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Nitpicking here, but looking at the specs from Sun's site, it does not appear that the D2 disk array supports the Sun Fire V240 server. Here's the link. Note the list of supported hardware platforms for the D2, about halfway down the page.

Sorry, but this is complete FUD. Sun has a Linux product and promotes it. It's RedHat under the covers. Click here for the page

OpenGroupware.org is not a Sun sponsored project.

Did you tune the VM at all? I find this a bit difficult to believe. I run all sorts of rather complex, high traffic web apps with Java and I have never found a performance issue that couldn't be solved with a bit of application or VM tuning. If you are using default garbage collection on a large app you WILL have performance issues. Here's a good article on GC tuning

Or you could always compile your app into a platform specific binary, although, personally, I would rather just buy another server.

You can choose different thread models when using Sun's VM on Solaris, maybe that would help. I would also check out RedHat 9 which has the kernel 2.5 threading support back ported to a 2.4 kernel. You might also check out the Blackdown VM, which is compiled a little more agressivly than Sun's, also it has some Linux specifc stuff that may be applicable if you use that platform. Also maybe try IBM's VM, I used to use that back in the 1.3 days and it was noticably faster than Sun's 1.3 with default settings.

This book sounds pretty lame.

First, even the Struts developers themselves consider all but the struts:html tags to be obsoleted by the JSTL (lots of struts newsgroup posts to support this...no time to provide a link). JSTL provides not only a fairly rich set of "nuts and bolts" tags, but more importantly a set of base classes that can be easily extended for custom tags (such as the choose/when/otherwise construct and iterator tags). For Struts, the JSTL expression language has been encorporated into the struts-el tags, included in the latest 1.1 release. ...the caveat is that this approach requires J2EE 1.3 (Tomcat 4.0+, WebSphere 5.0+, Weblogic since forever-ago).

JSTL also obsoletes most of the Jakarta Taglib project's libraries, which frankly were very ugly from the start (separate tags for interacting with session/request/page objects? come on...check out the Expression Language that applies elegance to this problem, and is used in JavaServer Faces, JSTL, Struts-el, and everything useful from here on out).

As for templating engines, the biggest driver towards them has been the lame scriptlet-laden way JSP has historically been used (see The Problem with JSP). JSTL, Struts-el and before long JS Faces nail this problem, and IDE integration in the next year will make clear the reason why Template engines like Velocity aren't compelling (my opinion...not trying to offend).

I call FUD!!!

JAAS has been a standard in J2EE for ages now.

Bob

Show me boxing in Java.

OK. Boxing, Typesafe Enums, ...etc. It's a fun read.

When Java was first released, umpty squat years ago, it introduced a lot of good concepts to the wider programming community (yeah yeah, smalltalk blah blah blah). The good news is, the language is adapting and evolving based on a community input process, and real world feedback. There are some things that maybe should or could have been done in different ways, but all in all, I keep comming back.

Isn't that to some extent what OpenBoot/Open Firmware does, allowing the hardware to pass architecture-independant initialization code to a Forth interpretor?

Analysis of the quantity of bugs in a software application is by no means a qualitative analysis of the performance of that application.

The predominant httpd servers available on the market today are Apache; iPlanet/SunOne; and IIS. Additionally, there are lesser-known httpd servers (zeus, cern), as well as 'niche' httpd servers (caucho) which typically perform additional functions to parsing HTML code (such as acting as a Java server, etc).

According to Netcraft, Apache is the #1 httpd server in use today, and has been for nearly 7 years.

Regardless of the purported 'quality' provided by commercial, closed-source alternatives, the Apache httpd server is the only solution in the marketplace that supports - in a stable, qualitative fashion - a startling variety of additional software to provide functionality to a website.

A primary example of this bundled flexibility would be the vast number of scripting languages supported by Apache. Java, Perl, PHP, and TCL are all free, stable, and work wonderfully with Apache. This kind of flexibility in application environments is simply unparalleled by the other httpd servers.

