Joe Winchester

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, has been kind enough to answer some questions for Java Developer's Journal. Rather than rattle off the usual ones about the name, about why Swing wasn't used, or how much influence IBM still has, Mike has fielded que... (more)

Having attended two conferences in the past three weeks and seen untold presentations, I've come to the conclusion that irrespective of the subject matter, each presenter invariably falls back on the same technique to impress the audience: to rely on the skills of a conjurer or c... (more)

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, has been kind enough to answer some questions for Enterprise Open Source Magazine. Rather than rattle off the usual ones about the name, about why Swing wasn't used, or how much influence IBM still has, Mike has fiel... (more)

In Bernard J. Baar's book "A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness," he describes the brain as having a single conscious area that can be occupied by one thought at a time. The unconscious part of the brain stores memories and experiences and, like the conscious brain, is capable of ... (more)

At the moment there seems to be an extremely unhealthy obsession in software with the concept of architecture. A colleague of mine, a recent graduate, told me he wished to become a software architect. He was drawn to the glamour of being able to come up with grandiose ideas - swe... (more)

The phrase "not invented here," or NIH, when applied to technology, describes a resistance by a group to use a perfectly valid solution to a problem they're encountering because they'd rather build the answer from scratch than adopt something existing that already does the job. A... (more)

At the annual Alan Turing memorial lecture given by Grady Booch in London last month, he chose as his subject, The promise, the limits, and the beauty of software. It was an excellent address in which one of the themes was that for each of the incredible advances that software ha... (more)

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is the GUI toolkit used by Eclipse. The same folks that worked on the Common Widget (CW) library for IBM/Smalltalk developed it, this time for Java. Now, it's maintained as part of the Eclipse Platform project and distributed under an open source... (more)

I am always in awe of people who develop hardware. They're the real engineers of our profession, the ones pushing forward the speeds at which things work, their size, and their connectivity. For example, in 2005 there were more computer chips produced worldwide than grains of ric... (more)

The year 2006 marked the tenth anniversary of the Java language and for me is the most significant in its history. The most important event was the announcement that a GPL version of Java SE will be available sometime in the first half of 2007. If nothing else, all the back and ... (more)

Ted Nelson, inventor of, among other things, hypertext, once lamented that software development today is at the same evolutionary stage film making was at 100 years ago. Back in the 1900s, when the technology of film production was in its earliest stages, the cameraman was the pe... (more)

Abstraction, as defined on dictionary.com, is "considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances." It's a powerful concept that underpins software reuse. When you implement a problem, if, instead of ... (more)

Recently I was able to talk to Tim Cramer, executive director of tools at Sun, about NetBeans. Tim started in engineering doing supercomputer compiler work, moved to more generalized hardware compiler work, and naturally moved to JIT/dynamic compilers in Java during its first few... (more)

The current polemic with Java and Open Source boils down to two important issues: money and power. Money In 1996, Sun created Java and the terms under which it is distributed. Since then, the Java Community Process (JCP) has emerged, allowing companies to participate in shaping ... (more)

Computers can generally be characterized into two types: ones that are designed to have more than one user attached and those intended for a single user. In the beginning almost all computing was done on large multi-user machines, partly due to their expense, which precluded thei... (more)

A lot of the time I find myself writing code to iterate over a Map goes something like this Map map = getMap(); // I'd like to read the keys and values of the maps Iterator keys = map.keySet().iterator(); while(keys.hasNext()){ Object key = keys.next(); Object value = map.get(key); }... (more)

One of the phrases that has always puzzled me is "business logic". It seems to crop up a lot in presentations, articles, sales pitches and so forth. The one I saw it in most recently was a talk about how great web servers are because they keep all of the business logic on the ser... (more)

SPAM, FUD and Rogue Web Services Most dodgy e-mails are fairly easy to spot, and represent the cost of doing business in a world where  human greed combines itself with technology and gullible users. First one today from "Visa services" who'd insisted I ente... (more)

Joe Winchester's Java Blog: Rich Client, Poor Client, Cool Client, AJAX Asynchronous Java Script and XML, shortened to Ajax , is the flared technology de-jour.  Like fashion, cooking, or music it’s a mix of stuff that’s old, borrowed, and not that new.  It does exactly... (more)

Back in 1996, Java was originally hailed as a way of making the Web more appealing through applets, and, with its "write one, run anywhere" philosophy, as the holy grail for desktop apps that would be truly cross platform. The truth is that both were oversold at the time. With th... (more)