The new BASIC

I’m seeing many posts that worry about computing devices like iPhones and the new iPad preventing people from having direct control over the hardware. Mark is telling us about a Ctrl+Reset and a BASIC prompt. Nowadays you get started with the following on an HTML page:

    <script type="text/javascript">
    document.write("Hello, World!");
    </script>

And you can do anything! Don’t tell me the days of tinkering are over.

Changing IT landscape

Here’s the latest top five list of countries with most monthly visits to the jackrabbit.apache.org web site:

1. United States
2. Germany
3. China
4. France
5. India

India just replaced United Kingdom on the fifth place, and while China is still far from the United States and Germany, it’s rapidly closing the gap.

It was very interesting to hear tidbits from the recent Apache Meet Up and BarCamp Beijing events. I heard rumours about a potential followup event next year. I hope I’ll find a good excuse to attend…

File system on steroids

Last week at ApacheCon EU I made a case for content repositories as a general solution for applications that are currently forced to fragment their storage needs due to the different limitations of traditional storage methods, mostly file systems and databases plus more recently cloud services on the network. See below for the presentation:

It seems like the message was well received, after the presentation I got a lot of positive feedback from people who had previously thought of content repositories as something you’d only use for storing content in a content management system. Instead I see a content repository as a unifying storage layer that can be used for almost anything ranging from traditional content and data to configuration files, user account information, preferences, templates and scripts, source code and binaries, ad-hoc annotations, etc.

Concurrency and River

If you’re interested in concurrency, distributed systems, and ways to best use the manycore processors we’re being promised, then check out the Concurrency and River thread on the development mailing list of the incubating Apache River project. The thread is about concurrency and ways the River project (a continuation of Jini from Sun) and related technologies like JavaSpaces could be used to parallellize many computing tasks. There are also some nice comparisons to Erlang and Scala, and how the actor model used by them is related to the Jini network model.

UMLet 7

Ever since learning UML back in 1998 I’ve been looking for decent UML tools that best suit my rather ad-hoc diagramming style. Even though I’ve occasionally used them, I’ve never really enjoyed the heavyweight, round-tripping, IDE-integrated (even IDE-embedding!) modelling monoliths that most of the UML tools seem to evolve into sooner or later. My reasons for using UML are documenting existing code and discussing new ideas, almost never to actually implement anything. I usually also work in highly heterogeneous settings with co-developers using a wide variety of tools and development environments. Adapting to a do-all-be-all UML tool is in many cases simply impossible or at least quite difficult.

Thus I’ve actively stayed away from the high-end offerings and focused more on the low-end alternatives like Dia and the most popular UML tool in the world, MS PowerPoint. However they never felt really natural, being either too inflexible or requiring too much manual work especially when rearranging diagrams. Luckily a few years ago, while doing my yearly lookout for better development tools, I stumbled upon UMLet, a lightweight open source UML diagram editor that has a rather original but very flexible and convenient user interface. It even works as a drop-in plugin for Eclipse.

A few weeks ago after upgrading to Eclipse 3.2, I went looking for an UMLet upgrade and was happy to find version 7 available for download. The new version has nice new features like color and transparency support, new diagram types, and various user interface improvements like improved mouse selection support. Warmly recommended.

The attached class diagrams were quickly created using UMLet 7 to describe the structure of a mid-sized patch I sent for consideration as part of the Jackrabbit issue JCR-415.