moebius recursive

Sun announced earlier in the week that it is open sourcing (via netbeans.org) some significant enterprise-level tools. These include:

* 2-way UML modeler for architecting and reverse engineering complex enterprise applications. UML tools generate diagrams and keep them in sync with source changes without adding markers to the source code. Full support for the current version of the UML specification is provided.
* A set of XML infrastructure and visual editing tools which help enable developers to manage complexity in their XML files. These tools are intended to provide a base that can be extended by third parties.
* Orchestration and SOA tools are included for building composite applications. These leading-edge SOA tools leverage the business integration technology and expertise from Sun’s acquisition of SeeBeyond.

I am quite happy to see that there might finally be a decent open source two-way UML tool available. Last time I looked at this space, there was not much on offer and what was there was pretty sketchy.

Hey, I know that Sun’s tools aren’t as “cool” to use as Eclipse but there is no reason why the Eclipse community can’t swallow hard and look at how to incorporate these new tools into their IDE.

technorati tags: sun, netbeans, ide, uml, development

 

I recently discovered a handy little tool at cl1p.net that lets you ‘store’ a chunk of text or a small (less than 2MB) file at a URL of your choosing and then retrieve it again using the same URL. As the site states, clip has some interesting use cases:

Getting around firewalls. With cl1p.net you can easily move data from one machine to another. All you need is a URL.

Enhance Instant Messages. Instant messaging clients do a poor job at sending large blocks of text. With cl1p.net you can create a cl1p and post the URL in an instant.

Improving productivity. Cl1p.net is the fastest way to post to the Internet. Why go to the trouble of logging into e-mail just to move data?

technorati tags: clipnet, clipboard, tools, utilities

 

I was a little surprised at how little coverage there has been of the RedHat acquisition of JBoss — could it be acquisition fatigue or general disinterest. The latter is a little hard to believe considering that both parties have at some point been the darling (or bane) of the open source community/movement. With the general love/hate relationship with RedHat, I’m not sure that having the bombastic Marc Fleury on the roster is going to be much more than a liability.

This blog post over at zdnet was one of the better I saw on the merger.

technorati tags: redhat, jboss, opensource, merger

 

This week I saw an announcement on Ajaxian that several high powered engineers were leaving Sun Microsystems for JackBe. I recognized all of the names of the engineers from the influential Core J2EE Patterns book that they collectively co-authored.

Unfortunately, visiting the JackBe web site does not give a very good first impression, particularly the large-ish advert that might as well read “make your company fully buzzword compliant with our Ajax assessment!!”. This reminds me of around 8-10 years ago when every consulting company was offering a ‘Java assessment’ or ‘Java Jumpstart’ and how such things will give you a ‘technical/competitive advantage’ to anyone who would take the bait. Repeat the same for client-server, object-oriented programming, eCommerce, agile programming, INSERT_YOUR_FAVORITE_HERE.

This is not to say that Ajax does not have value (it does, when applied appropriately), but it is to say that anything can be oversold.

technorati tags: sun, ajax, jackbe, hype, consulting

 

You can just hear it now: Is that a couple of gigabytes in your pocket or are you just happy to see me!?

This is an interesting take on flash drives: the more data that you put on the drive the more it puffs up. Not sure how practical this is, but it is definitely a novel indicator of free space on a storage device.

technorati tags: flashdrive, visualization, fun, humor, ideas