Joe Winchester

Web 3.0 - The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum When the phrase Web 2.0 came out a number of people were sceptical about what it actually means. Being objective, it’s a collection of disparate technologies that make web sites more usable. Everyone wants their user interfa... (more)

Some of the words I dread most in a meeting are: "What if ?" They're fine in the present tense of "What if a user tries this option?" or "What if the database read fails mid flight?", but as soon as the future tense is introduced I begin to worry. "What if the database and middle... (more)

When someone in a corporate boardroom decides what their IT strategy is going to be, it isn't based on what language or software architecture they will use, but on how a system can provide value to their business. Very few organizations buy their hardware and OS first, and then t... (more)

Sexy Clients and Programatic Oaths Recently I was called in at the last minute to help out with a sales opportunity.  The team had been working hard on a proposal for many months, during which they’d built a large working prototype system that talked to the customer’s... (more)

In Java's early years, the language received a lot of flak from its opponents over performance. Java turns its .class file bytecodes into machine instructions (MI) at runtime, something that costs cycles and is slower than a fully compiled language that creates the MI as part of ... (more)

I have just finished reviewing the book Open Source Development Tools for Java, which provides excellent coverage of such topics as log4J, CVS, Ant, and JUnit. There is a chapter on UML tools though in which the author almost apologizes for the lack of good open source design too... (more)

One way in which technology is adopted is when an existing process is automated and made more efficient, cheaper, or reliable. Another is when a technique or innovation is applied to an existing process to drastically alter the way it occurs. The disadvantage of the latter is tha... (more)

Is the AJAX Bullet Coated in Fool’s Silver? Ajax is an odd beast, because it gives a very rich user experience when compared to a traditional web page (Yakov writes wonderfully about this at http://java.sys-con.com/read/163232.htm), however apart from that it’s hard t... (more)

A programming API represents a documented contract between a function that provides some kind of computing service and those who wish to use it. In Java, once an API is used there is a physical contract between the two that the compiler and JVM enforce. If at some point in the fu... (more)

Joe Winchester's Java Blog: No More J and No More 2 - Lament We Shall - What Can We Do? First, we're dropping the "2" from the full edition names. They are now: -- Java Platform, Standard Edition -- Java Platform, Enterprise Edition -- Java Platform, Micro Edition Rumors of ... (more)

Ask most people on the street what Java is and they might tell you it's an Indonesian island. If you happen to bump into some programmers, they'll probably tell you it's a language that reads like C++ but has garbage collection and a virtual machine to make it portable. The conne... (more)

The world's first office computer, known as LEO, was created in the 1950s by Lyons, the British teashop giant. Its aim was to replace the thousands of clerks who did the billing, invoicing, and stocktaking, and also tracked the supply and demand of sticky buns and cups of tea tha... (more)

At a presentation a number of years ago given by Josh Bloch he made a comment that Java as a language hit the "sweet spot" of programming. His metaphor was based around the fact that the language was straightforward to learn and that rather than containing many esoteric coding co... (more)

Open source and J2SE, living together in perfect harmony Side by side on my computer keyboard, Oh yeah, why can't we? Java has been the springboard for some of the most successful open source projects today including JBoss, NetBeans, and Eclipse. Several folks though have felt the... (more)

London, the capital of my home country England, has a beautiful gothic style lifting bridge built by the Victorians in 1894 that magnificently spans the river Thames. It allows tall ships to access the river upstream by lifting its center sections, which for the first 82 years of... (more)

I witnessed a recent BOF conversation in which the general feeling was that the browser GUI and its accompanying plethora of back-end frameworks had let people down by delivering a poor return on investment and a weak user-interface experience. The Revenge of the Server To predi... (more)

Tim'O Reilly, the eponymous publisher, kicked off EclipseCon 2005 in Burlinghame earlier this year with an excellent presentation titled "Open source business models and design patterns." As well as documenting various failures and successes in the computing world, one message th... (more)

At a recent presentation given by a software engineer from a very large automotive company, I gleaned some remarkable facts:for a particular car model where the basic price goes up as the livery becomes lusher and the initials on the trunk longer, half of the increase in value c... (more)

Go fast, it runs too slow, you've got to make the number show. Diddle de bop, da la de doop, sitting around and feeling groovy. Speed Is as Speed Does Many moons ago I was working on a project that had to be sped up and we had the benefit of a very experienced consultant to help u... (more)

Earthdate: October 15, 1997, and the Cassini spacecraft is launched. Mission: to boldly go and explore the planet Saturn. Saturn is about 10 times farther away from the Sun than the Earth, and to get there required two orbits of the inner solar system, receiving gravitational ki... (more)