Daniel Brookshier's Blog

July 2004 Archives

Great article on Project Looking Glass

Behind The Scenes of Project Looking Glass by Will Iverson -- Project Looking Glass, highlighted in Scott McNealy's JavaOne keynote, is a 3D desktop environment that uses Java and hardware graphics acceleration to deliver a new kind of user experience. And now, it's open source. Will Iverson interviewed lead developer Hideya Kawahara to learn more about the project.

Graduation Day in the Education and Learning Comunity

It's graduation time! The following projects have graduated from the incubator. Below are t descriptions of the projects:

https://cve.dev.java.net/
Projects.edu-jelc. edu-research. cve
CVE visual sentence

CVE (Cooperative Visual Environment) is a software platform able to build new computational-user environments. Each environment is composed by software "agent": Excutors, Observers and Presenters. In CVE, Executors are responsible for managing computational resources and activities, while Observers are responsible for formatting views to be displayed by Presenters. Moreover, the observers are able to interpret the events generated by the user on the presentation elements and to consequently generate requests to the executors, or adjust presentation aspects, according to the meaning of the event. A notification mechanism ensures that state changes in the executor are reported to the registered observers to update their presentations. Actually, we defined environments able to manage visual sentence (graphic editor). In this context we have implemented independent software components to manage generic graphic relations, user interaction and Finite-State Machine (see Wippog project).

https://tspell.dev.java.net/
Projects .edu-jelc.edu-research. tspell
Turkish NLP library

Tspell (Turkish)

Tspell projesi ile Turkce diline iliskin cesitli bilgi islem problemlerinin cozumlenmesi icin acik kodlu, platform bagimsiz bir kutuphane olusturulmasi amaci ile baslatilmistir. Turkce yapi itibari ile Ingilizce, Almanca gibi hint avrupa dillerinden cok farklidir. Ulamali bir dil olmasindan dolayi baska dillerde kolayca gerceklestirilebilecek bilgisayarla kelime dogruluk tespiti, hata-oneri sistemi gibi islemler Turkce icin son derece guc bir hale gelmistir. Tspell, java'nin sagladigi kutuphane, dil ve platform avantajlari ile bu tur zorluklarin ustesinden gelmeye calisacaktir.

Tspell (English)

Tspell project intends to provide library and applications for solving Turkish Natural Language Processing (NLP) related computational problems. Turkish, by nature has a very different morphological and gramatical structure than Indo-European languages such as English. Since it is an agglutinative language like Finnish even making a simple spell checker is very challenging. Adding semantic capabilities to an application seems even more overwhelming. By the power of Java, Tspell will try to overcome this challenges.

Save P2P by stopping the INDUCE Act.

I just received an email from Ray Gao of P2PJournal.com. Apparently the lobbyists are at it again. This time your MP3 player is at risk. This also opens the door to a lot of other anti-P2P shenanigans from other companies. The INDUCE Act is just plain bad to the bone.

But first, let me say that I am 100% legal. I don't steal music. I buy a lot in fact (you gotta see my iTunes bill). Stealing is stealing. But the music industry wants to stamp out fair use. That's why I am hot about this issue.

Please take a look at this anti-P2P bill currently being proposed at the congress. And, sign the petition oppose it. Tell your congressman that this bill should not become a law.

I just sent a free fax from the site urging my reps in Congress to stop the INDUCE Act. Convincing even a single Senator will force a real debate on the bill.

Check out: www.savetheipod.com which will allow you to fax congress with a few clicks (I used auto form fill on my browser to do most of the work).

www.savetheipod.com has more info about the INDUCE Act and a form to fax your Senators and Representative. It only takes a few seconds to send a fax and it is really important that we respond to this legislation quickly.

Take a look at www.savethe.com for more information and details on the lobbyists and specific congressmen that are paid to be lobbyists lapdogs.

JavaOne - Day four - 4 - IV - t-shirts via P2P and bling for java.net users

The awards were given out at the end of the main session today. The winners were "The Cyclists". I got to speak to the developer of the software. Silly me forgot to write down his name, but he can be reached at mrjava @ sprint.com and the web site is www.observeit.com (site is not up yet).

As Gosling said, the winner was built with a lot of weirdness and imagination. Here is the list of technology involved:
o J2EE web server for audience participation and media server to relay server link establishment.
o Java Applet for real-time sighting video display
o J2Se Swing app(media server) for graphics and sound rendering.
o J2Se bike relay server - off - bike communications
o Dallas TINI Java Controller = sensors and actuation or the drills A.K.A poor man's servos and light controls.
o JavaCard iButton computer thrown with t-shirts for Java enabled camera phone giveaway.

But there was more to the details! There were two computers in the system on stage that communicated via 802.11 back to the man server to find the IP address of each other. This is the poor man's Peer-to-Peer system. What happens is that the each PC calls the J2EE server (at the developer's house) to get the other peer's IP address. Just before they rolled out, the 802.11 was overloaded by all the attendees and in the last few minutes before they rolled out, they had to rewrite the code to use a hard wired connection that was hastily wired to the computes on the bike. With five minutes to spare the code was patched and tested. Not knowing your IP address is a bit worse than having the chain break (actually it was the master link on the chain that was popped off by two desperate competitors in front of a live audience ). I could not help with the chain, but I did sugest he use JXTA instead of the home grown solution. We will also host the code at Java.net in the Java Education and Learning Community.

