Blogging Roller

Deigo Doval is digging into Open Office and it's programming interfaces and has discovered Open Office's own Universal Network Objects (UNO) component model. Components models like <a href= "http://developer.gnome.org/arch/component/bonobo.html">Bonobo, <a href= "http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/">Dot-Net's, <a href= "http://www.corba.org">CORBA, <a href= "http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/">XPCOM, and <a href= "http://www.microsoft.com/com/default.asp">COM, and <a href= "http://java.sun.com/products/javabeans/">JavaBeans are fascinating, and I really mean that, but how many of these friggin' universes do we really need? I understand that OpenOffice.org wants to support cross-language components, but couldn't they have started with CORBA as Bonobo does, XPCom as Mozilla does, or the Dot-Net model as Ximian does? I guess inventing your own component model is just way too much fun.

It is just amazing to me that so many people have from $10,000,000 to $30,000,000 in the bank somewhere, need my help to transfer that money to the USA, and are willing to pay me a 5% to 30% commission for my services.

Raleigh News and Observer reporter Karen Mann attended our most recent lunch and spoke with a number of other Triangle area webloggers. The resulting article <a href= "http://www.newsandobserver.com/front/story/2171116p-2057661c.html">A web for your thoughts is now online. See <a href="http://loebrich.org/2003/02/05.html#a2874 ">Bruce Leobrich's, <a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/02/05/unabashed_media_whoring.html ">Mark Pilgrim's, and Frank Boosman's weblogs for additional comments.

So says <a href= "http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/02/04/HNsidewinder_1.html">InfoWorld.

James Strachan reports a new top-level project at Apache db.apache.org for database related technologies:

James Strachan: Various database related projects will be moving under one roof such as ObjectRelationalBridge, Torque as well as various db commons projects like commons-sql, DBCP and maybe even PoolMan.

Chris Winters points out a new presentation by Dave Thomas one of the Pragmatic Programmers.

Chris Winters: I thought it interesting that many of the action items centered around getting yourself known, including contributing to open-source projects. Not just for the sake of getting your name out there, but to further your own knowledge in a more dynamic environment than learning by yourself. With the nice side-benefit of getting your name out there :-)

That's my plan and my excuse for my constant tinkering, writing, blogging, etc. I hope it works. On a related note: Dave Thomas has a blog and an RSS feed!

I'm wondering the same thing. If they were running in the same ServletContext, we might be able to make them do some interesting tricks.

Matt Croydon: How easy would it be to integrate something like JSPWiki with Roller? I really like the integration that Mr. Orchard has accomplished over at 0xDECAFBAD. I'm not personally a Roller user (tho I've played with it and love it), but given the JSP connection, I think it might not be too impossible.

Borland is moving Java veteran <a href= "http://www.borland.com/news/press_releases/2003/01_27_03_borland_accelerates_acquisition.html"> Tony de le Lama to Raleigh, NC to head-up research and development for the Together products. According to <a href= "http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,848792,00.asp">eWeek, former Sun marketing exec George Paolini will be taking de la Lama's place at Borland HQ in Scotts Valley, CA.

Stuart Halloway: At the last Triangle JUG meeting I was stunned by the level of unemployment in the local Java community. Here's something that may help. <a href= "http://www.techengage.com">TechEngage is a new non-profit organization dedicated to providing technical training for out of work IT folk.

In a recent <a href= "http://www.fawcette.com/javapro/2003_02/magazine/features/dsavarese/default_pf.asp">JavaPro article Daniel Savarese helps you choose between serialization, JDBC, EJB, JDO, and JAXB for Java object persistence. He ignore the O/R frameworks, I suppose, because they are non-standard.

Ed Cone: ...there remains something noble and unique about NASA's mission. It's the application of science to expand human frontiers, the courage of the highly-trained crews, the sense that what these people are doing is done to some degree for all of us, everywhere.

Excellent article with quotes from software pioneers and bloggers Dan Bricklin and Mitch Kapor.

