Today, thanks to this article, I saw a very telling diagram giving an overview of the “Mozilla Platform”. Before you read on, I encourage you to study the diagram for a few moments.
I was reading this article from David Herron today. It looks back on an article from a decade ago talking about how Java was predicted to be a technology that “doesn’t stand a chance.”
David suggests that, “Looking at that 10 years later I can only think the rumors of Java’s death are greatly exaggerated.” I’m not so sure about that. Java did in fact die. It died quite a horrible death. That death occurred in the consumer-grade desktop application market.
Earlier today I witnessed the wasteful nature of pointless JavaScript effects first-hand at the Blogger main page. The effect in question is visible under the “BLOGS UPDATED AT …” text immediately under the Blogger logo. In short, the effect involves the title of a recently-updated blog fading away every second or so, to be replaced with the title of another blog. So as can clearly be seen, it’s not essential in any way. It’s completely cosmetic, although it doesn’t even look particularly good.
In recent discussion at Slashdot about “refocusing” the development of Linux, it was suggested that the various distributions should standardize on a common software package installation and management system. If that were ever to happen, which is quite unlikely, then pkgsrc would probably be the best option.
One computing myth we hear quite often is that of Microsoft Windows offering a “common UI”. That is, one toolkit or framework that is used by all applications, thus giving an experience that is well-integrated and shared. But anyone who has used Windows recently should know that this is clearly not the case.
A colleague forwarded me the link to these sed, ed and awk reference sheets. One great thing about them is that they’re available in text form, so they’re easily viewable on UNIX systems where X hasn’t be installed, or otherwise isn’t running.
A short while back I wrote about how Scala’s interoperability with Java is not necessarily a good thing. One of my main suggestions was the avoidance of Java-based class libraries. Although they may fit well with the Java way of doing things, they likely won’t be a good fit when it comes to making the best use possible of the language features that Scala offers.
Jomo Fisher wrote recently, suggesting that symmetric multicore processors are a “dead end”. In turn, an architecture involving one fast processor and many “slave” processors is suggested. But this really isn’t a novel idea by any means. The Cell microprocessor, developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, is quite similar in many ways. Not only that, but it already exists, and is being used commercially (including the PlayStation 3 console).
Today I read this prediction that mobile phone game developers will start to create JavaScript-based games, rather than using J2ME. This is partially due to the iPhone, but also because of Motorola’s MOTOMAGX.
I have to say, this is quite unfortunate. JavaScript-based games running in the Web browser have proven, in my experience, to be quite terrible. This is something that I have written about recently. First was my terrible experience trying to play Brickslayer, a JavaScript-based Breakout clone. The I had yet another pathetic experience playing a JavaScript and SVG-based Space Invaders clone.
Luke Plant has been working on a Haskell-based blogging application for a while now, and describing his progress. I was dismayed to read today that he’s giving up!
One of his main complaints was with regards to the poor state of the available Haskell database interfacing libraries. He does mention Takusen, which a colleague of mine has been using for a personal project of his own. But Takusen doesn’t appear useful to Luke, due to a lack of a proper MySQL backend.
