Develope and Compile Java Apps on the P800 Mobile Phone!.

Tonight I compiled my first application on my P800 phone! I don't mean writing and compiling the app on a PC and then running it on the mobile. I mean coding and compiling it on the mobile!

Why compile Java code on your P800 smartphone? Because you can :-))

Hehe that's the reason according to the guy who wrote it! But it's good to always have a javac in your pocket :-) Grab jCompile for P800 here. Now it would be great to also have an IDEA for P800!!

Oh btw it compiles and runs personal Java apps. PJava is JDK 1.1.8, but it's interesting that one of the two samples that comes with jCompile is the Converter app from the standard JDK. It shows P800's Java runtime can run standard JDK code, no change at all, no need to learn a new API like MIDP. To compile applications it also uses the same javac code afaik.

Ara.

[java.blogs Day's Entries]

Jelly and Jython. Spotted this interesting article on Jython. I do think Jython's a neat way of scripting Java code. The article has some comparisons with using XML and Jython and it does look simpler to use Jython alot of the time. There's a comparison of Jelly and Jython for creating user interfaces - this was the one example of where I thought the XML was easier to read & process. Afterall with user interfaces you often want to restyle & reformat; so using XML for this seems to make more sense - I found the Jython harder to read. Minor point though. Another port worth considering is that Jelly and Jython work well together (Jython can be embedded into Jelly or Jelly can invoke Jython or use Jython expressions) so the two can work hand in hand. [James Strachan's Radio Weblog]

Python good enough to replace VB. Nelson Minar has concluded that Python is good enough for writing Windows apps, or at least those Windows apps that you would write using Visual Basic. His post contains reporting on the bloat (still too large) and tools for doing the expected Windows fit and finish. [java.blogs Day's Entries]

Anne Thomas Manes on Web Services and Open Source..

Network World named Anne one of the 50 most powerful people in networking.

Hear her insights in the latest IT Conversation:

1. When will security and reliable messaging be part of web-services products?
2. Which web-services vendors offer the greatest interoperability?
3. Is the web-services specification process effective or a disaster?
4. Will the EAI vendors survive the shift to open protocols for integration?
5. Will SCO's Linux lawsuits destroy open source's GPL?
6. Is C# "Java--the next generation?"

[stream—download—discuss, 6.2 mb, 27 minutes, recorded 8/18/03] [Blogarithms]

Identity-Based Encryption.. 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 Hosting Strategies]

Jim Gray on Storage.. Thanks to Phil Windley and Tim Bray for linking to this great interview with storage guru, Jim Gray. Read the others' highlights, or better yet--read the whole interview. My favorites include:

• Two groups start; one group uses an easy-to-use system, and another uses a not-so-easy-to-use system. The first group gets done first, and the competition is over. The winners move forward and the other guys go home. That situation is now happening in the Web services space. People who have better tools win.
• The processors are going to migrate to where the transducers are. Thus, every display will be intelligent; every NIC will be intelligent; and, of course, every disk will be intelligent...Soon they will have an IP interface and will be running Web servers and databases and file systems. Gradually, all the processors will migrate to the transducers: displays, network interfaces, cameras, disks, and other devices. This will happen over the next decade. It is a radically different architecture...It's IP. The interface is probably Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) or some derivative of SOAP; you send requests to it and get back responses in a pretty high-level protocol. The IP sack does security and naming and discovery.

[Doug Kaye: Web Hosting Strategies]

The Future of Applications.. A good interview with Tim O'Reilly by Robert McMillan prior to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention two weeks ago.

• "All of the killer apps of the Internet era – Amazon, Google, and Maps.yahoo.com. They run on Linux or FreeBSD." [This is Tim's important message these days, that Amazon, Google, etc., are applications.]
• Today's software licenses (including open-source licenses) are insufficient because with applications like Amazon and Google it's the data--not the code--that's being licensed to others. [One no longer distributes software. Rather, one provides access to data through web services. Whatever software is required executes at the publisher's location. And that software per se is of no interest to the consumers of the service.] "The value will be driven up the stack to data."
• "Amazon really understands that they are becoming a platform. They are becoming the ecommerce engine of an awful lot more of the Internet than people realise."

