An area that seems to have been glossed over in this thread is the laptop market. The reality is that running linux on your laptop is tough. The hardware isn't really upgradable anyway, so why not go mac?
I've seen a real increase in the number of powerbooks and ibooks that people are carrying around with them, especially in technical circles. It's unix without the hassle, in a spiffier piece of plastic/titantium/aluminum.
Perl certainly does a lot, and it is probably overlooked unfairly for a lot of web applications. As the authors illustrate, it makes a damn fine servlet container.
But an application server it is not. Container managed persistance, transactional support, message queues, naming and lookup services? Integration with existing business objects and processes? These aren't trivial in Perl, but they are the core functionality of app servers. They pulled off clustering for eToys, but it was hardly an out of the box solution.
If all you want is a servlet container, don't spend the money on an application server. Tomcat works great and iPlanet bundles one with their web server.
I believe it is a widely known fact that companies such as Sun, Netscape/AOL, and Novell all have much larger offices and budgets devoted to lobbying. In forums other than Slashdot, there was a good deal of discussion abut how much influence those companies had on the DOJ's decision to prosecute Microsoft.
The US needs a court that would be strictly for handling monopoly cases like this, only because the speed of business is several times faster than the speed of the judical system. A system where you have a month to prepare your case, and a week of court time, maximum, and that's it.
Such a system would give a huge advantage to the prosecution. They could go about preparing a case for years. The defendant is then only given a month from the time the case is filed? This seems like an awfully powerful stick to swing at any target they choose. (Keep in mind that politics play into anti-trust decisions as much as actual violations of the law.)
I'd much rather see the government on a short leash than companies.
In order to become a licensed architect, one usually needs an Masters of Architecture degree from an acredited school, and several years of internship, working for a licensed architect.
Such a system seems reasonable in the field of software engineering. No one is precluded from working just because they don't have a degree. But at the same time, those who are held responsible, are the ones who have completed graduate coursework in the field. Without trying to start a debate over the merits of graduate school (or lack thereof), I will assert that there is something to be said for formal education. Likewise, the internship period gives people a chance to learn from experiences that would not be possible in academia.
There is an interesting question, however, of how to bootstrap such a system. Automatically license anyone with an MS in Computer Science and 5 years of experience?
No system is going to please everyone, but it seems appropriate to have some form of accreditation. And rather than reinvent the wheel, we should use the practices of other engineering disciples as our examples.
(Note: there is an inherit assumption in all this that writing code is, in fact, an engineering science and not an art form.)
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An area that seems to have been glossed over in this thread is the laptop market. The reality is that running linux on your laptop is tough. The hardware isn't really upgradable anyway, so why not go mac?
I've seen a real increase in the number of powerbooks and ibooks that people are carrying around with them, especially in technical circles. It's unix without the hassle, in a spiffier piece of plastic/titantium/aluminum.
But an application server it is not. Container managed persistance, transactional support, message queues, naming and lookup services? Integration with existing business objects and processes? These aren't trivial in Perl, but they are the core functionality of app servers. They pulled off clustering for eToys, but it was hardly an out of the box solution.
If all you want is a servlet container, don't spend the money on an application server. Tomcat works great and iPlanet bundles one with their web server.
I believe it is a widely known fact that companies such as Sun, Netscape/AOL, and Novell all have much larger offices and budgets devoted to lobbying. In forums other than Slashdot, there was a good deal of discussion abut how much influence those companies had on the DOJ's decision to prosecute Microsoft.
Such a system would give a huge advantage to the prosecution. They could go about preparing a case for years. The defendant is then only given a month from the time the case is filed? This seems like an awfully powerful stick to swing at any target they choose. (Keep in mind that politics play into anti-trust decisions as much as actual violations of the law.)
I'd much rather see the government on a short leash than companies.
http://www.dailyfeed.com/ramfiles/9906 23.ram
Such a system seems reasonable in the field of software engineering. No one is precluded from working just because they don't have a degree. But at the same time, those who are held responsible, are the ones who have completed graduate coursework in the field. Without trying to start a debate over the merits of graduate school (or lack thereof), I will assert that there is something to be said for formal education. Likewise, the internship period gives people a chance to learn from experiences that would not be possible in academia.
There is an interesting question, however, of how to bootstrap such a system. Automatically license anyone with an MS in Computer Science and 5 years of experience?
No system is going to please everyone, but it seems appropriate to have some form of accreditation. And rather than reinvent the wheel, we should use the practices of other engineering disciples as our examples.
(Note: there is an inherit assumption in all this that writing code is, in fact, an engineering science and not an art form.)