HoodedHawk

The monthly Columbia (Maryland) BEA user group meeting was tonight, and Marty Hall (coreservlets.com) gave a very engaging and interesting talk about the new JSP 2.0 (Servlet 2.4) expression language. Now you can replace the verbose:

<jsp:useBean id="someName"
type="somePackage.someClass"
scope="request, session, or application" />
<jsp:getProperty name="someName"
property="someProperty" />


with:

${someName.spmeProperty}

-That’s the best reason for JSP 2.0 Expression Language. You’ll need an app server that supports the servlet 2.4 spec (i.e. Weblogic 9)…

I recorded Marty’s lecture, and have a link there to the materials from his website.

Ok, I don’t have a new Intel-based Mac (yet; saving my pennies), but here’s yet another reason why Apple rocks: They are going to officially support running Windows on their hardware. The software, “Bootcamp“, is in public Beta now, and will be included in the next major version of MacOSX. All you’ll need is a copy of the Windows XP (home or pro) SP2 disk. This brings with it all the issues with Windoze software, as Apple states:

Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

It’s not often that I need an online word-processor, but if I do I’ll use ajaxWrite. It’s fast, and was able to open up some fairly complex Microsoft Word documents I threw at it. Seems to have all you need to create a “rich-text” (ala Microsoft Word) document online. It’s not perfect (it’s a V 0.9 release) but it’s free. I wouldn’t use it to edit something private, as it does send info back to a server. Also, it may be awhile before I relinquish desktop apps for online apps, but this would do in a pinch.

I spent the day yesterday at the BEA Dev2Dev seminar in Tyson’s Corner, VA. A lot of marketing hype was presented among the technical presentations. Basically covered BEA’s new Weblogic 9, and Studio, and how they are “blending” in open source tech. Tomcat is a first-class citizen, with support from BEA. Studio will let you target deployment on any server, not just Weblogic (or Tomcat). Studio is a collection of Eclipse plugins. The demos were interesting, though not technical enough for my tastes. They did show off what Studio can do. I’m interested in trying it out, especially (unlike Workshop for 8.1) since you aren’t (technically) locked into any one server. Once I get to play with it some, I’ll post a note.

I did record the lectures, and I put up the PDF of the presentation slides. See the audio section of this site.

Interesting article in a March issue of Science by Alfred Aho (Columbia University). He points out that “few people appreciate the importance of software–until it breaks!”. He estimates that hundreds of billions of lines of code are running systems in the world (corresponding to trillions of dollars invested). This also corresponds to an estimated 5 million to 50 billion defective lines of code…

While “it is unlikely that humans will ever write software with zero defects”, a major area of study is how to make more reliable software systems.

See:

abstract