JBoss DR2 is finally released.
Download here:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/jboss/jboss-4.0.0DR2.zip?download

JBoss 4 Developer Release 2 Features include:

* JBossDO. JDO for transperent persistence for POJOs. First iteration from the hard work of Alex Loubyansky.
http://jboss.org/index.html?module=html&;op=userdisplay&id=developers/projects/jboss/jbossdo

* JMS rewrite. First iteration from Nathan with help from Bela Ban and Adrian Brock.
P2P serverless topics by way of reliable multicast.
http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=html&;op=userdisplay&id=developers/projects/jboss/jms

* AOP XDoclet integration. Great work from Andy Godwin. JSR-175/C# metatags right now in JBoss 4!

* Expand AOP Pointcuts. Per method, field, constructor as well as Caller pointcuts
http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=html&;op=userdisplay&id=developers/projects/jboss/aop

[Welcome to the real world]

There is a very lengthy explanation of the Eclipse plug-in architecture on the eclipse site that provides a lot of insight for those wanting to write their own eclipse plug-in.

[Welcome to the real world]

I don't think it's shipping yet, but I'm thinking about getting this HomePod MP3 receiver for Mac to access my music from my home stereo. Unlike the $239 SLIMP3, the HomePod promises built-in 802.11b. If you have any experience with either product (or another better solution!) please let me know in the Discuss area! Thanks! Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Howard Rheingold (Online Journalism Review: Moblogs Seen as a Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism. Because... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Elwyn Jenkins added a lot of medical related logs in his online magazine, called BHN or Blogging Headline News. In response on my previous log about weblogging, Elwyn Jenkins logs about a rich goldmine of medical blogging. There are now a lot more medical related logs in BHN then in Medlogs. But the sites are very different: • Medlogs is maintained by a medical doctor, BHN is not. • In BHN there are a lot medical related weblog included; not... [Obels.net Medical Weblog]

Miguel de Icaza is talking on Beyond .NET: The Mono Project. Mono is a virtual machine, a set of class libraries, and development tools for an open source version of C#. The project is two years old. Miguel is an entertaining speaker. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Sam Ruby is bringing the community consensus building powers of wiki and weblogs together to help define a new syndication format , an archive format, and an editing protocol for weblogs. Sam kicked off the effort with a discussion of the anatomy of a w... [814 characters] [Blogging Roller]

OK, so there was no time for blogging this weekend and there was certainly no time for blogging at work today. That will change as soon as I setup a collaborative workspace for our group using a wiki-blog combo (JSPWiki + Roller). Unfortunately, you will ... [347 characters] [Blogging Roller]

I've been reading Joe's draft Eco API doc, here's some comments (posted here, because following the wiki is just getting impossible for me, YMMV)

• Instrospection
  • what are all the valid element names for the introspection document?
  • can i extend this with Namespace qualified elements?
  • shouldn't this document be in a namespace?
  • are fully qualified URLs required, can i use relative URLs instead? xml:base?
• Creating a new entry
  • Why does creating a new entry goto the <edit-entry/> URL whilst updating an existing entry goto the <create-entry/> URL, based on the surounding text, I'd expect them both to go the <create-entry/> url
  • in 4.2.1 the GET example, shouldn't the Content-Type header be an Accept header?
• Deleting an entry should use the HTTP DELETE method.
• Are the user prefs going to be defined, or is that upto the different apps?

I'm not really a fan of the do everything over POST approach, i think RESTLogs use of POST/PUT/DELETE is much better. But now that everything is a POST, going to a SOAP version will be trivial. [Simon Fell]

Ready access to customer data is what Oracle is trying to deliver with its E-Business Suite, Ellison said, as he marked a turn away from heavy-handed database sales to a focus on integration. [Collaxa's Take]

This tutorial, will teach you how to integrate multiple services into an end-to-end business process, including how to invoke web services, receive asynchronous callbacks, manipulate XML documents and handle business exceptions. It also showcases the monitoring, auditing and debugging capabilities of the Collaxa BPEL Orchestration Server. [Collaxa's Take]

The most important case for BPEL is that proprietary EAI and BPM solutions are just too expensive. They are expensive to develop, maintain, and extend across a diverse, heterogeneous environment. Proprietary integration links are often brittle, and the cost to maintain them as organizations continually evolve is a significant burden. The specialized skills required to support these proprietary solutions often create their own cost and availability concerns. The frequent result is that constrained IT budgets end up shifting the majority of their funds toward maintenance issues, with precious little left over to satisfy the needs for innovation and improved flexibility. [Collaxa's Take]

"BPEL4WS, on the other hand, sits on top of that interoperability stack, and its value derives from being a standard business process language. A BPEL4WS scenario could theoretically run equally well on a Microsoft platform as an Oracle platform. It's reminscent, in a way, of the portability of Java. What is different," says Lehmann, "is that the language for doing this orchestration will be an industry standard. This standard moves Web services from being a point-to-point integration technology to being a technology that has the potential to fundamentally drive core business processes. Who said standards weren't exciting?"  [Collaxa's Take]

Most web services projects are missing out on choreography, a vital extra layer that assembles multiple services into coherent business processes. Choreography directs the connections between separate application resources to create productive business processes:

• Also known as orchestration, it manages links between separate activities
• Enterprises use it to extend and combine the functionality of existing IT assets
• Standards such as BPEL are bringing it into the mainstream

[Collaxa's Take]

This tutorial describes the use of different kinds of XQuery expressions by example. [Collaxa's Take]

