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The arc of a profession

Posted by daniel on September 9, 2004 at 6:23 PM EDT

Blacksmiths, bookkeepers, and programmers

What was so different about the professions of bookkeeper and blacksmith that enabled one to evolve and survive to this day while the other is not at all common. The message of Max Goff's article is sobering. We look at jobs that are essential today and try to imagine this world without them. He reminds us that "it is difficult to imagine how pervasive and important Longfellow's smithy was to a well-functioning society in mid-19th century America (as well as economies in other locales around the world). Blacksmiths worked with iron to make or repair the tools that were necessary for farming (including horse- and ox-shoes) and for the myriad enterprises in the shops of the villages and towns. Smithies also made the tools that were necessary for daily household chores, such as pots and pans for the fireplace."

Is today's software developer analogous to the village smithy?

How do you run an open source project? In today's Weblogs , Daniel Brookshier writes "With new projects at java.net come new questions. But sometimes they are really old questions that need new answers. Today the question was, how do you manage an open source project here? Read on to see what the basics are."

Chet Haase links to his article on Intermediate Images. The article shows you how to "Improve your graphics performance by caching rendering results in images that you can then do simple copies from; this is much faster for many complex (and even some simple) rendering operations."

The Public draft of WSRP v1.0 Primer is now available for review. Alex Toussaint provides links in his latest blog.

In Also in Java Today , you find the answer to the question: Can someone give us examples of SOA that are not Web Services? Steve Wilkes answers yes, in SOA Much More Than Web Services. SOA is just "A way of designing and implementing enterprise applications that deals with the intercommunication of loosely coupled, coarse grained (business level), reusable artifacts (services) that are accessed through well-defined, platform independent, interface contracts." Wilkes shows how you can expose a service in multiple ways.

SOA is all about serving "customers with temporary or rapidly changing needs, where software can be rented over the Internet, composed to deliver the required outcome, and then discarded." In the ACM Queue article Negotiating in Service-Oriented Environments, the authors argue that "Logical separation of need from the need-fulfillment mechanism is at the heart of the service model."

In Projects and Communities , the JELC community has graduated the following projects from the incubator: jsim, jactiongroup2, graphtool, rfwnet, twinpeaks, and BioBox. Daniel Brookshier summarizes each project in his blog.

Tim Boudreau blogs that he has just "committed some changes to NetBeans key bindings handling, so that Mac users will get key bindings that are much more like other mac apps (no change for Windows or Linux users)."

A discussion on Hardware/Software constraints continues in today's Forums . Smartinumcp writes "Java seems more flexible to me in its evolution possibilities. Here are some problems it will have to allow:- Multiple CPU threading, it's coming! - Parallel programming within a method - Multiple hardware interaction (combinations of mouse,palm, usb devices,etc...) We've had the mouse for 20 years, where's the "Thought" mouse?"

What about lightening up the core of Java? Jonathan Simon writes "I've been a big fan of a "core java" for a while now. We have Jar files that help us extend the language -- and alot of Java is written, well, in Java. So there is no technological reason why there couldnt be a really small core Java and everything else be extensions. [..] I think its awesome that the threading lib is independent. I wish more worked like that! And I'm always happy to deal with an extra lib on my side to speed up the 2 year release process from sun..."

Rythos follows up on reaction to a previous post with the question "What would a fundamental change in the language which allowed AI and multithreading to be easily expressed in look like?"

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