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Endorsing a front runner

Posted by daniel on January 19, 2004 at 11:22 AM EST

In political races, candidates drop out and endorse front runners for a variety of reasons. Are there analogous reasons for some open source software projects to drop out of a race, endorse a front runner, and help with its campaign?

In Endorsing the Candidates, Jim Cushing describes his search for a Java-based Object/Relational mapping tool in political terms noting that "the field of candidates was large. I held a caucus, of sorts, where I established my platform and the "issues" the candidates would need to address. The ideal candidate would be open source, so the project need not be delayed while I sought approval for a procurement. Candidates which require byte-code manipulation, or inheritance of a particular base class, or implementation of a specific interface, were struck from the ballot. So were those that appeared to have abandoned their campaigns; the nominee must be actively developed and supported."

He narrowed the field down and eventually chose ObJectRelationalBridge over Hibernate. The final choice isn't really the point of his article. Jim's story leads off Also in Java Today because he asks a key question as he reconsiders his choice:

When one project becomes the dominant or popular solution, would developers be better served by divided development efforts and the variety this affords, or by a focussed and collective development effort?

In the specific Hibernate / OJB choice he asks whether OJB should "abandon its campaign and lend its endorsement (and resources) to Hibernate? I'm still an undecided voter; I'm far from abandoning OJB in favor of Hibernate. But it does look like Hibernate has some advantageous over OJB. Likewise, OJB has features to offer that Hibernate may not. But what if developers of OJB were to endorse Hibernate, the apparent popular choice, and help that team create a product that is the best of both worlds?"

He specifically restricts his discussion to open source projects and wonders whether resources that could be combined to produce a top level solution are being split between two pretty good choices. As you read his essay, remember that his is really asking a question and not advocating one solution or another.

We also link to part two of Jennifer Rodoni Glore's article What's new in the architecture of version 1.5 of the J2EE Connector in which she examines the "Message Inflow and Transaction Inflow contracts that were introduced in the latest version of the Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Connector Architecture (Connector 1.5)". She explains that the Message Inflow Contract "Allows the resource adapter to synchronously or asynchronously deliver messages to endpoints that reside within the application server, irrespective of message style, semantics, and infrastructure." While the Transaction Inflow Contract "Allows a resource adapter to propagate an imported transaction to an application server, as well as flow-in transaction completion and crash recovery initiated by an EIS."

In today's Weblogs , Ben Galbraith asks about Java in Your Stereo? For the past few weeks he's "been playing with MacSense's new HomePod device. The HomePod is a compact MP3 player with WiFi built-in, a scroll-wheel interface not unlike that of Apple's iPod, and peer-to-peer media streaming software developed by Gloo Labs." The bad news is that it didn't do everything he wanted in the way he wanted. The good news is that (1) the HomePod runs Java and (2) Ben is geeky enough to fix his problems. He writes, "I downloaded the source code to the HomePod, tweaked the interface code in a few hours, FTP'd the new class files to the device, rebooted, and shazam! The HomePod user interface now behaves just as the iPod. Cool! This is one of the first times I could take my career skills and actually do something useful around the house."

In JXTA@LinuxWorld.NYC - "The Demos", James Todd lists the JXTA demos you can find this week at LinuxWorld. The demos include JackNet, Go, ZIM-Pro, and InstantP2P. John D. Mitchell asks Is Critical Thinking for Software Developers? He links to a Mr. Ed article that presents examples of "the all too common tendency of developers to make horrendously vague propositions".

In Projects and Communities , The Java Desktop project l2fprod contains the skinlf subproject that can read various skins to change the look of your Java application. The l2fprod-common subproject provides Swing components such as Property Sheets, StatusBar, Action Framework, and DirectoryChooser.

The Java Communications community links to a portal for the commercial development of the Session Initiation Protocol called the SIP center . Enter their 2004 competition or use their test bed that they describe as a "24 x 7 bake off facility".

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