Janice J. Heiss's Blog: March 2006 Archive

Posted by hiheiss on March 30, 2006 at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Conscientious Software: Part One of a Conversation with Sun Microsystems Laboratories' Ron Goldman Here's a rich IMHO interview with Sun's Ron Goldman by yours truly. Ron's a senior staff engineer at Sun Labs who is working with Richard Gabriel to envision a new software model. As we move into a world of massive software interdependence where standalone apps are on the way out, Ron wants to develop ways to make "large systems more robust, stable, and better able to take care of themselves." He wants software to start using cpu cycles "to actively monitor its own activity and environment, to continually perform self-testing, to catch errors and automatically recover from them, to automatically configure itself during installation, to participate in its own development and customization, to pay attention to how humans use it and become easier to use over time, and to protect itself from damage when patches and updates are installed." Are you enticed by his vision?...

The Advantages of the Java EE 5 Platform: A Conversation with Distinguished Engineer Bill Shannon

Posted by hiheiss on March 27, 2006 at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's an interview that yours truly recently did with Bill Shannon that you might find interesting. Bill's a Sun distinguished engineer and spec lead for Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE). He discusses how the Java EE 5 platform (formerly J2EE) makes life easier for developers. "There are so many ways we've made life simpler for developers, it's hard to know where to start," said Shannon, who has been at Sun since 1982. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Meet Java Developer, Arun Gupta

Posted by hiheiss on March 20, 2006 at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A "Meet the Engineer" interview I did with Java developer Arun Gupta of Sun might be worth checking out. Arun has useful insights about programming in India and the US, the challenges of developing software, Java APIs for XML Web Services Addressing (JAX-WSA), and efforts to get Sun Microsystems and Microsoft on the same page. He's a smart guy and has a patent related to XML and has several patents pending.

Seeing Shouldn't Be Believing or the World According to Josh Bloch

Posted by hiheiss on March 13, 2006 at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Please check out the interview

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/bloch2006_qa.html

I had the pleasure to do
with Google Java architect,
Joshua Bloch, in which he
discusses his latest book,
"Java Puzzlers," written with
Neal Gafter. He models puzzlers
on optical illusions; you look
at a piece of Java code and
see one thing, but then on
closer inspection you realize
your mind has deceived you. The
idea is to trick the mind into
making a mistaken assumption
about code; you see your
mistake and will hopefully
never make it again. With optical
illusions, Bloch claims, understanding
how the illusion works does not change
the illusion. But if you understand
how a "code illusion" works,
you can stop making that mistake,
and spot it in future code that you review.

Bloch claims that most
of the puzzlers were derived
from real experiences of developers
and that the biggest problem for
developers is unwarranted optimism.

Speaking of unwarranted optimism,
it's fascinating that they fell into
their own trap in one of the solutions
to a puzzler that turned out to be broken;
they had to include an errata in their book
correcting it. Bloch argues that no one is immune.

Josh also makes some interesting comments about
language design decisions.

I totally enjoyed interviewing him.
Besides being super smart, he's an
all-around great guy.

Meet the Engineer Q&A on java.sun.com

Posted by hiheiss on March 10, 2006 at 04:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Please check out this Q&A:

http://java.sun.com/developer/Meet-Eng/ohair/

I did with Kelly O'Hair, senior staff
engineer in JDK (Java Development Kit) Core Serviceability.

He was really fun to interview.

Asked if he ever feels a sense that he's
created something beautiful when
he writes code, O'Hair said,
"Well, more like 'not ugly.'
There's a gray zone between ugly
and beautiful. Simple is beautiful."

Kelly is a java.net blogger so check out his blog
too to get to know him better if you haven't already.

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