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Pretend the solution is simple

Posted by daniel on November 29, 2004 at 12:48 PM EST

Time for Dr. Phil to make way for Dr. Ken

Ken Arnold is high on my list of self-help gurus. While we have lost millions of hours of productivity arguing where an opening brace belongs, Ken says perhaps both sides are right - perhaps neither side is right. It doesn't matter. Choose one. Don't convene a multi-year panel, just flip a coin and choose one. Once you've chosen one, enforce this one true way with your compiler.

It's kind of like going to see a professional because of something like a fear of public speaking. There are professionals who will insist on getting to the root of the problem and going back to see what your mother or a teacher or somebody did in your past to lead to this fear. Perhaps that's a useful approach. Other professionals will say, it's ok to be scared - let's get you up and speaking even when you are scared. In my view, Ken comes from this second school when it comes to software.

In Weblogs, Ken blogs about Ludicrous as a Balm for Patent Idiocy. He restates his prime directive:

Often it seems that if you pretend the solution is simple, it becomes so.

By the way, I think the directive reads better if you use a Patrick Stewart as Jean Luc Picard voice. But the core of Ken's current thoughts on patents is that "A patent is 'ludicrous' if it is 'trivial to one normally skilled in the art.' Note the range opened up between "obvious" and "trivial". On a scale from 1 (stupid) to 10 (Einstein), we could say that an idea is "obvious" if is a 6, and so any patent should be a 7 or above. Whether an idea is a 5 or 6 or 7 is something reasonably people could argue about, and so is not fraud to disagree. But at some point -- let's call it 3 -- it's just plain trivial."

In Also in Java Today , J2EE applications can serve many users at once, but that has the potential to disenfranchise more people when a box crashes. More boxes help, but then you need to account for sharing information between them. In Session Replication in Tomcat 5 Clusters, Part 1, Srini Penchikala shows how Tomcat 5 handles this feature in clusters and how you can use configuration and code to best suit your application's needs.

In practice, there seems to be two approaches to Service-oriented architecture (SOA): business services and integration services. In SOA Design, Meeting in the Middle Boris Lublinsky argues that "For complete SOA implementations it makes sense to partition ESB into business services ESB and integration services ESB."

In Projects and Communities, check out the latest crop of Swing based applications as the Java Desktop community points to Swing Sightings #21. Features include Grokker for communicating large result sets, the BlogBridge blog viewer and many others.`

Brad Neuberg has let the JXTA community know about an update to the open source P2P Sockets project. The project aims to return the end-to-end principle to the internet by providing an alternative peer-to-peer domain name system that bypasses ICANN and Verisign.

In today's Forums, Kelly O'Hair writes "We are in the process of prioritizing the build improvements we need to do in Mustang, and you have pointed out most of the higher priority ones. So expect these kind of changes to made over the coming months. It's hard to predict when we will have these done. As you know, changing native compilers is something we need to do very carefully, but we will be changing, we just have to be very careful. The newer compilers can create some compatibility problems, and we need to make sure we don't break any older products that need to mix with the J2SE libraries."

KCPeppe reports "I just did a micro-performance benchmark and found that in the JDK 1.4, a simple cast to String added 1.3% to the overall runtime (iterating through an ArrayList containing 1,000,000 String objects). So while it's not free, it's not a performance hotspot running under these conditions."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

  • WinLAF 0.5
  • PJIRC 2.1.0
  • Omea Reader 1.0.2
  • Kanaputs 1.4
  • jGnash 1.8.1
  • Jakarta Commons-Transaction 1.0 RC1

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    Time for Dr. Phil to make way for Dr. Ken
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