You might say that 'you can run java, perl, php, and tcl on iPlanet or IIS, though'. Sure you can. Have you tried that?

First, your commercial vendor won't support it - Microsoft will only support you if you're running ASP.NET et al on IIS; Sun will only support you if you're running Java on iPlanet.

Second, non-supported scripting languages often don't work on non-apache httpd servers. Why? Because the source code for the httpd server isn't available to the scripting language developers - making intelligent integration more difficult - additionally, the major vendors don't test competitive scripting language functionality on their products, meaning that while the writers of PHP, Perl, TCL, etc may offer a version of their product for other httpd servers - Microsoft and Sun aren't testing them on their httpd servers - plus, they aren't guaranteed to work, and often don't. (At my company, we've never been able to get PHP to work correctly under iPlanet - and guess what? Sun doesn't give a shit. Big surprise, huh?).

Commerical httpd servers may indeed have less bugs - but they certainly are not as stable in performance, nor do they support as wide a variety of available software extensions - as Apache.

I'll gladly take that extra .02 in software bugs over a commercial, proprietary httpd server any day.

• IPv6- The Next Generation Internet - About IPv6.
• IPv6 Forum
• IP Version 6 (IPv6) - IPv6 at Sun.
• No shortage of IP addresses - Cnet Asia
• Big players push IPv6, but masses resist.
• Ready for IPv6 - PC World
• Ready for IPv6, Part 2 - PC World
• Verio Brings IPv6 to North America
• NTT Com Expands IPv6 Coverage
• KDDI Labs Pilots IPv6 Network Between Japan and the US
• Foundry Does 10GigE for N+I
• Perspective: IPv6, the Net's next frontier

Wow, the site design looks quite a bit like java.sun.com, down to the color of the sidebar border.

the antitrust service pack

For those of you who haven't heard of this, yet, here are places you can get it:

Mirror 1a
Mirror 1b
Mirror 2
Mirror 3
Mirror 4

These mirrors also work well:

Mirror 5
Mirror 6

evidence

You == troll || you == clueless

Although CORBA now provides the underlying technology for things such as J2EE, it is largely gone as far as a standalone technology.

CORBA, for instance, is designed for interlanguage operability, and is at once heavyweight and feature-deprived as a result, whereas J2EE remote object technologies are very Java-specific. CORBA, for instance, uses distributed reference counting for garbarge collection, RMI uses leases.

If by "underlying technology," you mean that CORBA offers naming, lookup, and invocation, and J2EE does too, then, uh, ok. I wouldn't say that McDonald's is the underlying technology for my mother's house, just because they both have kitchens and serve food.

Although CORBA now provides the underlying technology for things such as J2EE, it is largely gone as far as a standalone technology.

CORBA, for instance, is designed for interlanguage operability, and is at once heavyweight and feature-deprived as a result, whereas J2EE remote object technologies are very Java-specific. CORBA, for instance, uses distributed reference counting for garbarge collection, RMI uses leases.

If by "underlying technology," you mean that CORBA offers naming, lookup, and invocation, and J2EE does too, then, uh, ok. I wouldn't say that McDonald's is the underlying technology for my mother's house, just because they both have kitchens and serve food.

Although CORBA now provides the underlying technology for things such as J2EE, it is largely gone as far as a standalone technology.

CORBA, for instance, is designed for interlanguage operability, and is at once heavyweight and feature-deprived as a result, whereas J2EE remote object technologies are very Java-specific. CORBA, for instance, uses distributed reference counting for garbarge collection, RMI uses leases.

If by "underlying technology," you mean that CORBA offers naming, lookup, and invocation, and J2EE does too, then, uh, ok. I wouldn't say that McDonald's is the underlying technology for my mother's house, just because they both have kitchens and serve food.

Umm, you can download Netscape 7.0 and Mozilla 1.2.1 from Sun here. Give them time, and you might even find Netscape 7.1 now that it's been released.

