Felipe Leme's Blog: October 2003 Archive

Posted by felipeal on October 23, 2003 at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Abaporu, one of the technical conferences organized by Soujava (a Top 25 Jug) in Brazil.

During the keynote, my friend Manoel Lemos was invited to talk about the the National Health Card Project, which has won the Duke's Choice Award in the Massive Scale category, during the last Java One. So, when he was called onstage, he brought the Dukie in one hand and a bottle of beverage in the other, and said something like: "Well, Brazil have had Java for many years, even before the language was invented" and showed the bottle.

So, with no further ado, here it is: Java, the Aguardente de Cana:

You might be wondering: what is a "Aguardente de Cana"? Well, it's Brazil's most traditional beverage, a distilled liquor made of sugar cane. It's a very strong beverage (some brands reach 45% alcohol), in some ways similar to vodka and tequila. It also has many nicknames (like caninha, cacha�a and pinga) and drink recipes which can be made from it, specially the "caipirinha".

In fact, caipirinha is so popular that Bruno F. Souza always mentions that recipe in his presentations:

Caipirinha--"Little Country Girl" - Brazil's National Drink

Use a short glass. Cut a lime into 8 pieces. Add sugar to taste. Mash the lime and the sugar with the pestle until they are well mixed.
Add 3 cubes of crushed ice and fill the glass up with "cacha�a". Mix it all, and that's it!
Place a lime slice on the brim of the glass for decoration, and serve it with a stick for stirring.
You can change "cacha�a" for vodka, but then the drink name changes to "Caipiroska"

For those living in the Bay Area, you can find "cacha�a" (among other Brazilian goods like guaran�) at least in the follow places:

Sousa's wines & liquors - a place which sell Portuguese and Brazilian products, located in Mountain View
Caf� Brasil - a very good Brazilian restaurant in Santa Cruz (they serve the best feijoada I ate in the US :-)
Joao's Restaurant - another Brazilian restaurant, located in Santa Clara
a couple of restaurants and stores in San Francisco - unfortunately I don't remember the address and names, but if you're interested, drop a message in the comments area below and I'll try to find out

There are also sites which sell Brazilian products online, like Sendex, BrazilianShop.com or those listed here (DISCLAIMER: I only bought products from Sendex before, and they are a good merchant. I don't know about the others).

I doubt you're going to find Java on these places, because it's a hand-crafted brand - although you can surely find other major brands like Velho Barreiro, Caninha 51, Tatuzinho or Ypioca. But for those leaving in Brazil, you can order Java here.

JDK 1.4.2_02 released

Posted by felipeal on October 22, 2003 at 06:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday was really a "release day". Not only JWSDP and JDeveloper had new releases, but also JDK 1.4.2.

Acording to the release notes, most of the changes are bug fixes. And even though these bugs don't affect the applications I'm using, I'm downloading it anyway (as I said earlier, it's time to move on :-).

JDeveloper 9.0.3.3 released

Posted by felipeal on October 21, 2003 at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oracle has relased today JDeveloper 9.0.3.3, a maintenance release for its IDE.

It has dozens of bug fixes, most of them related to BC4J (its MVC framework).

It's time to move on

Posted by felipeal on October 05, 2003 at 08:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

There's been a lot of talk lately about how Tiger (J2SE 1.5) is going to make Java easier to develop with, bringing it to the masses (or as Sun call it, to the "corporate developers"). I have no doubt that this promise *will* be fullfilled. My question is: *when* will that happen?

I'm not even talking about Tiger's release schedule here - although I'm also afraid it's is a little bit late already. My main concern is how long it will take for this release to be used by commercial products. Take as example J2SE 1.4: it's been available for years, and a lot of products - specially J2EE servers - still uses 1.3. I understand the fear of using a new major release right after it's available, but gee, we are talking about a very stable product, which recently reached it's 3rd version (1.4.2).

This "late adoption" trend is really bad: there is dozens of cool features available on 1.4 (like assert, logging and nio) that can't be used in many projects because they are bound on 1.3. That's not to mention the minor improvements, like new methods on existing classes that causes hard-to-debug NoSuchMethodException when you a deploy a class compiled with 1.4 in a 1.3 JVM. And now with Tiger and its language changes, this situation can be even worse, as the IDEs have to adapt themselves to these changes...

So, in order to reach the 10M developers mark, it's necessary a bigger effort than just providing new tools and APIs: it's necessary to move on!

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