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.NET is years behind and plans to bring similar features only in 2007 (generics).

Uh, I think that's wrong. The whidbey release of .NET, with generics, is due in early 2005, is it not?

It remains to be seen if they can do it without breaking backwards compatability.

Nope, the betas are out, so anyone can see, and they haven't found that to be the case. And support for generics was always planned in .NET, and thus apparently is techincally superior to the kludge that was retrofitted to the Java VM.

I guess engineering, design and programming can't possibly be art.

DocBook XML and SGML require too much markup...

Another approach is simply to define your own markup language. Since your needs are simple, you probably don't need to validate your documents, so an informal description of a well-formed XML document is all the design you need to do. You'll also need to write transform software that creates HTML or whatever other deviverables you're trying to create. That's easy enough to do in XSLT.

One last suggestion: if you're serious about using markup that separates content and presentation (an attitude I heartily applaud) Slashdot is probably not the best place to get advice. You're inviting criticism and trolls from people who think that TeX, or even "Plain ASCII" is all anybody really needs. Try some of the XML forums, like XML doc

At my first startup, one of my first multipeople multiyear Java projects was a mainframe screen scraper ( TN3270 using AWT - example ). I was fresh out of college & totally unaware that mainframes still ruled the planet. Those two years & the huge revenues it brought led the startup to be acquired and made a lot of people really rich ( minus moi, ofcourse :(
Lots of money to be made in desktop-mainframe connectivity.

For those that want to know, here is the definition.

There is a note about how they apply to NET here.

Remember when you were kids and you showed each other your "outie" or your "innie". It's pronounced like that.

UML lets you use an Activity Diagram for this as well. Typically activity diagrams are used to document a business process. Activity diagrams explicitly include synchronization and timing information. Sometime that's better than using a DFD as you know that a particular action must complete before its successor starts. Sometimes, it's worse because you may represent synchronization in the model that is simply an artifact of the current process. For example, I worked on cell phone point of sale system that would not let the sales rep take money until the phone activation was completed. This syncrhonization point was't really required for the business process (and actually caused lost sales when the activation system was slow or down), but had crept in through an activity diagram that listed activation as a pre-requisite for billing.

Activity diagrams are actually part of the UML replacement for flowcharts. State diagrams and sequence diagrams (plus, to a lesser extent collaboration diagrams (which are sort of a translation of sequence diagrams mapping objects spatially and time through notation) nostly complete the picture of UML things that replace flowcharts.

Newsflash, Mac fanboy: Windows has always had a command line interface. From command.com to cmd.exe to the future MSH. MSH will obliterate all Unix shells. Fuck everything is a file; everything will now be an object. Mac systems only recently got a command line. Before it's Unix conversion, Mac was a completely click and drool GUI.

Chances are slim that *New* devices/chipsets such as those based on IHDA will be supported by OSS/Free. Although most existing sound chipsets work fine with OSS/Free, continuing development seems to be non-existant as of 1998. (scroll down to disclaimer section.) That said, if ALSA is considered too much trouble for some, There is an alternative in the commercial version of OSS marketed by 4Front Technologies called OSS/Linux. Cofounded in 1995 by the guy who originally designed OSS/Free, Hannu Savolainen, 4Front has developed many more drivers for Linux through NDAs with hardware makers. More details here. Alas, no free beer from 4Front.

.NET Remoting

In the beginning...Sun made AWT and it was very low level hardward/OS linked.

Then came Swing, which was more abstract, higher level, and less hardware specific, with more functionality in some areas and less in others.

Then came SWT, which came about to increase speed by moving closer to the lower level APIs, to avoid lots of bloat, to be closer to host OS look and feel, and once again more hardware/OS specific and this was good..

There are always differences, and more differences

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Sun doesn't plan on abandoning its development all together (see Project Rave) I beleive it is suppose to be a new IDE implementation, but still based on Netbean foundation.

New Java Specification Request also include a common java ide plugin standardization, so this may be another reason they are doing some of this.

Conclusions from the first article that the parent's Google search points to:

If you don't need cross-platform development and your target OS is supported (Windows, for example), you may consider SWT, especially if your customers have old, limited machines where Swing use can be prohibitive. For all other scenarios, Swing provides the conservative choice.

I don't know anything about SWT other than what I read in the article but you haven't sold it to me!

It only smells that way.

I have no experience with C# yet but I am guessing that it is close to state of the art.

I am guessing this because everything Anders has done before has been technologically groundbreaking (Delphi, Turbo Pascal).

Interestingly enough, his old company is attempting non vendor lock-in .NET approach.

For PHP stuff checkout PHPBuilder. developer.com sometimes has good stuff too for all languages and technologies.

The book is not only available in printed form, but Bruce Eckel has a web site on the book and related subjects, including the full text in both html (downloadable zip or browsable) and indexed pdf format. However, it's not small and I would recommend going for the paper version if you like it.