But the guys who run UNIX at the high-end of the spectrum don't see it as a UNIX, it's a Mac, and it's nice for graphic designers and desktop publishers, and maybe even has some room for people doing surface modeling for design purpose, but it's not a CAD workstation, and it's certainly no server.

Your point is taken, and accurate, but I want to re-iterate it in more simple terms: there is a perception in certain industries that the Mac is not a high-powered workstation and is not a server.

Perceptions are not facts, they're opinions, they're views of the world, so when you say this:

They just plain don't write this stuff for Macs. And they never will.

It strikes me as odd that you'd think this, considering the sheer number of mind-baffling trends we've seen. I'm going to list a bunch of very plausible quotes that I've heard circa 1998 - 1999. They're not true now.

"Embedded systems developers don't write stuff in Java. And they never will"

- Java is now the biggest platform for mobile phone development
- The NASA JPL is using in their future Mars missions.

"Linux will never be considered a serious server OS. The big database vendors will never port their products to it."

- Can you name a big database vendor without a Linux port?
- Or that Oracle's main marketing push for the past 18 months has been "Unbreakable Linux"?

So, yeah, I take your point that the major CAD vendors don't write stuff for Mac OS X due to perception issues. But do you honestly believe the platform is not capable of running such applications, especially with the new G5, and with X11 being embedded inside of it in 10.3?

Anyway, my point is mainly that strange things happen out there, and it's the companies that watch for the unexpected successes & failures that make great gains.

To put it simply, a servlet container runs java objects that extend the abstract HttpServlet class. At the heart of it, the servlet container will provide you with a HttpRequest, containing the session and any objects stored in it, cookies, request headers, etc., and HttpResponse, which contains a PrintWriter that you can use to output whatever you want. Servlet containers also do things like user authentication and application management. There's quite a lot of configurable options for this stuff.

With J2EE being all the rage these days, there's a lot of inertia behind writing MVC web apps. Writing apps in JSP has nearly the same maintenance hassles as writing them in PHP. Instead of writing a JSP/PHP page that checks that a user is logged in and creates connections to a database, the idea is for JSP to deal with presentation and servlets and java beans to manage the database connections and "business" of the web application.

Some of the cooler (newish) tools that people are using with servlets are XDoclets and object relation persistence

So... take a look around. I strongly suggest checking out the Struts Framework. And this IDE's not bad. And this tool is pretty fun. I mean, I use it...

To put it simply, a servlet container runs java objects that extend the abstract HttpServlet class. At the heart of it, the servlet container will provide you with a HttpRequest, containing the session and any objects stored in it, cookies, request headers, etc., and HttpResponse, which contains a PrintWriter that you can use to output whatever you want. Servlet containers also do things like user authentication and application management. There's quite a lot of configurable options for this stuff.

With J2EE being all the rage these days, there's a lot of inertia behind writing MVC web apps. Writing apps in JSP has nearly the same maintenance hassles as writing them in PHP. Instead of writing a JSP/PHP page that checks that a user is logged in and creates connections to a database, the idea is for JSP to deal with presentation and servlets and java beans to manage the database connections and "business" of the web application.

Some of the cooler (newish) tools that people are using with servlets are XDoclets and object relation persistence

So... take a look around. I strongly suggest checking out the Struts Framework. And this IDE's not bad. And this tool is pretty fun. I mean, I use it...

(btw, I don't work for Sun)

A Java Card would allow you to store information (in this case biometric data) in a way that the data could be used in some sort of transformation but the original data is protected.