CNET: "Web logs (commonly known as "blogs"), message boards and other online forums are becoming increasingly important vehicles for developers to attract customers -- and development talent -- well before an application even enters the beta stage."

It's nice that there are multiple competing Roller sites now.

<a href= "http://blogs.application-servers.com/blogs/page/leecho/20030131#sorry_blog_moved">Carlos Villela: I had to move this blog to another Roller. Sorry guys and gals, but freeroller.net is just too slow, and I don't know if it's a problem in their bandwidth, mine, or if they're just too loaded.

You probably did not notice this, but my site was getting a tremendous number of hits this week. The reason is Scooter. Scooter is the AltaVista search robot. Scooter is persistent but not very smart. Scooter is not content to index a page, follow the links, and then index the linked pages. Scooter tries to guess the URLs to pages on your site and does a terrible job at the guessing game. If Scooter gets thousands of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND errors in one day, Scooter does not care. He just keep on guessing. According to Seach Engine World, he may be here for several months:

Search Engine World The Altavista search engine starts by spidering your entire site with its spider Scooter. Although lately Scooter hasn't been scooting too well. Scooter may take up to three months to spider and index your entire site (if it is going to crawl your site at all). It normally spiders about 2-10 pages per site in any week. Sometimes Scooter needs a good swift kick to get it to index certain pages.

Yep, I would like to give Scooter a good swift kick. Scooter obeys a robots.txt, if you have one. I'm hoping that the following addition to my robots.txt file will make him go away.

User-agent: Scooter/3.3
Disallow: /

User-agent: Scooter/3.2.SF0
Disallow: /

There was a record crowd at the RTP-WUG meeting tonight. Shakeel Mahate presented a nice overview of Struts and Thomas Roche presented an energetic and entertaining overview of the (Eclipse-based) <a href= "http://www-3.ibm.com/software/info1/websphere/index.jsp?tab=products/studio">WebSphere Studio's Struts tooling. There was not much time left for Jason Garcowski, who provided a brief demo of IBM's example "Trade" application.

The Struts tools were pretty impressive and included a Struts tag-aware WYSIWYG JSP/HTML editor, a sophisticated struts-config.xml editor, and an innovative Struts Web Diagram Editor or 'Woody' as Thomas called it. If you want to learn more about these tools, visit the WebSphere Studio Zone or check out IBM's redbook titled <a href= "http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg246806.html?Open">Legacy Modernization with WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer. Chapters 4 through 7 provide a good introduction both to Struts and the WebSphere Studio Struts tooling - including lots of screen-shots like the one below.

I mentioned this before, so this is just a reminder. The meeting starts at 6PM at IBM.

According to the trade rags, Borland has licensed the Dot-Net SDK and will include it in Delphi 7, Together, and other development tools later this year. It will be interesting to see what other Borland products target Dot-Net. Borland's Dot-Net page makes it look like they all will. Does the inclusion of Kylix on that page imply a Borland-supported Dot-Net implementation on Linux? I get the feeling that Borland believes that bridging discordant technologies like Dot-Net and Java is a significant business opportunity, so maybe a Java-Dot-Net bridge product is in the works as well. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

<a href= "http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/01/27/030127hnbornet_1.html"> InfoWorld: Borland on Tuesday plans to announce it is licensing the Microsoft Windows .Net Framework SDK for inclusion in Borland's Delphi 7 Studio development tool immediately and in other .Net-based products afterward.

ZDNet: The forthcoming Borland product that incorporates the .Net Framework SDK will be an enhancement to TogetherSoft's current .Net product

Sounds like Andy would enjoy Piemaster Pete's BSOD gallery.

Whether you back Java or Dot-Net you have to agree that Carlos Perez's 101 Reasons Java is better than Dot-Net has resulted in some very interesting discussions. I've learned a lot from reading the responses from both camps. The latest and so far the best post on the topic is Ted Neward's <a href= "http://www.neward.net/ted/weblog/index.jsp?date=20030126#1043568228687">85 of 101 Reasons, Rebutted.

This looks like it could be useful. Congrats to Matt and team. I am looking forward to taking a closer look at the code.