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Posted by editor on February 9, 2009 at 6:48 AM PST


Keeping on your customers' radar

The last time I noticed a reference to Red Hat, it was in Forbes' list of the 25 fastest-growing U.S. tech companies, a list largely dominated by smaller start-up companies (since it's a lot easier to double your sales when they're small to begin with). So it was rather surprising to see a "Red Hat is a dinosaur" argument in today's blogs. But Tim Boudreau makes an interesting case, arguing that A technology company without a consumer strategy doesn't have a strategy by criticizing Red Hat's focus on the enterprise:

Well, at some point, I don't actually remember when, RedHat decided that this whole business of doing a consumer OS was costing a more than it returned. The money was in the enterprise. So eventually the whole consumer OS piece of it got sort of spun off into this Fedora-somethingorother thing (don't get me started about product naming), and progressively lost steam, but who cares - because they're at warp speed on the enterprise.

So what's the problem? Enterprise is where the big, clueless, pointy-haired boss money is, right? Why wouldn't you want to be there, and only there? Tim's argument -- and he makes an analogy to Sun and its workstation business -- is that the non-enterprise parts of your business are a "calling card" to your future customers:

There's just one problem with that whole "core competency" disease: Those unprofitable workstations were your marketing channel. They were your way to show the world that you do good engineering - to show that to the people who would be the decision makers at all those dot-coms to-be. To think the people who are deciding to buy your stuff today will be the buyers of tomorrow - that you've got a "permanent majority" isn't even the height of hubris, it's the height of stupidity. You can't even call it self-serving behavior because it's not even that! At best it's a malignant form of laziness.

Do you buy the argument? And is there an analogy here to Java, which is so strong on the server, and making a new advance on the desktop in the form of JavaFX?

Also in today's Weblogs, Fabrizio Giudici notes
An interesting debate about JPA and the DAO. "To sum up their positions, Adam is saying that the EntityManager in JPA, used from the service layer, can replace the DAO pattern at the point that it may disappear in most cases; Scot is arguing that he doesn't like to mix his first-class objects (derived from the domain model) with things related to JPA, so the DAO or something similar is still needed."

And Carol McDonald shows off her JavaFX RESTful Pet Catalog Client, "a JavaFX application that displays pet photos retrieved from a RESTful Pet Catalog app."

In this week's Spotlight, the JCP has announced the beginning of the special election to fill a vacated seat on the Mobile Edition JCP Executive Committee. "The nomination phase will continue until 17 February 2009. This Micro Edition EC seat is for a term ending in December 2010, and will fill Intel's vacated seat on the Java ME EC." Instructions for nominating yourself or another candidate are on the JCP home page, as is a description of EC member duties. The election will take place between February 24 and March 9.

In Java Today,
Jim Driscoll has announced the second revision of Project Mojarra's JSF 2.0 PR implementation. Binaries and source are available for manual download, and should be available in the GlassFish Update Center today. Jim writes, "we're very proud of the number of bugs fixed in this release, so if you're already using JSF 2.0, by all means check it out. We're still some time from being Beta quality however, so this release remains useful only to people who are early adopters."

As promised last week, OpenDS 1.2 is now available (download, changelog). Ludo Champenois has an Overview of the New Features which includes a new GUI for server and data administration, improved security, manageability and performance.

The latest edition, issue 190, of the JavaTools Community Newsletter is out, with tool-related news from around the web, new projects in the community and a graudation (JRecordBind), and a Tool Tip on converting special characters to the unicode escape sequence.

The debate over 6u10's Quick Starter behavior continues in the Forums. In
Re: Java Quick Starter IO activity question, fizix writes, "sure, there is a check box that supposedly turns off jqs, but it only does so for, at most, a day. i've tried turning off the java update manager as well, but for whatever reason, jqs materializes after some short period of time AND the check box is marked again. Now, the only option i'm left with is disabling the service - and that's just not an acceptable recourse, especially when there is a setting in the more obvious java app itself. a more typical user wouldn't know what to do other than uninstall."

keithrz would like to
Prohibit JRE from accessing network files. "I'm wondering if there are any JRE settings, policies, or permissions I can set in a JRE installation that will prevent all applets running in the JRE, including signed applets, from accessing network files and drives. In my particular example, I am running Windows XP sp2. I do not want my JRE able to read files in file paths like \\foo\bar, or Z:\, which maps to \\baz\."

Finally, JXTA user cyberdyne_indiya needs advice for creating new shell commands. "I am trying to develop new shell commands for the jxta shell. Is there any possibility of using the existing shell commands to create new one as they save a lot of development work. I saw in the documentation of ShellApp class, which every new command has to inherit , a method called exec to execute existing commands. Are my assumptions correct?"

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Keeping on your customers' radar

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