I was running around with Bruno (the fellow from Brazil with the Brazilian flag cape and who runs the Java user group community on java.net) and met some guys that will donate free installation software to the Java.net community. No names yet, but look for an announcement soon.

Finally I talked to a fellow from a mining company. They use 802.11 to communicate between their heavy equipment. They have problems communicating and managing their various devices. We talked about JXTA as a solution. Looks like a lot of their problems and allow a multi-ton earth mover to call the office for an oil change via JXTA P2P. Look for JXTA in applications like this real soon.

JavaOne - Day Three - More friends, JXTA, epackaging of an app server and open source

Greetings!

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them - Albert Einstein

I got to attend Brad Neuberg's tech session on P2P Sockets and Paper Airplane. Paper Airplane is a Mozilla plugin written with JXTA. It is a great example of extending a known metaphore into the P2P world. Brad talked about a shared Wiki and other services like SOAP via the JXTA network. Check out http://p2psockets.jxta.org/ and http://paperairplane.dev.java.net/ for more info. I really think this is a great way of doing things. There is a freedom from servers and a freedom to communicate. There are a few things to work out, but Brad has a lot of great ideas in this area that need to be explored.

Email==Face

Got to meet more people today. From the JXTA community, to my book readers, to business customers. Most I have never seen or talked to except via email. Some of these people have been emailing me for years and this is the first time I have seen them in person. JavaOne is getting to be a watering hole where everyone meets. Forget the sessions, it's about meeting the smart people of the world in person.

UML

I also got to teach a short class on UML today for NoMagic and ExitCertified (Sun's education partner). I had room full of people willing to learn UML and we had some fun too. Speaking of UML, I overheard someone say that the white-board is the best place to do UML. All I have to say is that is misleading. Using a white-board to think about a design is nice, but you need to capture the design for the long run. A white-board can't be emailed to your customer. A white-board can't be filed away to be referenced years later by a maintenance developer. You can't edit the same white-board to change the design over the course of ten years of maintenance. Use tools, free or otherwise and be a professional.

Creating an Artificial Einstein with JXTA

One of the more visionary people I met today (well... yesterday because it is now 2:00am) was Jeff Zhuk of ITS Inc. Jeff is using Open CYC and JXTA to create a distributed knowledge system and expert system. How cool is that? I have done similar things, but Jeff is going for a massive solution that integrates thousands of people to build an expert system via peer to peer computing. In addition, Jeff teaches Java, JXTA, and JINI. He has all the pieces and is looking for help.

Einstein and Java Enterprise Server

Spent the morning at Sun looking at Java Enterprise System (JES). JES is a new way to deploy and license the infrastructure of an internet business. Sounds innovative, but I would say it just shows that there are finally some smart people at Sun thinking about doing things right. JES is built on the idea that most portals are really built of a dozen or so applications like the portal application framework, web server, application server, calendar, email, instant messaging, LDAP, single sign on and many others. All of these pieces are usually put together one at a time and with a lot of work dedicated to getting them to actually work as a single unit. My past is littered with the with the wasted and long hours or complete failures because of applications not mixing well. What Sun has done is create a clean integration of all of these tools that runs smoothly and is tested as a unit to discover integration problems. The end result is a lot of the core business software is up and ready to use in a few hours. Think about the Integration of all the software components that make up the infrastructure. They are like building an airplane from little pieces and a blueprint. Instead, JES is a fully assembled and tested Lear Jet.

Like I said, not really innovative, but it takes a lot of work and politics to integrate all your standalone products into a single install, with a single interface for management, and one application to license, and get maintenance agreements on. My hat is off to the guy that proposed such a departure in the Sun way of doing business.

But now to the second part of the innovation of JES that might give JBoss a run for their money. The JES set of componenets in the common install management tools is available with a cool procing model. Think about having it all with a portal application framework, web server, application server, calendar, email, instant messaging, LDAP, single sign on and many others for just $100 a year per full time employee. This is just the business model for pricing and not some magic number that is part of the CPU count, the number of gigabytes of storage, email accounts, your first born child, and a chariot that turns into a pumpkin at midnight. The key is that this is just a way to price the system, it is not the price for the number of actual users. This just buys support for the tool and your software updates.

This is more cool and obvious if we look at a company that has 100 employees for a cost of 1000*$100 (it is free up to 99 employees but there is no maintenance). Now even though the company bought the 1000 employee license, they can have a million customers and their 1000 employees use the system without any additional costs(except for the pesky hardware). A good example is Google with 5,000 employees and 7 million customers would only need to pay for the 5,000 employee license. The economies of scale look like open source with maintenance.

The tools are all based on open standards, not open source. Seeing and modifying code is not an option. But when you have a good maintenance agreement, the risk and cost of maintaining open source verses a maintenance contract is about the same or better since most of the components are usually used as is and not customized. Because they are tested as a suite, there is even less need for the IT department to be fiddling with code that should be considered infrastructure rather than custom applications. Of course this is still a modular system and you can swap out almost any piece with an open source or commercial alternative (like the application server).

Is Sun really a winner with JES? Hard to say at this point. They have happy customers so far with the first release and a model that is hard to ignore. The application server and all those component parts are newly rewritten and running fast and seem scalable. They could be a market leader in their own J2EE market. Really! Stranger things have happened. Stay tuned.

One more day

One day to go here at JavaOne. Time to pull out all the stops and meet as many people as you can and collect ideas and business cards. Make friends, learn from them, and help them as much as you can. We are all in this together and we are a community. Get out there and make the Java world a better place!

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