In the mid nineties, IT job market was good. PowerBuilder or Visual Basic plus SQL would get you employed in no time. Good old client/server days. Two programming languages was all you need. When multi-tier architecture became hot and J2EE came into picture, all of a sudden you'd have to learn a lot more languages and technologies, for example, Java, SQL, HTML, JavaScript, XML, JSP, EJB, JMS etc. Surprisingly,the young generation doesn't mind being polyglot programmers as long as the set does not include SQL. The popularity of this language is comparable with the popularity of Latin and Esperanto in the real world. Why?

This new electronic book by Yakov Fain is available for free download. This book covers career-related issued that enterprise software developers deal with on a daily basis. In which ways are some people a little 'better' than others? Why people fail job interviews? Will IT outsourcing hurt your career? How often should you change employers? Comparing income of employees and contractors, and more.

The open source Mobile & Embedded Community is a gathering place where developers can collaborate, innovate, and drive the evolution of the Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME). Launched in November 2006, more than 500 active members are participating in more than 80 projects, most of them created by the community's members.

That leaves Java developers in a bad position. Java developers love the clean Unix-based Mac OS X environment for development. But we have been suffering with an unstable developer-only d ont-run-this-in-productio n release of Java 6 for the past year. Mac OS X is now the getto for Java 6. I love Apple and Java. I wish Sun would do more to get Java on iPhone and Java 6 on Mac OS X.

Vacations are meant for reading. This time I've picked the book 'Eric Sink on the Business of Software'. This blog is not a review of this good book, but rather my own thoughts and comments inspired by reading about running a small company that develops software. These comments are based on my own experience in this field.

While delivering a talk on SOA I've asked the audience the following question, 'What do you think is the driving force for implementing any technology or architecture in a decent size Enterprise?' The answers were typical: better code re-usability, accessibility? But I was looking for a different answer that has nothing to with technical merits of any technology...

In the perfect world, you can find local resources for your project. But in the USA selecting programming as a profession is not as appealing as it used to be 10 years ago, and you may have to hire an offshore team. This is a list of tips for a rookie development manager that has to work with the offshore software developers.

Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width' was the title of a British TV sitcom in the late 60's (yes, I really am that old), which has nothing to do with Java software development. Or does it? The more I talk to people about the issue of Java software quality, the more I am reminded of the name of that seemingly ridiculous TV show. It seems to me that however much we talk about the need for quality in software development, it's an issue that takes a backseat to the 'width' - by which I mean the number of feature requests that get crammed into our development projects.

The Java metropolis consists of three boroughs - the Server Side (sounds like an Upper East Side), Mobile, and UI. The first two areas seem to be fine. Working with Java Swing for desktop applications is not fun, but if you have enough time and money you can create solid enterprise applications. But this is not the case when it comes to Java applets, or in other words Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

When building the right project team to complete a custom solution there are many forces at work. These include business drivers, technical drivers, and organizational and political motivations. Regardless of the business or organization there are three basic rules to follow in building a team to deliver a technical solution. The first is to involve the business before the team is even assembled. Each organization has certain technology standards that govern specific tools and products that can be used on a given project.

Apache James is a full-featured SMTP, POP3, and NNTP server built using 100% Java and more importantly it's been designed from the ground up to be a mail application platform<

One of the 2006 Soccer World Cup highlights must surely be the Trinidad and Tobago versus Sweden game. The underdogs Trinidad and Tobago managed to push off the onslaught from the Swedish team. The game ended 0-0, which was for the people of Trinidad and Tobago a divine experience - their teams very first World Cup point!

In a previous wave of this study conducted in April 2006 by independent research company NPD Group Research, Flash Player 8 was at 69% penetration six months after its release, a considerable jump in the numbers from Flash Player 5 and 6, which were at 53% penetration during the same point in their cycles. The June 2006 study indicates that Flash Player 8 reached 86% penetration, just nine months after release - further indication that the demand for the latest versions of Flash Player is growing year over year.

For the third week in a row, IBM has spent in the neighborhood of a billion dollars on software acquisitions. This time it's the upscale neighborhood of $1.3BN cash, which is what it intends to lay out for Internet Security Systems (ISS) in the name of IBM Global Services.