Research firm The Yankee Group recently concluded a study in which it determined that the demand for EAI -- the practice of tying older legacy applications to newer products from various vendors -- is declining because businesses aren't embarking on large-scale integration overhauls the way they used to. Rather than taking on massive integration campaigns, which cost big bucks and include platforms, adapters and training costs, customers are employing limited, project-based integration spending.[....] In conclusion, for some businesses which push integration platforms as their main meal ticket, The Yankee Group predicts EAI vendor revenue will deteriorate through 2006 as EAI efforts lose popularity and demand for project-based integration grows. "Standalone integration technology vendors should target a vertical market or prepare to be acquired," Derome said. "One or two best-of-breed EAI vendors will survive as horizontal solution vendors -- most likely TIBCO and webMethods. Competitors should seek acquisition partners or find an attractive vertical market to serve." [Collaxa's Take]

Imagine being able to send encrypted email to anyone using only their email address as a public key? No need to obtain and verify a public key in advance. PKI has failed as an email-encryption tool. Only a few of us use PGP. IBE could change all that.In the latest IT Conversation, Dan Boneh (co-founder) and Sathvik Krishnamurthy (president and CEO) of Voltage Security explain this new technology.
[stream--download--discuss, 4.5 mb, 20 minutes, recorded 7/10/03] [Doug Kaye: Web Services Strategies]

A Washington Post story today on AOL blogs. (Thanks to Bill for the link.)

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

ng points. The entire industry should consider them.

But...

I disagree with him about why the Web became such a success.

I believe the Web became such a success because it was a single app that did so much. I was a BBS, then Prodigy, then AOL, then CompuServe, then came to the Web in 1995, so pretty early on (certainly not first, but certainly before 99.9% of people got on).

Why did I instantly like the Web?

1) It was one app that did what CompuServe couldn't do: show me links between communities. CompuServe and AOL were awesome. They had nice, easy-to-use interfaces, but it was very difficult to link my readers in one forum (the VBPJFO on CompuServe, for instance) to another forum. Plus, you'd be locked into a specific world (AOL users couldn't get to CompuServe content).

2) It was one install that brought you tons of goodness. This is real important. My dad or my wife isn't going to load a ton of different applications. Certainly not today's Windows applications. You know, the kind where you have to download, then double click, then tell it where to install, click next, fill in your name, click next, etc.

I've been using IE6 now for more than two years. One computer. One browser. Never upgraded. Well, I loaded some security fixes. I hate installing software. I keep feeling "insecure" about it. Am I messing up my registry? Am I putting something on my system that'll change all my file associations? You all know the suckage. I don't need to enumerate it.

So, I loaded the Web browser because it did a number of things (it integrated). That's exactly how Office became dominant, by the way. It integrated a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database program, and a presentation program into a single package for generally about the same as you'd pay for any single one of the others.

3) The Web was visual. AOL was visual too, but not to the extent that the Web was. AOL had a very limiting user interface. It forced you to display graphics where they wanted you to, not where you wanted to.

4) The Web did something that none of the others did. In CompuServe, you couldn't make a word be "linked" to other content. Impossible. AOL. Impossible. Prodigy. Impossible. That was the magic that got me onto the Web. I saw that I could link in my writing. It was an amazing day when I learned how to do it.

5) It was an open learning system. I could look at the source code and learn how to do it myself.

So, what are the lessons for today's "sharecropping systems?" as Tim Bray put it?

1) Make it easy to install.

2) Integrate more functionality than the competition has.

3) Make it more visual than the Web.

4) Make it an open learning system, so newbies can come along and figure out how the system works.

Some other corrections for Tim Bray. I have no idea where he heard that Win Forms would supersede the browser. Absolutely false. I'm using Longhorn every day now (it's painful, but someone has to do it) and I'm running Mozilla on it, and I'm running Google on it (and on the browser that's built into Longhorn). The browser is not going away. Not in Longhorn. Your "open source farm" is safe.

Tim, you also say that all user interfaces used to be "richer" environments. I disagree vigorously. Compuserve was not "richer." AOL was not "richer." Prodigy was not "richer." Are you talking about the APIs in Windows? Well, just what do you think Netscape was built upon? Netscape's code was written specifically to those platform APIs (Netscape built a version of its browser for each of the major operating systems).

But, now, let's look at the real argument. Is Microsoft getting rich off of the Web? Nope. In fact, by my calculations, we've spent $1.25 billion on our browser, and now everyone hates us because we did it.

Let's look around the rest of the industry. Adobe? They make a billion a year off of PDFs. Macromedia? They make a bunch (not sure how much) off of Flash. Borland? A decent amount off of application developers who build things like FeedDemon with Delphi. Name one big company making any decent bank off of the browser. One. All I ask you is one.

OK, I got a bunch of you, sure. Amazon. EBay. Yahoo. Google. Etc. Etc. Etc.

But, those aren't the kinds of development companies I think you're thinking of. And, even then, look at Yahoo and Google and EBay. All three provide a better experience if you're on Windows. Why? Could it be they've figured out that the way to differentiate themselves is to build custom features that'll make their systems behave better?

Aside: Tim also says "All computer applications fall into one of three baskets: information retrieval, database interaction, and content creation."

Really? So, when I'm playing Halo, where does that fall into? I guess, database interaction. But, Halo is impossible to build for a "non sharecropped system." At least at the moment.

So, where does WinForms play a part? Well, a few of the news readers that people like best are WinForms based apps. I have a whole ton of corporate apps that work far better in WinForms than in a browser. Want me to show them to you?

Nah, you probably don't. You don't wanna become a KoolAid drinker, do you?

Heh.

[Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog]