So what's next after Java ?

Today Oracle sued Google over Java patents. Miguel de Icaza's thoughts about the issue are very interesting to read. I have been waiting for a significant reaction on the stock market. Currently at this second: GOOG 0 ORCL 0 MSFT 0 NOVL + 2.5% The changes aren't really significant. If Oracle starts cashing out on Java, it could kneejerk the Java community to look for alternative solutions. This could be very good for other true open source languages that run both on the Java VM platform and on the IL platform. For instance it would be great to see Scala and Boo take off. My prediction for Android when it came out in November 2007 was right. I would love to see my wishful thinking for programming language direction come true also. I finally would like to work with type inference, closures and with a multithreading paradigm like Actors that goes beyond synchronized blocks and scales to work in the cloud. For our current work on replication between db4o and VOD it was no consideration yet to do this in a ... Read the rest of entry »

A new home for db4o

After many years of growth in community, customer base and revenue, it is time for db4o to go to the next level:We, the team behind the most popular object database db4o, have joined forces with Versant, the commercial leader of ODBMS. News releases can be found here (Servo) and here (Versant). From garage to startup to public company. Thanks a lot to everyone who has been part of the journey:community, team, users, customersSuccess would not have been possible without you. The transaction with Versant should be very beneficial for our developers worldwide and our customers, and I look forward to working with all of you in this new, expanded, framework. I am sure you will be happy about the continuity on our open source path. I have agreed to this transaction because Versant is very committed and actively looking to strengthen their portfolio with an open source offering. I am sure it's the right path to bring our useful technology into the hands of millions of users.  Paired with Versant's scalable, rel ... Read the rest of entry »

Paircasts - How we work

Have you ever wondered how and when an idea was developed? Would you have liked to see how the corresponding lines of programming code were written to make a dream come true? Are you interested how the people behind the code are like and how they behave when they work together? Hey, I would really like to know a lot more about many of you guys out there and how you work. So here is an offer:When we work on code (usually programming in pairs of two), we record screen and audio of our sessions to make them available for download as videos. Let's call these videos "Paircasts". A first selection of 10 recorded sessions is available on our new Paircasts blog. You may want to read "About Paircasts" first. It also tells you where to get a free video player and/or the right codecs. If you like the idea of Paircasts, please do try to record your own and tell us about them. Our team would love to peek over your shoulder also. Read the rest of entry »

LINQ for Java

LINQ - Language INtegrated Queries - are a developers dream come true. Queries are an integral part of the primary programming language. They are typesafe, compile-time checked, refactorable and autocompleted by the IDE. If you want to read up more on LINQ, Charlie Calvert’s Links to LINQ are a nice starting point. At db4objects we really like LINQ. Isn’t it cool that Microsoft has come up with a standard that is a great fit for object databases? LINQ is available for .NET, but what do we have for Java? Nothing comparable really. What would it take to implement language integrated queries for Java? A plugin for the Eclipse IDE and compiler with support for basic LINQ queries would be a great start to get the Java community excited. Wouldn’t this be a very nice open source project to work on together? At the icoodb conference we discussed this idea and the feedback we got from other object database vendors was very positive. With this blog posting I would like to pick up the idea. Are you interested to h ... Read the rest of entry »

Will Web 3.0 ( Android ? ) be Peer-to-Peer ?

Yesterday I gave Google Earth a try to see what the Sky view looks like. Playing around, I decided to switch on all content layers around my area. ( 47°51'49.49"N,  11°22'41.96"E ) Happily I discovered that the virtual world around our place is not yet polluted with YouTube smog. Curious to see what a busy place looks like, I flew over to San Francisco and here is what I found: [ImageAttachment] Isn't this overvhelming already? How will you be able to find a recommended Thai restaurant on a mobile screen? Imagine every single person walking around using an Android phone, constantly sharing location, pictures, videos, going sightseeing and getting shopping hints from commercial offers. If this would work like Google Earth does today, the vertical extension of layered icons would make the phone screen shatter. What struck me when I used Google Earth was how long it took to load all the data. I have a very fast broadband connection but still it took minutes to load all these icons. When the usage of Andro ... Read the rest of entry »

Sun buys MySQL, Oracle buys BEA

Today seems to be a good day to buy companies.

Sun buys MySQL

Oracle buys BEA

...and the day has only yet begun. Let's see what happens next.

Tim O'Reilly has commented on the price for MySQL.

A DZone Feature Request

Finally social bookmarking starts to be fun. I really like DZone and the way voting works there. You really get "fresh links for developers". Reading along the Popular Links Feed I feel better informed about what's going on than I ever was before. For some people the amount of links that pop up as "popular" may be too many to digest. In that case it can help to subscribe to the personal feed of a friend. Here is my feed. An even better solution would be, if everyone could generate his own feed with criteria that a link has to meet. I suppose it would be very easy to have different feeds with a certain number of positive votes. ("Popular" currently means 4 positive votes, I think) It would be even cooler if you could have a list with "friends" and "foes" of other DZone users. Votes of "friends" could be doubled. Votes of "foes" could be inverted. There is this one guy who always votes against the links that I post. I think I really want to read all the articles he is against. It's a good sign of quality if ... Read the rest of entry »

Release Early, Release Often

If marketing would always have as much influence on release dates as it does in the software industry, airplanes would probably fly like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZq4sZz56qM

Sometimes I wonder if I have the right job. I am considering the following alternative:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryMgZ0pyGS4

;-)

Happy New Year 2008 !

How good is your favourite programming language?

...it depends... Well yeah, of course it does. "Good" means nothing at all without "good at what". Three of the key metrics are of course: speed memory consumption size of the code base Here is a very nice website that let's you weight what you are interested in most to race your favourite languages against eachother. I recommend that you spend some time to play with the parameters. What happens if you rate CPU time (performance) to be most important? Which language is a good choice if you want the smallest codebase? Thanks to Miguel for the pointer on his blog and for his interpretations. When you choose a language for your next software project you may want to think beyond three simple metrics that are easily measurable. Here are some more factors that need consideration: Potential user base for libraries that you write Availability of educated and experienced developers Strong IDE support Tool support (profilers, code coverage, obfuscators, build) Productivity (time needed to write ... Read the rest of entry »

Interview with Martin Odersky (Scala)

If you are interested in Scala, make sure you watch this interview with Martin Odersky, the key designer of the language. In case you don't know Scala yet: It's a fusion of functional programming and object-orientation, taking the very best of both worlds. It compiles to Java byte code and .NET IL code, so you can mix Scala with your existing Java or .NET libraries. Java support appears to be slightly better. Plugins for Eclipse and Netbeans are being worked on but of course they are not yet as mature as JDT. The first Scala book just came out. The Scala documentation that comes with the download is very good. I recommend to work through "ScalaByExample.pdf" to get a grasp of the language. Scala provides strong advanced concepts for concurrent programming, "Actors" for example. From what I can see, the Scala crew is doing a brilliant job at designing the language. I can see Scala superseding Java as the most popular programming language. (...and of course, Scala and db4o play together very ni ... Read the rest of entry »