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With Sun finally announcing that Open Source Java will be here in 2007, ZDNet's Dana Blankenburg asks the relevant question, "Should you care?" He considers Sun's move to be purely defensive in the face of the rising star of .NET.
What do you think? Is Sun's announcement too little too late? Does .NET have the momentum? Weigh in with your thoughts in the comments below.
On Tuesday, July 25th, New Equities is sponsoring an event for .NET developers through the Charlotte chapter of the Enterprise Developers Guild: "Wally McClure presents Ajax". Here's the event info:
| Date: | 7/25/2006 |
| Time: | 6:00 PM |
| Location: | Microsoft Campus |
Join us Tuesday, July 25, at 6 PM on the Microsoft campus for an evening with Wally McClure -- MVP, author, and Tennessee neighbor. Wally is working on a new book and is eager to show us how Ajax has progressed for .NET web developers. In case you've been vacationing on the South Pole without an internet connection, Ajax is the technique of getting information exchanged between the client and the server without a post-back and the usual page flash and redraw.
Wallace B. McClure graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. He continued his education there, receiving a Master’s degree in the same field in late 1991. Since that time, McClure has done consulting and development for such companies as Coca-Cola, Bechtel National, Magnatron, and Lucent Technologies, among others. He is the founder and president of McClure Development. You can find Wally’s blog at weblogs.asp.net/wallym.
We have also added Wally's blog from our Tech Links blogroll in the right column.
Directions to the Microsoft Campus can be found here, as well as on the Enterprise Developers Guild website.
Washington Business Journal has an excellent introduction to Web 2.0 concepts and lingo: "Web two-point, oh?"
Web 2.0 is slowly making its way into the business world. But there is a challenge to widespread use: No one knows exactly what it is. There's no official Web 2.0 program to install. The features have to find their way into everyday use, which they are starting to do.
Implementation of Web 2.0 does not require dramatic action but rather a subtle shift in the way users connect to applications. The subtlety of the changeover can make it more difficult to get buy-in from colleagues and clients, but the upside is that many of the applications are free or cost very little. [snip]
Plenty of tech types claim that Web 2.0 is just the buzzword for all things newly Internet, something that gets used ubiquitously and without any real meaning.
John Dvorak, an editor at PC Magazine, decries Web 2.0 as a bunch of high-tech hooey: "Web 2.0 is the latest moniker in an endless effort to reignite the dot-com mania of the late 1990s," he wrote in a March 2006 column.
Dvorak says: If you can get past the buzzwords and conferences, the real essence of Web 2.0 is making the do-it-yourself nature of the Internet more efficient. It's about self-service.
If jargon such as "Ajax", "tagging", "wikis" and "social bookmarking" seems a bit strange, this is a good primer. If you are already fully Web 2.0 buzzword-compliant, but are interested in going deeper, check out this widely-linked article by software maven Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software".
(Hat tip: Tiffany Bridge)
Mating cats and dogs alert: ZDNet's David Berlind has an interesting report on a new partnership announced by Mainsoft and Azul Systems that allows .NET apps to run in a J2EE environment at the speed of accelerated Java. How? By translating .NET source into Java bytecode and running it on an a dedicated network attached processor:
Whereas the old-school (I can't believe I'm calling it old school) XML integration basically puts a layer of XML-based abstraction between the two normally incompatible code-bases, the new school a la Mainsoft and Azul's partnership takes .NET source code, turns it into Java bytecode (that's Mainsoft's job) and then runs that code on Azul's network attached processor. The result, say the two men, isn't just a new form of Java/.NET integration, it also is a way of taking .NET applications that still run out of gas after being put on the most powerful systems, and squeezing even more peformance out of them.
If you're in either the .NET or Java/J2EE camp and interested in the possibilities of this sort of integration, ZDNet includes a podcast of an interview with Mainsoft's Sales and Service VP Ron Johnsen and Azul's Chief Marketing Officer Shahin Khan. The podcast is also playable directly as an MP3.
