I've decided that it's about time I started blogging again, and what better time than JavaOne 2010?
I've fortunate enough to be able to attend this year, courtesy of my employer , and it's shaping up to be an interesting conference. Some interesting questions I hope to get answers to next week:
- Will Oracle sue the entire universe (just like they are doing with Google) over the use (or not) of Java?
- Will Java 7 ever come out?
- If either of #1 or #2 occurs, will the fact that Sun open-sourced Java into OpenJDK save us all?
In all seriousness though, I'm looking forward to hearing what the future of my favorite language/development platform has in store, and I plan to post it all right here, so stay tuned...
Microsoft has recently announced that Internet Explorer 8 will contain not one, not two, but three different rendering modes: Quirks mode (IE6), Standards mode (IE7), and We'll-Try-Harder TM mode (IE8), from here on referred to as WTH.
IE8's WTH mode is basically what other standards-compliant web browsers, like Opera, Safari, Firefox, and pretty much any other browser that's Not-IE TM , do already, namely render the pages to the best of their ability and stick to the standards as closely as possible.
Rather than follow suit and make IE8 render things like everyone else does, Microsoft has decided to bring us back to the bad old days of browser sniffing, content negotiation, and general suckiness that was the web before browser makers got serious about supporting real standards. To get IE8 to render in WTF mode, you need to include a Microsoft-specific META tag (or equivalent HTTP header) on every page. To make matters worse, we must be living in some sort of twilight-zone inspired alternate reality, because long-time standards advocate site A List Apart has gone over to the darkside and is actively shilling for Microsoft's asinine stance on this.
If you think I'm over-reacting to the problems this may cause, there have been numerous other examples of why this is a Bad Idea .
Instead of adding my two cents about why this is bad, I'm going to take another approach, and suggest a solution: Don't drink the Kool-Aid. Boycott the X-UA-Compatible header Microsoft is pushing, especially if you are concerned about coding to standards. Why? To force Microsoft to abandon WTH mode, make IE8 standards-compliant by default, and stop this ridiculous cause once and for all.
We can do this . By Microsoft's own admission, they are relying on those of us who care about standards compliance to add this tag to our pages; they don't expect older sites to do anything at all. Instead, just keep doing what you're doing -- writing standards-compliant sites. IE's market share is declining, and by the time IE8 ships and is widely deployed, it will likely be even less. Now is the time for standards to reign, not vendor lock-in. Make your voice heard!
There appears to be some hope for Java developers on the Mac platform... it is now possible, thanks to Landon Fuller , to build Java 1.6.0_03 on Mac OS Leopard.
I can confirm that this works, at least for non-GUI code. I successfully compiled and ran a 64-bit VM. 32-bit was more problematic; all attempts at building caused a JVM crash which I was not able to overcome.
Details and benchmarks after the fold.
Added feeds to the website. At some point, I'll add RSS 1.0/2.0 feeds and tag-specific feeds, but for now the only choice is the main feed in Atom format.
Let me know if you run into any problems with the feed.
Recently I have been dealing with the disconnect between Mac OS X and Java 6 , specifically that Java 6 is not available. This is not intended to be yet another diatribe on the evils (or not) of Apple's approach to this. Rather, it has gotten me motivated to work on some tools to make creating cross-platform GUI code in Java a bit easier to manage.
Updated the download manager to query a local version of the Maven repository. This avoids periodic polling of the web server to read metadata, which was causing a lot of unnecessary traffic.
Comment moderation has now been enabled (both manual and through Akismet).
Hopefully this will put a stop to the comment spam. Tip: Post your comments as a logged-in user. This lets them show up right away (although they will still be processed by Akismet after a few minutes).
Update: It looks like I failed to set some database permissions properly, and adding new comments was failing. I thought it seemed a little too quiet around here...
The latest version of the site is now up and running.
The only major change in this version is the new Download page ( update: removed in favor of BinTray ). Download pages are always a pain to write, as the content on them changes fairly often. This version dynamically queries sources on the fly (and caches them) so it shouldn't require any manual updates.
As always, feedback is appreciated.
Just a quick update... Even though I haven't posted anything to the site recently, development has been proceeding along.
Unfortunately, it looks as though the next update to the site is going to be delayed just a little bit longer due to the need for some comment spam handling. I made the mistake of assuming that this site was small enough to allow open posting. Currently, I'm looking at several options:
- Forcing logins to post
- Comment filtering
- Moderation
- Reputation
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.