Were biometric data to be included on Passports, I see no better way to store it than in a Java Card. Portions of the biometric data analysis could be offloaded onto the Java Card itself, until an acceptable and mutual balance of trust and distrust can be achieved between the biometric processing algorithms and the data on the Java Card. In this way the biometric data is never exposed directly to the outside world, so one need not worry about it getting leaked to the "bad guys" even if your passport were stolen.

http://java.sun.com/j2se/5.5.5/

Microsoft doesnt need any help letting .NET get an advantage (i.e. Java not being shipped with Windows). Sun actively refuse to ship it for Pocket PC meaning Microsoft has free reign with .NET anyhow. Its not all Microsoft's fault!! See this for more details

Sun is working on this issue together with Apple and are in the process of merging their code.
At first they expected it in 1.4.2, but because the code is not stable yet, they haven't released a new date

Java chat on 1.4.2

*snip*

Filip: Startup performance is better in this release, but you only achieve about 1.3.1 startup performance with 1.4.2. Is there going to be some work in the Tiger release to further speed up startup? Also, why is shared VM dropped from 1.4.2, and can we expect it in Tiger?

Ken Russell: We are planning to make more startup improvements in 1.5, but cannot provide specific details at this time. We are continuing to work with Apple Computer to develop and integrate their VM sharing code, but can make no guarantees about its future availability in Sun's J2SE releases.

*snip*

I don't know what Java Plugin you're using, but Applets already run all in the same JVM for all Browsers and JVMs I know. The problem is with multiple applications in the same JVM, which expect everything to close down when System.exit() is invoked (and other sharing issues). See the RFE on this issue

>We can't (and shoudln't) prevent Microsoft from writing their own JVM

Well, Sun had something to say about it as Microsoft was violating their license with Sun, IIRC.

amemded complaint

In order to obtain the right to make and distribute products incorporating Sun's JAVATM Technology, and to mark such products with Sun's JAVA Compatible trademark, defendant Microsoft entered into two written agreements with Sun in March 1996. Pursuant to one agreement, defendant Microsoft promised to incorporate Sun's JAVATM Technology in certain products, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0, in a manner that fully conforms with and adheres to Sun's set of published specifications ("JAVA specifications") and "public" application programming interfaces ("JAVA APIs") for the JAVATM Technology.

Microsoft's prior agreements and promises notwithstanding, it has now unilaterally abrogated its obligations under both contracts by refusing to honor its express obligation to implement and adhere to Sun's most current set of JAVA specifications and JAVA APIs for the JAVATM Technology. Rather than comply with its contractual obligations, defendant Microsoft has instead embarked on a deliberate course of conduct in an attempt to fragment the standardized application programming environment established by the JAVATM Technology, to break the cross-platform compatibility of the JAVATM programming environment, and to incorporate the JAVATM Technology in a manner calculated to cause software developers to create programs that will operate only on platforms that use defendant Microsoft's Win32-based operating systems and no other systems platform or browser.

So yeah, Microsoft can and should produce their own JVM, so long as they adhere to the agreements under which they licensed the right to do so from Sun. Sun went to court to stop MS from distributing their version because it didn't meet the standards for compatibility that Sun had put forward in their contract. If they had just done this in the first place, no one would be crying about it now.

Someone please correct me if I've got this wrong.

They are site licensing the server products, almost the entire product line. Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc etc etc ad nauseaum.

Indeed, I feel ill. What exactly does all that shit provide that free software does not? Vendor lock-in? Great.

The details aren't being disclosed because MS doesn't want their other customers getting pissed at the ball breaking that the Army gave them

Nuts. I've never heard of a non-clasified public purchase with a NDA. It's my half a billion dollars, I want the details. Only crooks who sell crap have to hide their details. You would think they would be happy to give anyone buying half a million computers a similar deal.

There's no excuse for buing into more Microshit right now. Computer hardware has been more than adequate for general purpose desktop computing for the last six years. If the software those computers came with is no longer up to the task, I suggest looking at alternate software. There are a few other good American companies that could use this kind of shot in the arm but would provide a much better product:

• Red Hat has far superior server and desktop software and support.
• Sun also has all three and a great Productivity suit for much less than M$ Office
• Debian software quality and updating sheme are hard to beat. Yes, Star Office runs just fine on their stable distro.

