A friend brought this book to my attention recently. As an experienced enterprise Java developer who has recently added Objective-C to his toolkit of technologies to solve problems with, I was happy to see a book so close to my heart. I have started (but not yet finished) reading this one and so far it seems well worth the read for those of you who want to also add Objective-C to your Java skillset.

The following image is available on the Oracle website currently (original URL):

For me personally the 2 biggest questions about the whole deal have always been What happens to MySQL? and What happens to Java?

MySQL has always been open source and Java has been creeping slowly towards open source over the last few years.

Can Oracle really kill either of these technologies if they chose too? Probably not outright, but they could certainly damage their reputation and community support. People can fork code bases and start again, but it would take time (many years) to build back up to the flagships they are today.

The above image from Oracle is interesting in that it does call out MySQL but does not mention Java at all.

Perhaps Oracle sees more value in MySQL than Java and is attempting to protect it better. Or perhaps Oracle believes Java needs less protection than MySQL, after all, much of the debate over the Oracle/Sun deal has surrounded MySQL and not Java.

Wednesday is the day when some of these questions will hopefully begin to answered.

Why do you think Oracle called out MySQL and not Java?

Well, it seems almost official now, Oracle will get it hands on Sun and the Java and MySQL communities (among others) will need to hold their breath and wait to see what kind of chaos this might cause for our industries.

James Gosling (the father of Java) has long been publishing Java related images on his internal Sun blog. He has now posted his very last one.

The best comment I saw so far was “So long and thanks for all the Glassfish”.

You can read the original post here.

Recently I have been doing some research on tweaking websites to make them faster (either in reality, or at least in appearance to the client). Specifically the research has been focused on the actual client tier interaction – requesting the page, downloading the assets and rendering the page in the browser. In this post I will document some of the better resources I have found, focusing on client-side tweaks, so these resources should be relevant no matter if you are a Java, PHP, .Net or any other flavor of developer.
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Coding styles are THE religious debate of the Software Engineering industry. Everyone has an opinion, but no one has an iron clad argument as to why their ideas are better than someone else’s.

It doesn’t matter what language you write your code in or what company your work for or even what open source project you contribute too, the topic of coding styles will sooner or later raise its head. The debate can range from the banal, like which line the curly brace goes on, to the overly subjective, like how to name variables.

In the end most of the decision points are pretty subjective and it is somewhat irrelevant what you choose, as long as everyone agrees and you are consistent. But don’t be mistaken, a consistent coding style is an important consideration on any project, from the solo developer to the multi-national team.
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Firefox add-ons can be hard to manage – for me, mostly in terms of finding quality add-ons that do something you find useful.

There is a new feature available called Add-on Collections. The name is helpfully descriptive – basically people can now group related add-ons together, give that group (or “collection” if you will) a name and list it on the site. So if you are on every social network, there is a collection of all of the add-ons that allow you to stay connected with those networks from the browser. If you like to travel, there is a collection that pulls together all of the add-ons that will help you do your thing. You get the idea.

Read more about Firefox Add-on Collections here.

So, if you consider yourself a web developer of any kind, please take my recommendation and install the Web Developer’s Toolkit collection right now, today, without delay. Hopefully you are already using Firebug, but there are a bunch of other add-ons in this collection that you might not be using already and you really should be.

And if I can provide one more piece of advice today – learn to use the tools you have available to you. Every day I see software developers doing things the hard way, particularly when it comes to debugging issues. There is a cornucopia of tools out there to help you do your job and if you know how to use them and you know what issues they will help you solve, you will instantly become a better developer – more efficient, more productive, more reliable, more dependable – perhaps, dare I say it, a craftsman.

Imagine an Electrician who carried around a whole toolbox of tools, but only knows how to use a screwdriver and a hammer – he can probably complete most tasks with those two tools, but he is probably going to disappoint his customers and not make much money as a contractor.

So, in summary, get some decent add-ons for Firefox to help you be a better Web Developer, and then actually take the time to learn how to use them. Easy.

CollabNet is sponsoring a webcast tomorrow entitled Subversion Best Practices: Maximizing Productivity.

You can register to attend here:
https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=147957