Elliotte Rusty Harold prognosticates what he thinks is in store for XML.
The wheels of progress turn slowly, but turn they do. The crystal ball might be a little hazy, but the outline of XML’s future is becoming clear. The exact time line is a tad uncertain, but where XML is going isn’t. XML’s future lies with the Web, and more specifically with Web publishing.

It seems a little funny to have to say that. After all, isn’t publishing what the Web is about? The Web was designed first and foremost as a mechanism to publish information. What else can it do? Quite a lot. The last three years have seen an explosion of interest in Web applications that go far beyond traditional Web sites. Word processors, spreadsheets, games, diagramming tools, and more are all migrating into the browser. This trend will only accelerate in the coming year as local storage in Web browsers makes it increasingly possible to work offline. But XML is still firmly grounded in Web 1.0 publishing, and that’s still very important.

Read the full article:

• The future of XML

This article, the first in a two-part series, describes the Mobile 3D Graphics API (JSR 184). The author introduces you to 3D programming for Javaâ„¢ mobile devices and shows how you can work with lights, cameras, and materials.

Playing games on mobile devices is a fun pastime. Up until now, hardware performance has favored classic game concepts that use addictive game play, but simple graphics. Today, Tetris and Pac-Man are increasingly complemented by two-dimensional action games with extensive graphics. Consequently, the next step is to move toward 3D graphics. Sony’s PlayStation Portable shows the graphics power you can put into a mobile device. Although the average mobile phone is technologically behind this specialized game machine, you can see where the market is heading. The Mobile 3D Graphics API (M3G for short), defined in Java Specification Request (JSR) 184, is an industry effort to create a standard 3D API for mobile devices that support Java programming.

M3G’s API can be divided roughly into two parts: immediate and retained mode. In immediate mode, you render individual 3D objects. In retained mode, you define and display an entire world of 3D objects, including information on their appearance. You can imagine immediate mode as the low-level access to 3D functions, and retained mode as a more abstract, but also more comfortable, way of displaying 3D graphics. In this article, I’ll explain the immediate mode APIs. The second part of this series shows how to use retained mode.

Article: 3D graphics for Java mobile devices, Part 1: M3G’s immediate mode

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

Several early grid computing projects were focused on the idea of harvesting unused cycles from compute resources and providing this aggregated computing power for work that comprised lots of tasks — from hundreds to millions — that could be executed individually.

Today, there are several commercial and open source grid computing software packages that support this form of distributed computing on the desktop or other nondedicated computing resources. In this article, we will take a look at a popular commercial software package designed to help execute this function: the United Devices Grid MP platform.

Grid MP has several interesting and unique features, including:

* Support for heterogeneous desktops/nodes
* Nonintrusive client execution
* Tolerance to failures of desktop resources

We will provide an overview of the Grid MP features designed for harvesting idle cycles from nondedicated resources, and we’ll describe the types of applications that can effectively use the type of “desktop grid” we’re discussing.

Read the full article:
* Grid in action: Harvesting and reusing idle compute cycles

Also see:
* BOINC (SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, ClimatePrediction.net, LHC@Home, Predictor@Home, Cell Computing (JP))
* Team GiGA Productions Computing Group

* Slashdot | Largest Privately Owned Supercomputer

about the Cell Processor programming model under Linux, and the Linux kernel in the first Cell Processor-based workstation computer, which premieres at Linuxtag 2005.”

* Slashdot | Linux For Cell Processor Workstation

Slashdot | Effort to Create Virtual Brain Begins