself also leaves a lot to be desired here, but that eventually is another story).

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… trying to capture light again, found in peculiar places… :)

Soundtrack: Kalte – “Mariana Arc”. A moment of quietness in a place where light seems to be percieved in a completely other way than, say, on a bright sunny day, under a sky wide open.

Simply put: “Programming Collective Intelligence” is one of the most outstanding publications related to IT and software development I’ve been reading in a while. Given some of our business use case, at the moment I am a little deeper into dealing with analyzing (and, subsequently) making decisions and suggestions out of data somehow linked to users in our environment (for the obvious reason of both making our work a little easier and making our users overall experience a little better), and browsing the table of content of this book made it seem worth a closer look. And, overally, after having a closer look, I was about to find out that this book indeed offers profound information on the issue I am dealing with – and way more beyond this scope…

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Sometimes you just end up frustrated beyond belief: Being into software development / architecture, reading and keeping yourself up-to-date is an essential part of your work. Likewise, you generally tend to be (maybe a little too) enthusiastic about new technologies, as in most cases, while stumbling across new technology, new approaches and concepts, you might see new solutions that might provide an elegant, powerful, or maybe simply more sane way for you to help your customers, users, … getting their work done. This is a good and healthy process… if it works out. Because on the other side, it also can be a source of extreme frustration, if your given infrastructure and IT environment is not up for that. That’s when you get to work highly motivated in the morning, and the outcome is all the same virtually every day:

• System integration using open standards, web services and SOAP? Oh please, we don’t even support generation of valid XML (based upon some schema or DTD) right now.
• Quick scripting integration of backend services using JSON and REST? Not out of the box, you have to do that manually, and you can’t do it bidirectionally as our current HTTP client implementation doesn’t support anything else but GET.
• Usable, AJAX enriched web client? No. Our web client architecture relies upon a whole block of code containing hundreds of lines of inline HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and we don’t intend to change that.
• CORBA integration as a technology at least somewhat open? Oh no. We do have rudimentary CORBA support, but just for our very own internal purposes, unsupported, untested and unmaintained outside our own use cases.
• Asynchronous communication, ESB or business orchestration even? Well no, by now you should have learned that our system doesn’t need an outside world to exist.
• Mashups, Web 2.0, portal integration, widgets, all these technologies which aren’t really useful in itself but maybe a good thing to provide end users with some eye candy? No. Not now, not tomorrow, probably never.

Being in kind of a rant mode, I could continue this list forever, but it is of no real help. What’s the bottom line? Well, despite my personal (political) attitudes, I have become a little more pragmatic the last couple of years as far as it concerns the use of “open source” software or even “software libre” in a business context, as I have figured out that, though I think it’s generally an important matter from a long term point of view, there are more important short term aspects to deal with: Open standards. Open connectivity. The ability to integrate applications, to make them seamlessly go together without too much ado. Ask your vendors to support open, industry-adopted interfaces and agreed-upon communication standards, and don’t accept “data” or “logic silos” to lock up part of your business data / functionality. Show your vendors that this matters to you, and support those who make a change here, no matter whether open source or not. It’ll make things more difficult during project startup, especially as it will be more expensive and provide value you can’t immediately “see”, but as soon as you will need it, you know why you did it initially… or, maybe worse: You know why you should have cared, initially.

A few days ago, while browsing archive.org I stumbled across “Incubi Succubi” by Daina Dieva and Svart1. Somehow, this 25-minutes beast of an ambient track has caught my attention and been played quite a couple of times ever since. Initially, this track partially reminded me of Vangelis’ incredible soundtrack to “Blade Runner”, but “Incubi Succubi” is way more, way stronger in some respects: The course of a nights worth of dreaming, travelling through its different stages from nightmare to relieving wake-up in the morning, captured altogether in soundscapes somewhere between (dark) ambient, industrial and folk. Ethereal, somewhat distant voices (I don’t want to call them “vocals” as I don’t know whether there are any articulated lyrics), deep distant drums once in a while, all kinds of noises and sounds, and an overall construction of “atmosphere made sound” all around this. A perfect soundtrack to a movie taking place in your head, and you decide what kind of movie this might be. And, asides being a great audio track, thanks to stumbling across this release I also learnt about Daniele Serra, a truly interesting artist, and I dared to discover more musical doings both by Daina Dieva, most notably darkwinter dw056 (another rather strong ambient production), and the doings of Svart1, a very effective merging of audio, visual, … into one working “whole”. A good way to spend a winter evening, I guess. ;)

So, now it seems it’s done: oracle.com brightly announces the finalization of the Sun acquisition, the Oracle Java download section features a NetBeans logo (and, vice versa, netbeans.org comes with a “sponsored by Oracle” button), developers.sun.com is bright red as well, and there are numerous blog posts as well as official answers to questions asked just way too often the last couple of months. Overally, looking at the outcomes of webcasts provided yesterday, I have to say I am modestly pleased of what has been announced there:

• Generally, of course, I am happy to see tools that matter to me (Glassfish, NetBeans, OpenOffice, VirtualBox) seem to have quite a good perspective being under the hood of Oracle. Surely, time will tell and we will overally have to see how much of this commitment still will hold true one year from now, but at least it’s good not to see these projects / communities axed immediately. So far, the only thing that really seems to go away is kenai.com, at least as a public service.
• Reading this page, I have good hopes that the current ecosystem of user groups related to Java and OpenSolaris will continue to exist and be supported in its current form. Again, I guess, it’s wait-and-see how these things will be like, in near future, but at least it’s a pretty good start.

So, finally (and I guess this is my last post on Sun and Oracle): I like the overall product and platform strategy Oracle seems to adhere to (even though, as pointed out before, somehow I wished Sun came up with the same idea earlier). Maybe, by now, it’s up to the communities (NetBeans, Glassfish, …) to embrace the new situation and keep their projects up and alive the same way they would do being “under the Sun hood”. Let’s see where to get, this way. :)