Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Russel's got a new job Announcements Continued.... Okay, so I gave my notice at work so I can talk now - no nasty surprises for anyone here reading online (not that I think anyone reads my blog here at work anyways...). So woohooo! Last night, the American company I talked about before called Orcom called me up and gave me the offer which I accepted. ... -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] Russel's got a new job: congratulations Russel ! It was fun to get the teasers in the morning in the Newsreader today: I wondered when your announcement was going to come. Managing 2 careers + children can be really challenging, but it's worth it. Good luck to both of you with your new jobs. From what I've read in your blog, they're lucky to get you :-) 11:49:04 PM    comment []

File access from Servlet apps.. File access from Servlet apps.. Jeff Duska is forgetting a couple of things that many Servlet/JSP developers (myself included) often forget. He is forgetting the distributed nature of Servlet apps and he is forgetting the WAR. Someday, when your app becomes incredibly popular, you might find that you need to distribute the load across multiple worker processes on multiple computers. All the major app servers support this, does your app? In a distributed configuration, if your app writes a file to the file-system on one computer, you won't be able to get to that file on another computer. If you want all instances of your app to share a file, then this is a problem. If you are just writing a simple little temporary file, which sounds like Jeff's case, then this is generally not a problem. Even if you are only writing a temporary file, you still don't want to write it inside your Servlet context. When your app is packaged in a WAR file, may not be able to open files inside the Servlet context. If you are just writing a temporary file, it might be better to use one of the static java.io.File.createTempFile() methods to get a file. [Blogging Roller] 7:14:26 PM    comment []

J2EE vs. NET, Java vs. C# J2EE vs. NET, Java vs. C#. [James Strachan's Radio Weblog] A very interesting discussion between James and Graham Glass about the 2 current contenders in language and architecture. 6:58:40 PM    comment []

The Java API Map: I hope students are not put off by java's breadth On Java Map. This Java map over at O'Reilly's OnJava is pretty cool. -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] This rings a bell with the discussion between James Strachan and Graham Glass in today's post J2EE vs. NET, Java vs. C#, about the overly complexity of J2EE, which is only a small area on this map. Finally on J2EE vs .Net. I totally agree that we need a simpler way to create server side applications. Glue, Axis and recent AOP discussions are all examples of this happening. I'm glad to have learnt java going along as the language grew: every new API was a little gift to play with. I wonder how people who come out of school today manage to learn all this and what they think about it. I haven't met any young programmers in a while: the people with whom I've worked in the past 3 years are all pretty experienced. This complexity is something that may put java in danger.   6:56:34 PM    comment []

Websphere 5.0 announced: Web Services, a clever mix of open source and proprietary features IBM pushes Web services, e-business in WebSphere upgrade. Version 5.0 to ship Tuesday [InfoWorld: Web Services] Web services features include the Axis 3.0 open-source SOAP parser for improving Web services requests by a factor of four to five, and support of Web Services Invocation Framework, an IBM technology that enables Web services to be deployed over networking protocols such as CORBA IIOP, MQSeries, and JMS. Web services over AOL Instant Messaging also is supported. ... In addition, using Parallel Sysplex technology, multiple mainframes can be linked together as one system. Mainframes also offer a workload management mechanism for managing service-level agreements. IBM is really good at leveraging the Open Source: they involve some of their top engineers, like Sam Ruby in the Apache community, then they really leverage that by integrating the latest and greatest of the Open Source, like Axis; then they add some value added proprietary software that  is necessary to industrial strength sites, like WSIF. And some proprietary soft that runs only on their proprietary hardware, so that if you really want some advanced features you have to buy their hardware. Clever. The good scalable WS stack will be useful for the Grid computing area: Websphere will be their vehicle of choice to implement the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)   Other functions of WebSphere 5.0 include HTTP clustering for sharing workloads between multiple application servers, and servlet-level clustering for managing the link between the Web and application servers. I need to look at what their docs to see what this means exactly. I thought they already had that in Websphere 4.01. BEA had these features since Weblogic 6.1 ! 6:42:08 PM    comment []