Archive for September, 2008
Apple of my eye?
Having just signed up to collaborate on JDK7, it looks as though there’s about zero chance of this happening on a Mac OSX. Grrrr….! Having done some further reading, it seems like this might be old news to some people – I’ve only really started to cut code on my Mac recently – and I do vaguely remember the storm in the news when Leopard was released, so there’s obviously been a lot of frustration within the Java development community at Apple’s latency on JDK updates… Now that we are a year down the line however, is anyone any the wiser as to why Apple are not listening?
To GPL or not…
As the following post describes in more detail, I have created and released under the GPL a versioning framework for database release patching. This has been tested and used in an Agile environment with multiple users throughout all stages of the development lifecycle. Please feel free to download and use it within your project, or comment on any improvements you think could be made.
I thought it worth explaining the reason why I have released it under the Ordinary GPL and not the Lesser version. Firstly, I doubt this framework is ever likely to appear as part of a software release bundle – it’s more likely to be used to support the software development process and releases themselves, as opposed to actually being part of an application. And secondly, I would rather this were not used for direct commercial gain but to give users of freeware a benefit over commercial applications or software houses. There’s a very good explanation of the pros and cons on the GNU site.
Architect Responsibilities
Whilst trying to identify some of the gaps in my own experience, I stumbled across coding the architecture.
It has some very useful articles on software architects and what they should be doing, as well as not doing! The most helpful for me personally was an article describing the role profile as I have worked with several architects over the years, and their daily duties varied markedly. As well as self-assessment, I think the published matrix could also be very useful whilst interviewing candidates – the author has attempted to assign a degree of responsibility to each aspect. For me, it’s not always cut and dried exactly who is contributing what to a particular project, be it a senior developer or an architect – it depends very much upon an individual’s desire to contribute as well as their particular skill-set.
In general, I was very impressed with the tone of coding the architecture. It is very hands-on and pragmatic in it’s approach, and dispenses with most of the fluff you sometimes hear from senior guys who haven’t got their hands dirty in a while. From my own experience and the way I have tried to build my own career, I’m of the firm belief that an architect who loses touch with the code base is asking for a fall…
Browser wars?
I have been interested in “the cloud” for a while, having recently employed Amazon S3’s services to great effect, as well as read a little about Amazon’s EC2 and Apache’s Hadoop. So I have been following the browser wars and Google’s Chrome entry to the market and all the industry commentary with interest.
What has this to do with cloud computing? Well, if the current trend for ‘Software as a service’ really delivers, then which browser you are using is going to be much more important than it currently is – the really interesting part of this for me as a developer is that Google appear to have made each tab run as a separate process. But re-engineering the tab processes is something existing market players could resolve with their own browsers should the need arise – with some difficulty, yes, but definitely within the realms of possibility for gifted software engineering teams.
Initial reports on Chrome don’t seem all that favourable, and it really doesn’t appear to contain the ‘killer app‘ which might make those outside the technology industry adopt it. I would wager that Google have a very valid reason for bringing a new browser to the market, and I can’t believe that making the JavaScript engine 10% faster is what it’s really all about. But at the end of the day, Chrome is totally dependant on whichever OS it’s being run on and suggestions that Google is targeting Windows as opposed to IE are way wide of the mark for the moment.
With thanks to El Reg, who made me reconsider my initial post.