Bernie’s Ramblings

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There’s a book over at InfoQ that attempts to bring architects and developers alike up to speed on domain-driven design. I’m in the early stages of the book and might/will/probably write a short review (or rather, form an opinion on the book lol) after reading it. But then again, don’t hold your breath because I’ve been known to abandon projects like this after reading a book (or I’ll just forget ;)).

Excellent write up here - Chet Haase’s Blog: Consumer JRE: Leaner, Meaner Java.

Exciting features:

• Quickstarter: Radically reduce the startup time for
  Java applications and applets.
• Java Kernel: Reduce the time-to-install-and-launch
  when the user needs to install the JRE in order to run an
  application.
• Deployment Toolkit: Enable easy detection and
  installation of the JRE.
• Installer Improvements: Improve the user experience of
  installation.
  Windows Graphics Performance: Enable default graphics
  acceleration for simple and advanced 2D rendering.
• Nimbus Look & Feel : Release a new cross-platform
  look & feel based on Synth.

Seems to bring a whole lot of improvements for JRE users as opposed to developers, but it’s a good thing to Java overall. I can’t believe that the JRE has ballooned up to 12MB over the years. It’s still leaner that the 21MB .NET framework though, and the Java Kernel should bring it down to slightly over 5MB for most Swing applications. Here’s to hoping applets can take off after this ‘fix’.

An unplanned purchase, interest in Palm fueled by thinning patience toward Windows Mobile 5 made it happen. Already loving it. This is the only smartphone that responds to key presses as if it’s a feature phone. Even though I’ve been a long time Palm user, it took me a round trip of using Symbian & Windows Mobile phones to realize how important this was. Even though I had a smartphone all this while, I end up using only its phone features because of it’s terrible speed and horrendous user interface of Windows Mobile. I find Symbian’s UI and speed very much more tolerable. Even WiFi ended up being unused because, well, of a lot of reason. Terrible screen resolution, the browsers suck (again, talking about WM here, S60 devices have lovely browsers), and well, it’s slow (I’m sounding like a broken record here). You guys might think I’m nitpicking here, but trust me, when you need to look at screen redraws for a few second every time you use your phone, it’s a big issue.

I will miss my 6965, at least a while because of its GPS. Garmin Que + a GPS receiver has simply changed how I navigate and I don’t think I’ll go GPS-less every again. Now hunting for GPS solutions for the Centro or an external GPS device.

Ken Saks wrote about a few upcoming features, and I’m liking what I see right now. A few of those - a standardized shutdown/startup API, simpler packaging, simpler async API - I can very much relate to. I still remember having to implement specific application server interfaces simply because there’s no way to have your EJB bean do something on application server startup and shutdown. Then there’s the totally nightmarish packaging when there’s a combination of (EJB) JARs and WARs that shares libraries (do we put them in WEB-INF? Some app server specific lib folder? Where? Argh!). And you’re pretty much screwed if you need to have a singleton like behavior among EJB components.

No doubt, those issues can be worked around, but a spec like EJB is supposed to take care of plumbing stuff like that. Good to see much is still planned after EJB 3.0 has been released.

Hmmm…

Decided. Enough is enough.