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Posted by editor on August 8, 2007 at 8:13 AM EDT

Learning from CORBA

Every few years -- or months, at the accelerating speed of tech marketing -- we're told a new silver bullet will allay all our problems, whether the topic at hand is GUI's, media, persistence, or what have you. For a while, CORBA was the way to do distributed systems. Yet today it seems all but replaced by newer technologies, such as web services (setting aside, for the moment, more exotic distributed technologies like Jini and Zeroconf). But does that make web services intrinsically better? Have web services magically rendered moot the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing identified by Peter Deutsch?

ACM Queue's post-mortem for CORBA, Corba: Gone But (Hopefully) Not Forgotten, cautions developers of web services and other distributed systems not to assume that all the Big Problems are already solved for them:

Using Web Services is no more a guarantee of building a good distributed system than using CORBA was a guarantee of building a bad one. Web Services cannot magically confer on a system design the ability to effectively deal with limitations in latency and bandwidth. It cannot remove the difficulties that arise from partial failures and dependencies on systems that may be temporarily inaccessible. Fortunately, people have been designing and building distributed systems for many years, often using technologies like CORBA, DCOM, and their predecessors. Don't assume that all that work has been superseded by the magic of Web Services, because there is no magic and the lessons of the past apply just as well today.

Also in the Java Today section, the latest Java Mobility Podcast takes a look at the Java Tools Community. Fabiane Nardon and Daniel Lopez, the Java Tools Community Leaders, talk about their community, mobile projects in the community, and how the Mobile and Embedded Community and Java Tools Community can work together. They also share their experiences in developing mobile applications.

In San Francisco and have the afternoon free? Sun Microsystems and Joyent are sponsoring a free JRuby on Rails Hack Day, from 2:30 to 8:00 PM, at the Axis Cafe. "August's Hack Day will introduce you to the benefits of including Java in your next Ruby app. We'll discuss how deploying JRuby on a open source JVM can scale your application and utilize the good aspects of Java EE - management, clustering, failover and monitoring. Additionally, you'll have the opportunity to code and deploy a JRuby on Rails application that harnesses the expansive collection of first-rate Java libraries."

James Gosling emerges from his annual multi-month post-JavaOne hibernation in today's Weblogs, saying It's been too long... "At work, life has been a good form of madness: working on the JavaFX plan, helping to make sure that all the pieces fit together and that everyone is building the right thing."

Bruno Ghisi entices NetBeans users with the rhetorical question What's coming in NetBeans Mobility Pack 6.0? "I have tested Netbeans IDE 6.0 M10 last weekend to take a new look in the Mobility Pack 6.0 that is coming. I am going to talk about some of its improvements... really good news for ME developers!"

Chet Haase finally has his fingers on finished copies of Filthy Rich Clients. In Done? Done. It's Here, he writes, "the advance copies of Filthy Rich Clients have arrived; a comparative analysis is in order."

In today's Forums, hewagn00 focuses on a GlassFish persistence issue in JPA cacade remove operation: Spec vs. TLE implementation. "After using the JPA cascade entity operation feature, I had several problems when removing entities from the database, that should cascade their remove operation to dependent entities as this results in a database constraints violation. There are several issues already filed, but it seems they have low priority/importace (P4), thus impliying that it is not a mandatory feature required by the JPA spec. From my understandig of the spec e.g., it is completely legal to have a unidirectional @OneToMany relation set to cascade type ALL. Are there any plans to support cascading of remove operations for the release of Glassfish V2?"

choudharynarendra wants to start doing ME development and needs guidance in Re: Where do I start: Java Programming for ARM? "Where do i start java programming on the ARM926EJS processor is JTEK is have buy or what else i have require to start progrmming in this? I am new to the embedded java field i am a purely application guy?Thanks in advance. I have to design the sample application in the iMX.27 board."

rodricksin is apparently in need of an algorithm for Recognizing Blank Images. "I have scanned some 10 images and saved the images as PNG images... then i want to analyze whether the images is Blank page(pure white image). I want to separate the images according to Blank images. Please give some Idea how to recognize the blank images."

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Learning from CORBA
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