Netuality

Went with my wife yesterday to see Master & Commander at Hollywood Multiplex, the only cinema multiplex in Bucharest (that is, until June 2004 when they'll finish the one that they're building just 500m away from where I live, which supposedly is a positive thing). It's a great movie, less haunted by the usual clichés and I do recommend it. But that's not the subject.

At the beginning of the movie we had the right to see a nice scrolling text on the screen, proving that RIAA&friends had already thrown some stones in the troubled waters of Romanian (quickly growing !) DVD/DIVX market. “In order to protect author rights, usage of video recording devices in the Multiplex is strictly forbidden. Please note that in case of infringement, your camera will be immediately confiscated.” Well, we are already a little on the abusive side (they COULD retain the camera and give it back to you at the end of the movie, don't they ?). But there's more : “Dear customers, please watch carefully around you. Should you see any video recording device, please report immediately to Multiplex staff.” Now, that's really murky. First, I have paid my ticket and just want to eat that damn popcorn and watch the movie, not spy on my neighbors. Second, it is not my job to assure that the rules are respected in the cinema. It's for the first time I see anything like this. Is delation promoted as common practice by the copyright-protecting agencies or just the Multiplex guys stupidly over-zealous ?

Am I the only one thinking that the new Eclipse workbench look is plain ugly ? Ok for floating toolbars, palette and slimmer sash, but what is with all these rounded corners and smooth slopes ? I want a functional GUI, not a cluttered toy…

While I think that Codehaus is an exceptional provider of open-source software (some of the projects hosted there are really shining), I'm a little horrified by all their Maven-generated sites. It's not because I'm ignorant to Maven usefulness, but BECAUSE I've worked extensively with Maven since the beta7 days (August 2002, if i remember well ?) and gave up in April this year, replacing everything with Ant tasks and customized Python scripts. Painful memories of strange bugs (compatibility issues from a version to another, proxy problems, not being able to create a simple and primitive CVS log, or test suites for one of our projects not executing under Maven due to some obscure, unsolved class loader problems) are haunting me. But, the most frustrating issue on Codehaus is the 'Mavenized' sites – superfluous clicks and a number of pages you have to see again and again just to download the latest version of a certain project … a not so strange resemblance with the horrendous structure of the Jakarta site.

The simplest solution is just ignore the project sites on Codehaus and go directly to the root of the download repository. Only by looking at directories dates, you can guess if a new version was released. And as a small bonus, you'll find there some (still incubating ?) projects that aren't even referenced on the Codehaus main page. There is JMock, which looks like a easier-to-use EasyMock-like library (but it doesn't seem like being up to EasyMock on functionality level). And a nice Spice project, a sort of library of IoC-able components with multi-container support, some of them worth a look (JNDIKit, ThreadPool).

You know what would be really nice ? Being able to subscribe to RSS feeds containing release information a la SourceForge …

Last, week I got to visit Web Services & XML Integration Forum in Paris. It was an interesting day and I’ll probably come back with some more info, but for now I’ll just talk about what really impressed me. There was a nice triagle of expo booths somewhere in the ‘North-East’ area of the Forum, three little companies you might’ve heard about : Microsoft, Sun and Borland.

The difference was striking. Microsoft is by far more prepared for this public event. They weren’t using presentation rooms, but instead conferencing right there in the booth all day long (with a lunch break of course). Although the presentation rooms were at least 4 times larger than the space they prepared (3 benchesx2m apx), I think they’ve got the best coverage at the Forum. They and Adobe, but Adobe was slightly off-topic (PDF is king at Adobe, and for a reason).

Instead of using a classic projector, casting large shadows every time they wanted to point something on the screen, MS people installed a large (plasma, I think) flat-screen in their booth. They were the only ones I saw with wireless microphones, which gave them a lot of freedom to walk, wave hands and hypnotize the audience. But wait, there’s more … The Microsoft guys were talking “agile enterprise and processes” and one of them said once “you can put any backend database here, say MySQL for instance”. No, there is no confusion with “MS SQL”, the guy standing next to me was as stunned as I was. And to complete a superb marketing image, they wear no suits, no ties – everybody was relaxed and smiling. The only glitch was that the latest rage among MS employees seems to be cloning Bill’s haircut. I mean wake up guys, you can cut your hair in differents lenghts an shapes, you know…

Just a few meters away, in the much smaller Borland booth, there was also a plasma display. However, no real presentations showing. Just a loop of images, logos of products and the word SPEED written in large, red letters. Um, ok. After 30 seconds I had to walk, it was incredibly boring.

No crowd was gathered at Sun’s booth, neither. Some LCDs were displaying what looked like a non-interactive Project Rave demo and some screenshots of a Windows’look’alike Linux distribution, their famous Sun Desktop blabla whatever. WHY were they showing this at a Web Services & XML Forum ? But, probably Sun’s intentions were to scare away the visitors so they could watch undisturbed Microsoft presentations. In that case, they succeded extremely well. Plus, their unique positioning gave them a perfect view of the presentations – or was it Microsoft which strategically placed their flat screen in Sun’s direction ? Hmmm, makes you wonder.

Anyway, to conclude, I watched two Microsoft speeches (one about their Web services strategy and one about Biztalk). It was fun, it was interesting, it was well explained. But it was not Java – and I am a Java developer. Should I be – hmm, ashamed or something ? For not watching instead : what, the bored faces of Sun staff ? Or : Jbuilder logo and words in big red letters ? Java has what we call an image problem. Some steps were made (the java.com site for instance) but there’s still a long way to go. It’s a matter of ‘packaging’ and might seem useless and frivolous. But how will Sun impose ‘friendlier’ development tools if the language itself still has a cold, silent, sad, geeky image, competing with .Net platform which has a much “sexier” look ?

In the series of “not so wellknown but useful plugins for Eclipse”, I'd like to introduce to you some code comprehension tools (well, no Juliet for Eclipse yet, but still impressive):

• JQuery, another project from UBC, Computer science department (are these guys insanely cool, or what ?). Now, only if I could grok their query notation, it'd be real nice having some other queries than the examples.
• The Creole project which is basically an Eclipse plugin version of the older SHriMP (Simple Hierarchical Multi-Perspective) and should be downloadable “real soon”. What's really neat about this app is that it's domain-independent and can be used for browsing any information space.

Here is one of SHriMP shots from their site (note the extremely ugly colors, yes it's the famous “research software” skin, worldwide used in order to scare intruders out from software research labs).