[digital:meditation]

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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Soundtrack: Covenant – “Winter Comes”

… seeing the snow quietly cover the world surrounding our office building…

“Get Tomorrow Today” is what, these days, one can read while visiting the NetBeans web site. Well. Indeed. Today, a major update of Suns Java (Enterprise) environment for development, deployment, runtime has been released:

• First of all, NetBeans IDE has bumped up its version number to 6.8, including (not too much of a surprise, I guess…) seamless and production-ready support for Java EE 6 and Glassfish v3, along with improved or newly added toolings and plugins for maven2 (very impressive), Project Kenai, JavaFX, PHP and a whole bunch of other technologies. Adding to that, asides “just” being another multi-language/-technology IDE, NetBeans RCP also is likely to get more support as an RC platform, which surely is a good thing.
• Then, Java Enterprise Edition is available in version 6 (JSR-316), aiming at making Java EE development more slim, more easy and, thanks to the newly added “profiles”, more adaptable to given use cases than ever before. Along with this, there are a bunch of improvements in technologies such as Java Servlets (3.0), EJB (3.1), persistence (JPA 2.0), JCA and, especially notable from my point of view, support for RESTful web services (JAX-RS 1.1).
• Finally, in addition to that, along with Java EE 6 comes Glassfish v3 as its reference implementation and the “open source” platform Suns Java System Application Server is based upon. Along with (obvious) support for all the Java EE technologies, just the last couple of weeks I experienced during FishCAT that GFv3 is a pretty good platform, providing all the strengths so far provided by its predecessors, yet being updated to reflect the changes in Java EE 6 and also providing hosting for in example JRuby applications out of the box. Adding to that, Adam has a more in-depth list of goodnesses that come with GFv3.

So, overally, a lot of great technologies and tools to play (or eventually work :) ) with, but also a moment of thought: Maybe not for NetBeans, but I am pretty sure at the very least for Java EE and maybe Glassfish, this could be the last release made by Sun as an independent business entity, the last releases related to these technology before Sun gets acquired by / gets merged with Oracle, leaving their products end up in the ever-growing Oracle product and services portfolio, some driven forth maybe more enthusiastically, others maybe left out in the cold and eventually discontinued. No matter how, I guess the next year might be crucial to all of these technologies: It will show how Java EE 6 can come up against or side-by-side with latest and upcoming Spring releases, with the whole OSGi movement in general and, especially, the environment to be set up by Eclipse RT project. And it also will show what NetBeans, as an IDE, as a platform, as a community, can come up with to provide viable alternatives and approaches to a load of (unquestionably good) features provided by Eclipse ecosystem, like the whole Eclipse Modeling toolbox or the upcoming XWT and declarative UI technologies in e4. Or maybe (which eventually could be the best of all outcomes) it might show that there is a good reason for different alternatives existing to address different requirements and use cases.

And, overally, no matter how things will move on: At the moment, congratulations to all the engineers, writers, tech people behind these three releases! You did a rather great job again…

There have been a couple of different posts in various SAP related blogs recently, as well as some responses by non-SAP(?) folks, dealing with Java technology (especially in light of the ongoing acquisition of Sun Microsoystems by Oracle), open standards and “open-ness” in general, it seems. Looking at this through the eyes of someone who is professionally using a dedicated piece of SAP technology (its database environment SAP MaxDB), a few thoughts come to my mind here…

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