Today's topic is how to lead offshore programmers. To make this discussion a bit more interesting, let's go back in time into the first half of the 19th century.

In answer to the question 'Where are the high-level Open Source design tools for Java?' I believe that they're emerging from efforts at Eclipse.org. These efforts began with the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) in 2002, and have been building momentum ever since, with the addition of the UML2 project, the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF), the Generative Modeling Tools (GMT) Project, and Model Driven Data Integration (MDDl). More recently, with the creation of the new top-level Eclipse Modeling Project (http:// www.eclipse.org/modeling) to act as a home and focal point for all of these modeling related technologies, there is clearly an ever-growing focus in this area. So what does it all mean and what's behind the acronyms?

You're six-feet, 190 pounds and can type System.out.println faster than most people can say AJAX. You're a person who dreams about the Milwaukee Brewers winning the World Series and the correct data structure to be used when talking about a baseball player. You've spent five years of your life writing Java code and leading Java development teams. You consider yourself an expert in Swing, Struts, XML, and XSL-FO and feel comfortable talking about any other buzzword in the Java world such as JSF, Portal, and AJAX. You've had experience as development lead on a team with anywhere from three to seven people where Java applications were rolled into production well within the scheduled deadline. Now you have received a management position on an internal Java development team. Where do you start? What things do you look at from day one? What's your role going to be as a manager? What would you like to see happen within your team? Do you want to keep your technical skills? How do you rate your employees at the end of the year?

I bet you thought agile development was supposed to be easier than a traditional, prescriptive process! That I would wax evangelical that agile development is the answer to everything, and it simplifies your life. Yeah, just like UML and model-driven architecture and XML and SOA and Web services are silver bullets. Uh-huh, r-i-g-h-t.

What comes after Google? Where will the Web, the Internet, the whole nexus of telecommunications, i-Technology, and the quest for a better world, take us?

'We're now making serious progress on open sourcing Java,' writes Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, 'while focusing the debate on what matters most: not access to lines of code (that's already widely available), but ensuring compatibility.' Schwartz was writing in his 'Jonathan's Blog' - which not surprisingly celebrated the fact that a record number of people attended JavaOne this year, making it what he carefully termed 'the world's largest free software conference.'

Time is a brutal enemy of youth and exuberance. Time makes cynics of us all. Time is the universal truth serum that reveals all authenticity. Time will tell, but the announcement yesterday by Google may change the faces of AJAX development, strike that, Google's announcement may change web development forever more. This cynic heard an announcement yesterday that changed his viewpoint and beliefs on the future of web development.

At the annual JavaOne event that he calls the 'epicenter' of his mission to remake Sun's business by making the company deeply relevant to developers, CEO Jonathan Schwartz yesterday wooed attendees with a keynote designed to underline how much Sun views as a collective endeavor the building out of new network applications and the targeting of the 1BN+ high-capability cell phones that will ship over the next year.

We have measured performance information to distinguish the differences between the Windows and Linux platforms. Given comparable hardware we found the performance differences almost trivial. When the server was pressed to capacity, our Windows installation was forced to turn away some traffic with minimal alteration in service performance, while our Linux installation elected to service nearly all the connections at the cost of introducing latency.

Some weeks in any industry seem longer than others; as far as i-Technology industry goes, the week just ended seemed to last about a month. How else is one to explain how there can possibly have been room for all that happened, from the return to center-stage of Larry Ellison on the one hand and Nokia on the other, to the rumored separation of Scott McNealy - by his own BoD - from the helm of the good ship Sun Micro? And sixteen other major things besides...

The marketplace tells you that 'middleware is everywhere' when all along it should wise up and recognize that 'middleware is dead.' Because that's the new reality of enterprise computing today, according to Sun's software czar Jonathan Schwartz.

'Because of its prominence,' writes Bryan Taylor, 'Java gets a lot of attention and with it much criticism, some of it valid.' What many may not realize, Taylor notes, is that some big breakthroughs have arrived and that the Java development landscape is solving important problems. In this column he takes a view of where Java is going to go in the next year or two as these ideas gain traction.

The requirements for different user-facing applications frequently say something like: 'User has to see/read/be shown only funds/records/itiner aries/policies he or she is entitled to.' Permissions in these cases usually depend on multiple factors related to the user profile (job role, locale, etc.), to the protected data (data origin, storage, approval status, etc.), or to both. This represents the fine granular entitlement requirements that are rarely supported by commercial systems.

