Greg Luck writes his impressions of OSCON 2005, in Portland, Oregon, USA.

At OSCON 2005 there was a lot of interest in Ruby. Ruby is the hot new? language popularised by Rails. Rails is derived from/inspired by Basecamp.

What was more surpising to me, as a Java developer, was the way Java has come in from the cold. There were lots and lots of Java sessions. The daily keynotes discussed Java. Last year there was little Java and the year before that none. Two open source Java stacks, gcj/classpath and Apache Harmony had sessions and generated a lot of excitement. The Apache Geronimo guys announced Geronimo M4 which passes the J2EE 1.4 TCK, and is open source. Java seems to be front and centre. In many other sessions constant comparisons were made with Java. Java is the reference language…

Read Greg’s complete report:
Greg Luck’s WebLog: OSCON2005: Ruby is hot, Java is cool, C# is neither

Still have holliday? Well then, book a flight and attend the Copyfight festival / convention. It’s in Barcelona, Spain 15/16/17 July 2005. So hurry hurry!!

p.s.: I will sadly not attend, since I have postponed hollidays for the not-so-near future.

COPYFIGHT

I’m currently reading Joel’s latest book, so obviously this had to be posted promptly

Doctor O writes “Joel Spolsky (of joelonsoftware
fame) has some good points and fun with numbers on the quality of programmers and whether it is more profitable to go with cheap or good programmers. His point is that a good programmer will simply create code of a quality that average programmers never can create. An interesting read.”

Slashdot | Hiring Good Programmers Matters

The Mozilla Foundation has announced the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary that will continue the development, distribution and marketing of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation will be a taxable entity (that is, a for-profit rather than a non-profit) but the Foundation is eager to emphasise that it will pursue the same public benefit goals as the Foundation itself and will not be driven purely by revenue goals.

The change will not affect the day-to-day development of Mozilla, with the current system of module owners, drivers, reviewers and super-reviewers staying in place. End-users are unlikely to notice any difference either, though the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation will eventually have separate websites. At the moment, only Firefox and Thunderbird will be developed under the auspices of the Mozilla Corporation; other projects, such as Camino and SeaMonkey, will continue to be overseen by the Mozilla Foundation…

Full story:
Mozilla Foundation Announces Creation of Mozilla Corporation - MozillaZine Talkback

Mozilla Foundation Reorganization [RSS]

IBM releases XML toolkit for Java providing native XML features to the Java EE 1.4.

IBM XML Enhancements for Java, part of their Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK), has released a tool for providing language extensions to J2EE 1.4 to support XML, XML Schema, and XPath in Java.

This is unique because it uses a Java language-based approach to developing XML applications. Through integration of Java and XML, the extensions simplify the development of XML-based applications and enable developers to reuse existing Java libraries when developing XML code.

Integration with XML at the language level is a feature supported by Groovy, and currently being debated by Java heavyweigts for inclusion in Dolphin. (JSE 7)

XML Enhancements for Java 1.1 released