bbweblog – Page 114 – Kev's Development Toolbox

August 15, 2006

Sun announces open source plans for Java

At JavaOne this year Sun announced that they had plans to open source parts of the Java platform, although at that time the details were thin. This week, Sun have announced that they will be open sourcing two critical parts of the Java platform, the javac compiler, and the Hotspot virtual machine – both of these will be released to the open source community by the end of 2006.

Up until this year Sun has resisted community pressures to open source Java, over worries that the language and the platform may ‘fork’ into different branches of Java that may diverge in their language support and become incompatbile. This is not something that happens often in the open source world, and if it does it is usually because of good reasons, to address particular very specific needs.

It will be interesting to see how the Java platform evolves past this point, and longer term what this will mean for Sun and their involvement with the Java platform.

August 14, 2006

PC’s 25th birthday – “The 25 greatest PC’s of all time” – PCWorld

This year is 25 years since IBM launched the first IBM PC in 1981. PC World have put together a list of 25 of the ‘Greatest PC’s of All Time’ – the list is an interesting computing history of machines pre and post 1981, including greats such as the Apple II and the Comodore Amiga.

Noticably absent from the list are the machines big in Europe during the same time period. The Sinclair Spectrum was one of the first and the arguably the best selling home computer of it’s time in the UK (during the early 80’s) and most of Europe. Also missing from the list, the Atari ST – although if this is the ‘greatest’ of all time, it would have to be the ST Falcon030, which was an awesome piece of hardware, just out of reach of most people’s pockets at the time.

August 11, 2006

Getting started with Hibernate3 – O’Reilly

O’Reilly have been experimenting with short downloadable PDF books, which they are calling ‘Short Cuts’. The latest is ‘Getting Started with Hibernate3’ which you can purchase now from their site for $9.99.

Anyone tried one of these ‘Short Cuts’ yet and have any comments? They look like a good idea if you are looking for something to get you started quickly?

August 11, 2006

Rails 1.1.6 released with further security updates

Just one day after the security announcement and patch, there is a new Rails release, 1.1.6, which further addresses the security risk.

Earlier in the week when the first announcement came out there wasn’t any indication of what the issue was, but apparently the security risk was a hole where a user could execute code on your filesystem. Nice. A reminder to do some testing with that shiny new development framework before you deploy your new app out there on a production server…