[Doug Kaye: Web Hosting Strategies]

An Introduction to BPEL.. I just came across this elegant introduction to BPEL and the concepts of orchestration. I say elegant because it's short and sweet. The first slide tells most of the story: a mix of synchronous and asynchonous services, exception handling, and parallel async processes. If you understand these three issues, you're most of the way there. [Source; Collaxa] [Blogarithms]

IT Conversation: Anne Thomas Mannes.. My latest IT Conversation with Anne Thomas Manes contains so many valuable insights, it's worth a more detailed summary than most. Here are some of the things Anne had to say:

• Advanced Web Sevices. Anne expects to see WS-Security implemented in software products in 6-12 months. Reliability in the messaging layer will take more than a year.
• Interoperability. Older products don't interoperate well. Anne recommends the products from Systinet, The Mind Electric, IONA, and CapeClear because they provide the best Java/.NET interop. She says to stay away from Apache SOAP, which was replaced by Apache Axis. Anne is a big fan of WS-I's Basic Profile.
• Web-Services Protocol Development. We spoke at length about the unusual way in web-services protocols have been developed. As Anne pointed out, web services are all about interoperability, so there was no way to have implementations in advance of the standards--the traditional sequence for standards development. We agreed that progress has been extraordinarily rapid, despite some in the press who complain that it's taking too long.
• Scalability. I asked her about the lack of real-world scalability testing, and Anne pointed out that we need real-world applications before we can really understand scalability. She specifically mentioned gigabit Ethernet and proposals for compressed XML as technologies that will obviate some of the current inefficiencies of XML.
• The Future of EAI Vendors. Because good EAI software includes much more than connectivity, it's fairly sticky. By way of comparison, Anne pointed out that even though WebSphere and Web Logic are both based on J2EE, you wouldn't likely switch from one to the other unless you had a specific problem with your current product or its vendor. Good EAI software is equally sticky.
• SCO Linux Lawsuits. Anne is "very disappointed" with the current situation. She's particularly worried that IBM has raised the issue of the General Public License (GPL) and that SCO is therefore challenging its validity. If the courts finds against the GPL concept, the entire open-source community will be affected.
• Novell's Acquisition of Ximian. Novell picked up GNOME and Mono, but the latter is the more interesting. Microsoft put C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) into the public domain. They're now ISO/ECMA standards. Mono is an open-source Linux implementation of CLI, which means that compiled (bytecode) versions of C# programs can be run on Linux. Anne says that "C# is Java--The Next Generation." She's a huge fan. If programmers are willing to develop under Windows, C# and Mono may offer them true portability.

You can hear this all first hand. It's a great IT Conversation. [Blogarithms]

Behind the Curtain at WS-I.. John Hogan, news editor at SearchWebServices.com, spoke with some of the members of WS-I's board about what happened along to way to WS-I's new Basic Profile 1.0. WS-I isn't a standards body. Instead, they've released this important document that tell us which of the many standards to use and how to combine them if we want to develop interoperable services. From Hogan's interview:

• "The working group dropped the idea of SOAP encoding interoperability in favor of XML Schema as the type system for Web services."
• "Fully 44% of the [interoperability] issues we tackled, of the 200-odd issues, were around the WSDL specification," [Chris Ferris, chairman of the Basic Profile working group and a senior software engineer at IBM] said. The working group had to clarify WSDL and "clean up the ambiguity aspects of it," such as how to use it with SOAP and the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry.

Other examples from the WS-IBP itself include:

• Don't use DTDs or precessing instructions. They're out!
• Use HTTP POSTs, not the new Extension Framework.
• IP port 80 is acceptable, although not ideal.
• The handling of HTTP status codes is explained.
• Cookies are permitted as a way to manage state, but only only under certain circumstances.
• All XML Schema must be derived from http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema. Read and use the WS-IBP. You'll be gald you did.