We can be sure that Dell, Gateway, etc would be happy to work with any of the above software firms for this contract.

The fact of the matter is that the US Army took a half a million computer order and got themseves treated like some dinky midsized company with a thousand desktops. Next thing you know, they will be on the three year upgrade cycle. They did it because they were told to do it that way or they were incompetent. Either way, it's un-fucking-forgivable. They have a whole, ummm, Army of technically qualified people!

They are site licensing the server products, almost the entire product line. Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc etc etc ad nauseaum.

Indeed, I feel ill. What exactly does all that shit provide that free software does not? Vendor lock-in? Great.

The details aren't being disclosed because MS doesn't want their other customers getting pissed at the ball breaking that the Army gave them

Nuts. I've never heard of a non-clasified public purchase with a NDA. It's my half a billion dollars, I want the details. Only crooks who sell crap have to hide their details. You would think they would be happy to give anyone buying half a million computers a similar deal.

There's no excuse for buing into more Microshit right now. Computer hardware has been more than adequate for general purpose desktop computing for the last six years. If the software those computers came with is no longer up to the task, I suggest looking at alternate software. There are a few other good American companies that could use this kind of shot in the arm but would provide a much better product:

• Red Hat has far superior server and desktop software and support.
• Sun also has all three and a great Productivity suit for much less than M$ Office
• Debian software quality and updating sheme are hard to beat. Yes, Star Office runs just fine on their stable distro.

We can be sure that Dell, Gateway, etc would be happy to work with any of the above software firms for this contract.

The fact of the matter is that the US Army took a half a million computer order and got themseves treated like some dinky midsized company with a thousand desktops. Next thing you know, they will be on the three year upgrade cycle. They did it because they were told to do it that way or they were incompetent. Either way, it's un-fucking-forgivable. They have a whole, ummm, Army of technically qualified people!

No, but I suggest anyone interested in a nice new flat panel should check out this sexy new 24" LCD Screen from Sun. This takes the place of SGI's old 1600SW for coolest display.

No, but I suggest anyone interested in a nice new flat panel should check out this sexy new 24" LCD Screen from Sun. This takes the place of SGI's old 1600SW for coolest display.

I'm a Java developer with a lot of experience with Swing, and I have to say the Oracle Java-based tools are some of the slowest, ugliest Swing apps I've seen.

For much better examples have a look at JGoodies or some of the apps on Swing Sightings (it's a mixed bag but some of them are very good).

If you have met Graham Hamilton you will know he has a brain the size of a planet. He may not have been involved in Java for 7 years but he has done a lot. Anyone who can be spec lead for jsr 59 and jsr 47 at the same time must know a few things.

> It's a subtle user interface trick that they've
> missed out on, although I'll admit that Java 2 is
> making things a little better.

I think you're making the right point for the wrong reasons. Java itself is not slow. The VM is highly evolved - have a look at the hotspot whitepapers if you don't believe me. Even the GUI performance is quite good if implemented correctly. The main problems are that correct implementation of a Java GUI takes experience. Have a look at IntelliJ for an example of a well implemented Java GUI. Sun could help by improving the defaults and more importantly supplying "best practices" for building GUIs which they are doing. The main "implementation" problem is that memory consumption is still quite high and that can have an impact of performance. Again, Sun is working in a number of areas to alleviate this. Hopefully, the "shared VM" will be available in 1.5 some time later this year.

(sun won its suit against microsoft that it was unfairly squeezing out the java vm - then promptly sued microsoft for posting the microsoft jvm on windowsupdate.com because the license from sun didn't explicitly allow that. they won the suit and for some time windows users just couldn't get their hands on a vm. and if that doesn't decimate any gains from using java, i don't know what does)

What are you talking about? Windows users have always been able to get their hands on a JVM, just not the Microsoft one because of the lawsuit. Nothing stopping users from downloading one of the many other implementations of the JVM on Windows.

