Tag: java

Marc Fleury, founder and once CEO of JBoss before he sold the company to RedHat, recently did an interview with news.com. Sounds like he’s happy being away from the business of Open Source, the business model that JBoss itself created by offering paid Professional Services for Open Source products, and the software industry as a whole.

I’m sure Fleury will be missed – he completely turned the Software industry on it’s head and showed the big Corporations that Open Source is a viable commercial option, and that good quality software can be produced for free by a community of developers. IBM has it’s Geronimo open source Java EE server offering, Oracle donated the source for their ORM tool TopLink as Open Source, and Sun has made it their business recently to Open Source practically everything they have – the Java platform, Netbeans (it’s Java IDE which had previously been feeding into it’s commercial IDE offerings like Studio Creator, but that flow of knowledge seems to have reversed recently and features from Creator are finding their way into Netbeans), Glassfish App Server, Open Solaris, the list goes on.

In the interview, Fleury said he would not be doing a ‘JBoss 2’ – if he does start a new business it will be in biotech, not Software. Although JBoss continues in name under it’s new owners, RedHat, it will definitely be remembered from the turning point in open source awareness that it created within the industry.

In an attempt to cash in on the brand-name they were responsible for creating 12 years ago, Sun has changed their Nasdaq ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA.

This blog post on the O’Reilly site is a breath of fresh air. One thing we seem to be too good at in the Java World is making things too complicated. What’s more, we’ve a long history of it as well (think EJB 2.x implementation). While other HTTP based web frameworks are championing the simplicity approach (RoR, Grails etc), for some reason in the Java World we are going off in the other direction of making things impossibly complicated (JSF and Seam). Their promises are commendable, to enforce separation of concerns, enable maintainability etc, but the cost seems to be at a huge learning curve, and a negative impact on developers productivity.

At some point this is all going to come full circle and we’ll look back and thing ‘wow, what were we thinking?’, and I’m looking forward to that day coming sooner than later.

This is a great article that gives Flash videos of various VM configuration options and demonstrates the Garbage Collection behavior of the Java SE 6 VM when configured sub-optimally for a given application.

I don’t know if anyone has thought of this before but seeing the patterns develop as they happen via Flash videos is a great way to convey what is happening, that would be far more difficult to express with just words alone.