Tom Wheeler Wins The 2006 NetBeans Community Award
Congratulations Tom.
(Jeff Brown announce this in an internal email.)
Gregg Sporar, Sun NetBeans evangelist: Rich Green said a few words and then introduced James Gosling. James held up a SavaJe phone and referred to it as the "device of the conference" for JavaOne this year. He also talked briefly about the version of NetBeans that includes support for BlueJ projects (more on that here). He then announced the winners of this year's NetBeans community awards: Ramon Ramos, Wade Chandler, David Strupl, and Tom Wheeler. Each gets a signed certificate and a Sun Ultra20 workstation.
Tom Wheeler, as you know, wrote two JNB articles ([1], [2]) on the NetBeans Platform.
Congratulations Tom. And can I touch your super cool Ultra 20 when you come back. Just one touch. Please... :)
(Geertjan and Tom Wheeler)
JDK On GNU/Linux: All But Fedora
I'm disappointed that Fedora is not part of the deal.
Simon Phipps: All that just ended. An unprecedented collection of Debian developers, Ubuntu developers, Sun engineers and Sun lawyers has spent months devising a new binary license for the Java platform, together with the parts for new installers, so that the Java platform is available on GNU/Linux in a way that "just works". Yes, you can now
apt-get install sun-java5-jreand have it install without fuss on Debian and Ubuntu. Gentoo will have it soon too.
I bet the Red Hat folks are saying: "It's still not Free Software!" And the Sun folks are laughing there heads off: "Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah."
As a long time Red Hat/Fedora user, all I want to say is "Guys, work it out. Make it so that I can yum install sun-java5-jdk and have it installed without fuss."
(If they don't, I'll give up Java altogether and become a Ruby-on-Rails fanatic.)
The Problem With Threads
It's so hard. There must be a better way.
(Via Lambda the Ultimate.)
Edward A. Lee: Many technologists are pushing for increased use of multithreading in software in order to take advantage of the predicted increases in parallelism in computer architectures. In this paper, I argue that this is not a good idea.
ACM Queue: The Amazon Technology Platform
This interview with Werner Vogels is worth a read.
ACM Queue: Many think of Amazon as "that hugely successful online bookstore." You would expect Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to embrace this distinction, but in fact it causes him some concern. "I think it's important to realize that first and foremost Amazon is a technology company," says Vogels. And he's right. Over the past years, Vogels has helped Amazon grow from an online retailer (albeit one of the largest, with more than 55 million active customer accounts) into a platform on which more than 1 million active retail partners worldwide do business. Behind Amazon's successful evolution from retailer to technology platform is its SOA (service-oriented architecture), which broke new technological ground and proved that SOAs can deliver on their promises.
JG At this point, what are your biggest successes and biggest headaches?
WV Next to the things that we already talked about—the service-oriented architecture, the way we scale, the way we serve our customers—I think our biggest success has been that Amazon has become a platform that other businesses can benefit from.