Evolutionary Goo

I have installed Firefox 3 on one PC so far and the browser has been working fine so far. I definitely see an improvement in speed and the interface is also more polished. I don’t run with a lot of plugins, but if you do, you might want to first make sure the ones important to you have updates available for the new Firefox. I have seen a few blog posts say that the Firebug plugin isn’t available for Firefox 3. That is not true, as Firebug 1.2 will work with Firefox 3 (although I haven’t put it through the rigors yet).

Most technical people end up being the IT support staff for their immediate and extended families. I am no exception. For years I felt like the best choice to recommend to family members was to go to Dell’s web site with a budget in mind and build a Windows PC that fits that budget. I would help out with the accessories and let them know about the service contracts that were available. For the most part it worked out pretty well. The process didn’t take up too much of my time, my family member got a pretty decent and technically up to date PC at a good price. And the support wasn’t too bad either.

Today that has all changed. Dell and Windows is no longer my default choice. In the past year I recommended Dell with Windows Vista to two family members and they have each had problems. The problems aren’t all Vista’s either as some were related to software that came pre-installed by Dell. Regardless of what the problems were and whose fault they were, the problems happened and they cost me valuable personal time as I assisted my family members in getting the problems resolved.

If asked today what system to buy, I think I would still list Dell and Windows as an option. However, I would be asking more questions like, “Do you have a copy of Windows XP that you can run on your new computer?” or “Have you thought about paying more and getting a really cool Mac Book?”. I might even ask, “Have you ever heard of Linux or Ubuntu?”. And I would definitely mention that using a quality, local PC builder, like J & B Technologies in St. Louis, has all sorts of benefits over using a national company like Dell or HP.

Maybe its not as cool to do so, but go ahead and code that new Web 2.0 app you’ve been thinking about in Java. Once of the most succesful Web 2.0 apps, LinkedIn, is written in Java. It serves up 40 million page views a day. And from my use of the site, its performance has been very good.

From a technical standpoint I am really impressed by LinkedIn’s pragmatic and striaghtforward technology choices for building their application. Tomcat/Jetty, straight JDBC, Spring and Oracle/MySQL.

For more information on LinkedIn’s implementation, see this excellent article.

Today’s theme is lesser known, but great alternative music.

• Primitive by Ambulance LTD from album LP   iTunes
• The Sound of Fear by Eels from album Daisies of the Galaxy   iTunes
• Country Sad Ballad Man by Blur from album Blur   iTunes
• Happiness/The Gondola Man by Elliott Smith from album Figure 8   iTunes
• Good to Be On the Road Back Home by Cornershop from When I Was Born For the 7th Time   iTunes

Update: When I do a list like this, I thought it would be nice to provide a link for each song.

Are you a…

• Programmer?
• Software Analyst?
• Software Architect?
• Software Engineer?
• Software Designer?
• Software Developer?
• All of the above?

And how much experience is required to put the word “senior” before your title?

Its fun to check out the variety of titles and descriptions everyone has given themselves on LinkedIn.

If Winston Churchill was a Java developer today instead of a powerful world leader during World War II, I think he might make this quote about Java instead of the Germans.

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
- Winston Churchill, November 10, 1942

Here are some links related to green computing from the last few weeks.

• The Story of Stuff (2008-4-22)
  
• The 5 quickest returns on your green investment (2008-4-22)
  
• 5 habits for greener computing (2008-4-22)
  
• IBM servers run cool to woo Web 2.0 crowd (2008-04-23)
• Six lessons learned at the Uptime Green Enterprise Computing Symposium (2008-05-01)
• HP Desktops Go Green (2008-05-13)
  
• Green IT Numbers Don’t Lie (2008-05-18)

There is a new Java web framework, Web4J, that has the goals of being simple, small, minimalistic and opinionated. I really love the idea of this framework. See the overview to get the full list of features. I worked with a number of Java web frameworks over the years. There are so many ways to build a web application that sometimes you just want something that is bare bones and doesn’t come with a bunch of external APIs. Those external APIs can give you lots of power, but also take time to learn and implement.

However, there is one drawback. This framework isn’t free and isn’t open source. Therefore, I don’t think much will come of it. Too bad.

Tapestry and it creator, Howard Lewis Ship, are back. Tapestry 5 is in beta and has started getting some good press. Here is a great introduction from InfoQ. I’ve worked with both Tapestry 3 and 4 and really like Tapestry 5’s approach to HTML templates and components. Tapestry was a ground breaking web framework a few years ago when it first came out and many frameworks, including JSF and Wicket, owe a lot of their ideas to Tapestry’s early innovations.

For better or worse, Tapestry 5 is a rewrite. The XML configuration files that were criticized in the past are now gone. And Tapestry 5 may be the first Java web framework to include an auto-reload feature that allows you to make code changes without redeploying. Very cool.

I think Tapestry 5 still has a chance for a unique place among the Java web frameworks. It uses XHTML templates over JSP pages. Its approach to development is still through components and not actions. And it doesn’t try to generate any Javascript on the fly. Instead if focuses on working with popular Javascript libraries like Prototype.

It will be interesting to see where Tapestry 5 goes. The rewrite has driven some developers away, while the new features will bring some of them along with others . I think the key for Tapestry 5 is to get some great books out there quickly. Also, it will be interesting to see what Trails 2 looks like. Trails, which is a web framework in the spirit of Rails, will be written on top of Tapestry 5.

OK, I’ll play. I’m not sure how exciting twittering will be unless I find it to be a nice replacement or supplement for IM. You can follow me here. I can see how people are getting hooked on it, however, I think it will be interesting to see if Twitter can sustain the hype.