[digital:meditation]

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. :)

James Gosling, known at best as the father of the Java language, is giving his very kind of special “farewell” to Sun Microsystems, now that the European Commission has unconditionally approved Oracle to buy the company that once invented Java, the Solaris operating system and a couple of other great technologies. One will have to see what arises out of this, for it could be both for better or for worse for some of the product in the Sun portfolio.

At the moment, however, I don’t want to re-evaluate the various aspects of the Sun/Oracle merger again as this has been done extensively all over the ‘net before. I just, given the day, want to add two personal thoughts to that…

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Listening to extensive ambient soundscapes like these by Daina Dieva is an interesting experience while in public transport (tram, bus) with open headphones: In the end, the music is likely to merge with the sounds and noises of your environment nearby, generating something akin to an “acoustically augmented reality”, intensifying both experiencing the music and experiencing the very situation… Somehow, things feel “familiar” because they feel all the same – it’s the same city every day, the same trip, the same places to pass by, the same views looking out through the steamy windows… and yet it is different: Different times of year, different faces, different people, different moods. Change all over, and yet things feel “constant”, maybe because “change” is perceived as an integral part of living in a city?

Music to code to, in some way: Browsing the darkwinter.com archives, I stumbled across “Glaciations” by Canadian ambient/electronics twopiece Kalte. The page says it all, I guess:

…
Inspired by the isolation and emptiness inherent in the Polar Night, the Toronto-based electronic duo Kalte has released “Glaciations”, a series of five sound environments made up of cold elements and deep darkness. Drawing from a range of organic sound sources which have been altered and reassembled, “Glaciations” immerses the listener in a space that evokes the feeling of solitude and glacial winds, where dark tones drift through the soundscape, shifting in subtle ways.
…

Go get your headphones and check it out. ;)

Reading the Sun Inner Circle Newsletter once in a while, I found the recent issue to be, well, pretty enthusiastic about promoting the idea of Open Source software, especially talking about OpenOffice and several others of Suns own open source projects / products:

Sun has been involved in free software for a long time. The company was founded on open source. We took a general-purpose processor and what would have been called an open source operating system and combined them to create the low-cost workstation. Bill Joy was a key figure in the formation of the free and open source software movement.

Indeed. Agreed. And yet, I thoroughly hope words will be followed by deeds and the “new”(?) company Sun might eventually become after being acquired by Oracle will manage to play up to these commitments…

I’ve been looking at the implementation / support of the concept of aspect-oriented programming in Spring for quite a while now, unsure to see a meaningful use of it (except for logging and caching, maybe). But maybe viewpoints like this generally grow out of lack of simple, straightforward examples close to ones day-to-day life. So, recently I looked at it again and found something to indeed use it for: Extend a given Spring application using “hooks” and scripting languages.

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