WS-IBP is a huge help to us all. Highly recommended. [Blogarithms]

IBM is batty over OGSA. From what I can tell, three major themes are coming out of the IBM software group:
1. Model Driven Architecture (a byproduct of purchasing Rational)
2. Web Services (a byproduct of being in bed with Microsoft)
3. OGSA (a byproduct of wanting to beat Microsoft)

The OGSA is an interesting beast and at the heart of it you will find web services:



For more information on OGSA, check out:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/gr-visual/

One thing I didn't really get was why they have OGSI services laying on top of web services, and their explanation didn't help:

Let's look more closely at the two main logical components of OGSA -- the Web services-plus-OGSI layer, and the OGSA architected services layer. See Figure 2. Why are they separated like this? The GGF OGSA working group believed it was necessary to augment core Web services functionality to address grid services requirements. OGSI extends Web services by introducing interfaces and conventions in two main areas.

First, there's the dynamic and potentially transient nature of services in a grid. In a grid, particular service instances may come and go as work is dispatched, as resources are configured and provisioned, and as system state changes. Therefore, grid services need interfaces to manage their creation, destruction, and life cycle management.

Second, there's state. Grid services can have attributes and data associated with them. This is similar in concept to the traditional structure of objects in object-oriented programming. Objects have behavior and data. Likewise, Web services needed to be extended to support state data associated with grid services.

IMHO, the ws layer should front end all of the service - both of the aforementioned issues seem resolvable. Perhaps the IBM boys will set them straight...
[Service Oriented Enterprise]

"RSS Utilities: A Tutorial" [Daypop Top 40]

Each file should be uniquely named and sourced.

Each file must be verified for authenticity. 

The P2P client software must be able to communicate with the weblog tool software using XML-RPC.  The P2P software should be invisible.

The classic search feature of P2P systems should be disabled or unavailable.  The only way to access the files on the network is via a link on a weblog or via RSS subscriptions.

Placing a file in a P2P folder should generate a unique URL that points to the location of the file on the P2P system.  This URL can be published in your weblog.  When someone clicks on it they will either begin the download (which is done immediately or delayed via preferences) or they are prompted to download the software.

Files on the P2P network can be delivered as part of RSS enclosures.

Multiple source downloads is a must.

The P2P client should be cross platform.

Optional:  Individual nodes can be turned off and specific files can be filtered. 

If you have more requirements or disagree with the above, post them below. [John Robb's Weblog]

EEVL's RSS Primer and Why Even Google Can't Filter.

Gary Price has two good catches (among others) over at ResourceShelf:

A New Primer on RSS
"From the announcement, 'EEVL's Primer is aimed at publishers and content providers, with the intention of introducing and explaining the concepts behind RSS and addressing some commonly expressed concerns. It is primarily intended for a non-technical audience who require an overview of RSS to make decisions regarding the possible use of the technology. However, the guidelines also provide recommendations for good practice, case studies on RSS production and links to tools and specifications which provide useful starting points for those tasked with actually producing RSS feeds.' The document is also available in Word format."

Google's SafeSearch Blocks Some Content from the White House
"The following post is far from shocking. Nevertheless, it's another example of how filters, even from much beloved Google, have problems...

The other day I was having an email chat with Marylaine Block and mentioned a neat web 'gadget' from Harvard Law School that allows you to quickly compare Google results with and without Google's SafeSearch filter activatated. This 'gadget' was embedded in a report that Harvard Law released several months ago about SafeSearch.

Yesterday, I wanted to see how Google’s SafeSearch would handle a couple of basic queries for names of U.S. Presidents. I searched for Bill Clinton and learned that Google’s SafeSearch was blocking the number one and two results. What’s more interesting is that these filtered sites come from Whitehouse.Gov. Hmm.

I then ran a search for George W. Bush. because it also blocked the first two results, also from the whitehouse.gov domain. I didn't search for each U.S. President but did give it a go with two additional names. President Zachary Taylor and George Washington also have bio pages from Whitehouse.Gov blocked. Finally, a search for White House with SafeSearch active removes the official White House Homepage (#1 result) and replaces it with a parody site. We've also noticed that SafeSearch blocks the THOMAS site from the Libarary of Congress and the Student.Gov website. Those of you who give web search presentations might find this resource from Harvard useful to find examples illustrating the weaknesses of a web search filter."

[The Shifted Librarian]