I am deeply saddened to hear that John Vlissides passed away during thanksgiving after a long battle with an illness (see here and here). I had the pleasure and good fortune of meeting him once and only once at OOPSLA a couple of years ago. I now recall how I was struck by his modesty and friendliness. He was a great author, contributor and an overall very nice guy. He will greatly missed by the community.
Read anecdotes and memories and even share yours on WikiWikiWeb here (See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JohnVlissides).
GoF Patterns Software
November 28th, 2005
Today, I presented on Sun SOA at our Software Summit attended by Sun and our partner folks. There were lots of comments and feedback on my presentation and there were some pretty good discussions.
A discussion touched upon the topic of SOA and Standards which I blogged about a while ago. On one of the slides, I was trying to address the confusion about SOA and Web Services by saying that SOA != WebServices, but that Web Services was the current popular implementation that seems to be gaining traction with our customers and the industry. And a few slides later I showed a picture (see image map below) to show how we were trying to grasp all the standards (approved, emerging, conflicting and so forth) mapped to different SOA aspects.
I might have confused my dear audience a little (can’t blame them!), because on one hand I was saying that SOA != WebServices, and on the other hand most of the standards I was mapping to different SOA aspects were Web Services related. But the reality is that SOA today is being mostly viewed from a WebServices implementation perspective. What do you think?
PS: On the plus side, it was great to meet the John Clingan and other Sun bloggers in person.
SOA Software Standards WebServices
November 11th, 2005
A picture is worth a thousand words they say. So, without much ado, here it is… having been with Java since the beginning, here is how I feel about it now.
And to justify with some concrete evidence, here is the page count from the Java In A Nutshell book that was one of my most beloved Java books in the last decade. Not anymore, the friggin book is 1252 pages!
- 1st Edition: 460 pages
- 2nd Edition: 628 pages
- 3rd Edition: 720 pages
- 4th Edition: 992 pages
- 5th Edition: 1252 pages
Hell, it should be renamed to “Java in a Coconut Shell”. And I am just talking about core of Java here, not all the other extensions around it. Because there are spawns of Nutshell books like “Java Enterprise in a Nutshell” and what not.
PS: Apologies to those who came here looking for some philosophical/technical discussion about how I really feel about Java.
Java Humor
November 7th, 2005