Now I really don’t get this project. At first glance, JAM seems to provide some of the Maven functionality in a nice, structured, way using Ant. The part I don’t grok is that JAM depends on Maven. Huh?
Since I am sure to be missing something and am very interested in build tools, please comment if anyone can do a good job of explaining where JAM fits.
I should now say something witty about Kool-Aid here…
I’m in the process of reading the Trails tutorial by this guy (Trails’ creator) and I am very enthused about the idea: I’ve always felt that code-generation is being overly used in J2EE development. I believe, as do others, that if you can generate it, you should be able to handle it at runtime. (There are exceptions to this rule, of course.) Java has an exceptional reflection API, we should use it. Also, Spring allows much of the work to be done via AOP. But I’m rambling a little here.
The major exception to my dislike of code generation has always been page templates. These are just dumb pieces of text, so you either need to build them by hand or generate them. I’ve never really understood what Tapestry was about until I started reading about Trails and realized that it was allowing us to push object oriented design all the way into the template layer of our applications.
They features of Trails, like allowing us to override the presentation of a specific field without building a template for the entire form and lack of code generation, are really exciting and will provide some great ideas for my current side project.
Those familiar with Plone development will see some similarities here.
A.
In a previous post, I discussed the important of integrated VoIP, IM and presence.
[Adam Sherman] misses one key player in the presence space. Skype. It may be justified as he describes the benefits of IM, VoIP and Presence using SIP and SIMPLE, two elements that SKYPE lacks.
I guess I better come out and say it: Skype scares me. There.
Skype has a solid product, backed by a solid service and is giving it away for free. They intend to charge for value-added services like calling the PSTN. The client works through all kinds of weird network configurations as is fully cross-platform. It has most (all?) of the requisite presence functionality.
So why am I scared? Two reasons: central control and standards.
If Skype takes off and corners a piece of the market, users will be dependent on a central, proprietary, system. As I mentioned previously, I believe that this is a critical flaw and that we must adopt standards that are distributed in nature. The proof of this is in SMTP, which is extremely reliable and needs no central authority (Other than the root DNS system.) Which brings me to my second concern…
Skype uses no standards. Admittedly, this is probably a major reason for its success. While SIP struggles to become a fully functional protocol by extending with SIMPLE, we deal with poor audio codecs and terrible user agent implementations. Skype doesn’t have to worry about this. But these protocols will mature and implementations will be tuned. We will then, hopefully, live in a wonderfully interconnected world where the limitations of the long-forgotten public switched telephone network will be a thing of the past.
Until then though, I hope Skype does well enough to raise the profile of VoIP but not so well that it gets us into a technological dead-end.
Cheers.
Update: I think that XTen understands where future communications should look like. Erik Lagerway posted about the IETF going into P2P VoIP land. I really want to try out eyeBeam!
I try hard not to link blog, but this post on Cameron Purdy’s blog, /dev/null, is great. I’ll save you the anxiety:
And a drum roll, please ..
1 – At the 2005 TSS Symposium, Rod Johnson will not be able to resist saying the word “Spring.” Yup, it’s like trying not to think of pink elephants — impossible once you get that in your head. Spring, spring, spring, spring. La tee dah, spring spring spring. Take that, Linda. Spring-diddy-spring spring. Spring.
grin
Some time ago, I posted a short entry on Maven vs Ant. Since then, I have continued to use Ant while periodically taking yet another look at Maven.
This week, I came across this post on Otaku talking about keeping your Ant builds maintainable using <import> and <macrodef>. Greater maintainability seems to be one of the reasons Maven was created: allowing you to avoid creating build target spaghetti by describing the project and applying standard goals. These new Ant features can provide this maintainability, while keeping all the flexibility we’ve grown accustomed to.
Cedric’s post then led me to this comment thread on techno.blog(“Dion”) where a good discussion is taking place.
Finally, I can no longer remember how I got there, but dependancy management tools for Ant came up. TSS has an article on Savant, part of Inversoft‘s Verge project and a post on Mallim Ink pointed me to Jayasoft’s Ivy project. Both projects look very interesting; I think I will try out Ivy shortly.
Great work guys, the best blog application just got better!
Since WordPress 1.5 was released yesterday, I upgraded this morning. As you can see, I’m using the default, Kubrick-based, theme; with just my photo added. I’d like to change the blue to a green, but my understanding of layers in The Gimp isn’t up to it yet.
I just read Debian on Soekris HOWTO and was wondering if there are any additional steps one should take to ensure proper functioning of a Debian system running from a CompactFlash card. For example, would logging and other hammering reduce the life of the card in any significant fashion? Is it worth the hassle of going to a read-only root filesystem on the card?