Annotation is a new Java language feature introduced in JDK 5.0. It has quickly become one of the most popular, and yet most controversial, language feature in core Java. New Java frameworks, such as EJB 3.0 and Hibernate 3.0, make extensive use of annotations to eliminate the excessive XML configuration files (a.k.a. the 'XML hell' in Java EE). Those annotations significantly reduce the amount of code and configuration data, and simplify the overall architecture, making application development easier. At the same time, enterprise architecture purists are complaining that annotations corrupt the separation between code and configuration, reduce the overall level of abstraction, and create more coupling between code and external frameworks.

'In a week 2005 will become history,' writes Yakov Fain, 'and I tried to visualize what will have changed in software development a year from now.'

Ever hear the phrase 'the interface IS the system?' It implies that what people perceive a software system to be is largely determined by how the system looks and how they rate their experiences interacting with it. Is the system aesthetically pleasing? Were simple operations simple and were complex commands easy? Was information organized logically? Was the system well behaved and helpful with tips, prompts, and feedback?

In this month's article I continue my discussion of a list-based UI framework that I started last month ('ArrayListModel,' [JDJ, Vol. 10, issue 10]). The primary concept behind this idea is a data model that contains elements that describe parts of an application's user interface. Through a single model, various aspects of the user interface can be controlled, manipulated, and visually synchronized. There is a lot of interesting code that accompanies this article, so I encourage you to download it and check it out. Let's get started.

The single thing that Adam Kolawa in 2004 (prophetically) said he'd like to change about Java's history is its separation from Microsoft. 'I think it is a shame that the technologies from both sides cannot be used together,' he says, in an exclusive interview with JDJ. 'Java seemed to be the perfect technology to bring Microsoft into the world of coexistence, and I think this opportunity got lost.'

As per Wikipedia, 'an arranged marriage is a marriage in which the marital partners are chosen by others based on considerations other than the pre-existing mutual attraction of the partners.'

The most important impact Ruby/RoR will have on Java, according to JDJ editorial board member Michael Yuan, is to drive the innovation in Java EE. 'Much the same way C# drives the Java 1.5 innovation. We are already seeing this happening,' Yuan explains.

'Oracle's a great place, a great opportunity, but they have a fantastic CEO and they're likely to have that CEO for a long time. It was not only a case that he was not leaving, but I was not the obvious heir apparent,' said Greg Maffei yesterday as he became Oracle's second CFO in a row to resign less than year after taking up the position.

According to Sun, its mergers and acquisitions – unlike Oracle's, Adobe's, and AT&T's – aren't quick fixes aimed at instantly growing its customer base. They're 'thoughtful, strategic acquisitions that complement and enhance our historic strengths.' Sun Microsystems, McNealy claims in a memo sent to Sun's customers this week, takes a different approach.

Many years ago I saved up for a 16K RAM pack for my tiny Sinclair ZX81 computer. I thought, rather naively, that this was going to be the answer to all my memory issues. I would be able to use increasingly complex programs, okay games, and I could program without the restriction of literally making every byte count. I quickly found out, as you have already discovered if you have been writing Java applications for a while, that adding more memory to your machine is not always the answer to the running out-of-memory problem, the infamous 'OutofMemoryError'.

Groklaw's PJ says: 'Apparently Google isn't intimidated by Microsoft. That is news by any marker. And further, if we were worried that Sun was in Microsoft's pocket ... I think this is evidence to the contrary.' Read what's being said web-wide about the announcement this week of a strategic alliance between Google and Sun.

If someone would ask me what's the coolest application I've seen in years, I'd say Google Earth. It's a desktop application and it's free and it's fat as in fat client. And even if some of their applications are thin, the AJAX technology make them look fat and rich. If you'll add the ability to remotely download Java Virtual Machine to your desktop/PDA/phone, we can cut the umbilical cord between you and Microsoft Windows.

Pooling is great - except it's not very tunable. It's hard to map end users back to connections in the pool, and if a connection ever becomes invalid inside the pool, expunging only that connection from the pool is nearly impossible; JDBC 4.0 addresses all these drawbacks.