RAP seems to be moving along, really need to check out the architecture, I’ve been wondering for a while how performant it is. A nice Web 2.0 -ish demo look n’ feel goes a long way though.

Good design / usability is good design / usability, and poor design / usability is poor design / usability. So it has always been and so it shall always be. Anyone building RIAs (cough) should know this. Products like Flex make the eye candy easy. Only humanoids can produce usable designs, or not. I do like Flex though, very accessible. Just a pity ActionScript syntax is so annoyingly close to Java that I keep finding myself staring at code wondering why it won’t compile.

Nothing like a Microhoo! Frappe in the morning to cheer me up. Chuckle. I reckon Fivebucks should invent a new lip-smacking drink called Microhoo! Frappe, as they hark from the same corner of the planet, then we could all have a laugh at this whole ridiculous escapade on a regular basis, while parting with our hard earned currency. What has this got to do with Java I hear you ask? Uh, they’re both drinks, right?

I just love this quote from Rod Johnson: “The Entity Bean technology somehow ignored every piece of prior art, with the result that you had two generations of completely failed technology … The cause of object-relational mapping probably lost at least six years because of that, and [it caused] billions of dollars of wasted development.” I recall quiet distinctly the first time I looked at the EJB 1.0 specification and played with an implementation. I remember taking a sharp dislike to the technology and thinking that I would never use it. And I was right, I’ve never once used any EJBs (neither entity nor session beans) in any product or project I’ve worked on. There was always a more suitable and easier to use alternative.

The Eclipse runtime folks are beavering away on Equinox and server side focused tooling. Wayne has more details. I’m looking forward to trying this stuff.

Workday, the On-Demand Enterprise Services provider, is to acquire Cape Clear, read the announcement here. Read more from Annrai, and learn more about Integration On Demand. I’m very excited to be part of the Workday team, software delivered as services is the future, and integrating into and in the cloud is a vital component in realising that future. I’m really looking forward to helping make this happen and making it simple to achieve, enabling more and more enterprises realise the benefits, cost savings and new opportunities that software-as-a-service brings.

I do believe the slow burner is coming out on top, there is now a huge amount of very healthy activity around Groovy and Grails. Some good points at TSS: Groovy and Grails testimonials.

I’m eagerly awaiting my copy of The Big Switch, ordered from Amazon.com as it has not been published in Europe yet (plus with the exchange rate its cheaper anyway). Michael Cote has just started reading it and has some thoughts on the big switch and the Cloud. Mentions ESBs as the gateway, but does not mention Cape Clear (we’re not clients). This is a big focus for us and we’ve had considerable success solving this key issue with Workday and their customers using the Cape Clear ESB. Jeff Kaplan has a good post on the Top Ten Reasons Why On-Demand Services Will Soar in 2008.

I’ve been watching with interest the moves towards a proposal for an Eclipse Runtime project, to focus efforts around Eclipse as a runtime platform, with Equinox/OSGi at its core. OSGi is the Java component specification on which the Eclipse platform is built. In fact, Equinox is the reference implementation for the OSGi R4.1 framework and JSR 291. The other work I’ve been following with interest is the Spring framework’s OSGi integration, namely Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi Service Platforms. The combination of an Eclipse Runtime and Spring as a runtime platform has huge potential, and it is potential that can be realised and exploited today. Apart from the proven dynamic component model and advanced classloading capabilities of OSGi, and the rich development environment that Eclipse provides for it, and the productivity advantages of developing on the platform that is also your runtime, and the Spring framework as a whole, and the wonderful power and simplicity of inversion-of-control and dependency injection, one of the key use cases I keep coming back to when I think about this is hot service re-deployment, being able to update services other components are using without having to bounce the server and without those components missing a beat. In the always-needs-to-be-on, software-as-a-service cloud of the rapidly approaching future, this is a key business operations requirement. I agree with the assertion that the Java market will continue to fragment, but I think a lot of people will head in this direction.

One of my Cape Clear Studio team colleagues works remotely (very remotely, the other side of the world in fact). I installed Jing a few days ago and used it for the first time in anger today, while working out a problem with a new feature. Jing allows you to instantly share screenshots and desktop movie captures. Haven’t tried the movie sharing yet, but the screenshots work great. Its free right now, but clearly they (Techsmith) are going to charge for it in the future. I like it, I might well sign up.