Yeah, me too. But unlike the Mac, I could not run Office, Photoshop, function as a web server, surf the web, compile code
, run bioinformatics searches, do molecular modeling
and have wonderful text aliasing all at the same time.

Yeah, me too. But unlike the Mac, I could not run Office, Photoshop, function as a web server, surf the web, compile code
, run bioinformatics searches, do molecular modeling
and have wonderful text aliasing all at the same time.

Yeah, me too. But unlike the Mac, I could not run Office, Photoshop, function as a web server, surf the web, compile code
, run bioinformatics searches, do molecular modeling
and have wonderful text aliasing all at the same time.

Yeah, me too. But unlike the Mac, I could not run Office, Photoshop, function as a web server, surf the web, compile code
, run bioinformatics searches, do molecular modeling
and have wonderful text aliasing all at the same time.

Yeah, me too. But unlike the Mac, I could not run Office, Photoshop, function as a web server, surf the web, compile code
, run bioinformatics searches, do molecular modeling
and have wonderful text aliasing all at the same time.

javachip was prototyped, but never marketed - yet another execution failure at Sun. At on point, Sun declared "Java implemented right was not slow". It then hired coders to implement a "Java compiler in Java". Result ? The Java compiler in Java was 20 TIMES SLOWER than the Java compiler written in C! These were never widely published, but just do a search on Technical Abstracts on sun.com, you'll find them.

As far as the 106 CPU Version Cluster the XServes the same way Sun does it. I said Sun should be scared.

Sun doesn't cluster little boxes to get 106 cpus. Its one big box, the E15K, and it capabilities are amazing. Apple won't be producing hardware like that for a long, long time, if ever. How Sun acquired the technology to build those systems is a story onto itself.

And for your information, clusters aren't even close to a universal solution to difficult computational problems. There are some classes of problems where using clusters really bites and you need to do the calculations on a big box, at least if you want an answer this decade.

Sun's midrange workstations are about equal to Apple's high end systems. I think that it is reasonable to say that although Apple has some great products, as a system house it is still in Sun's shadow.

Perhaps by "native bindings to Gnome" you mean something along the lines of SWT in Eclipse,but it's interersting to note that the Java 2 SDK release 1.4.2 Beta does include preliminary support for a GTK+ 2.0 Swing look-and-feel. See this for details.

As far as the 106 CPU Version Cluster the XServes the same way Sun does it.

is already some source code available. :)

Sun Blade 2000

The Single 900MHz is 7,595
The Single 1.2GHz is 9,995
The DUAL 1.2GHZ is 13,995 (whoops off by 7.5%)

What about Dual 2.0GHz don't you understand? They may not have been in the same market before now. However, that will soon change (there is your clue). As far as the 106 CPU Version Cluster the XServes the same way Sun does it. I said Sun should be scared. They no longer have a lock on the 64bit market.

I guess things never change in your world. Look out someone may be moving your cheese.

Jeez, nearly makes you think that /. editors have something against Sun....

Well, I'm sure if you locked editor abc in a room with a Sun Ray 150 Thin Client connected to an 8-way Opteron in another room, they'd have something against it pretty damn fast.

I thought this was a joke. But look for yourself:

First, I went to the URL mentionned above and thought it could be unrelated. But click on the PDF News item on the right side!

It's true!

I thought this was a joke. But look for yourself:

First, I went to the URL mentionned above and thought it could be unrelated. But click on the PDF News item on the right side!

It's true!

However, if you believe the Sun PR newswire, they don't own Solaris.

--Mid

One corporation claims to have complete immunity to SCO's legal threats. Interestingly enough, they happen to be one of IBM's competitors in the high-end server market. And dispite all those take-over rumors, they have around $5.5 billion in the bank..

And now there's this Big Blue blood in the water. If you were an IT head, whose sales pitch would you listen to? Hmm....