4 things I read more recently (about REST)

I'm currently swamped doing non-blog stuff. But still I seem to take time out to read other blog entries, this time on REST web services. Ok, ok, I know, REST isn't strictly web services, that's why I'm reading ;)

Following are 4 posts about REST I checked out more recently that you might be interested in:

• Subbarao at Testeraly demos RESTful Web Services in 60 Seconds showing how to publish a Java REST web service via NetBeans and GlassFish

• /dev/sprout has a go at explaining why he thinks How REST will neuter Web Services

• Steve Jones points out there might be more to scaling REST than meets the eye, with REST on Mars - scaling the problem to make a point

• Finally Bex links to a recent post where Damien Katz comes out swinging against REST

Hmmm, suddenly it doesn't feel like REST is the cool-kid on the block anymore.

4 things I read more recently (Java vs .Net vs the world blah blah blah)

It's an old story that's going to continue in the IT industry for at least the next qwzillion years, the "my technology is better than yours blah blah blah" saga. Of course it makes for interesting reading. The following are posts generally related to Java and .Net:

• In Defence of Java - Michael Kolling writes why he thinks Java was designed with a number of needed language compromises at the time, followed by the usual open flood gates on "Java-sucks-no-it-doesn't" blog comments.

• J2EE Vs .NET : Are major development shops moving to .NET? - Meera Subbarao picks up the discussion about Java vs .Net, but attempts to skip the technology issue and instead look at industry trends, whether there is a full stampede towards .Net away from the Java arena. The conclusion: management could do with a slap.

• Developer Spotlight: Hitting the Seam with Gavin King - Not so much an interview with Gavin King about Seam, but about his view on a whole lot of things happening in the Java arena and the challenges facing it.

• The coming of .Net – Peter Bright has a rant how Microsoft's .Net had potential but missed the boat in tidying up Microsoft's operating system mess as well as providing a generally poor and inconsistent API set. Follow the whole multi-part series for some interesting reading on Apple.
  

Why neither Apex or JDeveloper are actually "free"

I've always had trouble with the word "free". Because the people who bandy it around are typically in marketing and sales (or consulting ;). And they wouldn't be in a job if they actually sold stuff for "free".

Recently PsyBlog had a well articulated blog entry describing this sales-speak: FREE! But at What Price?

This is why the marketing for Apex and JDeveloper as "free" doesn't sit well with me, and neither the zeal behind the Apex and JDev camps with the argument "but it's free!". To me free means 100% free. No conditions attached. Forever. Covers all cases for you and me and everyone else. There shouldn't be a "yeah-but" situation with free.

As such Apex strictly isn't free because the majority of users are running it on a purchased licensed Oracle database edition. Of course it's "free" if you use it on Oracle XE, but I've yet to find a single customer with a substantial Oracle install willing to downgrade to the Oracle-lite version. I'm not saying there aren't Oracle XE sites out there, but (from my subjective experience) in the scheme of things most Oracle customers aren't using Oracle XE for production purposes. The Oracle salesman already got'em.

In turn JDeveloper isn't strictly "free" either. Arguably the IDE is, but JDeveloper is coupled with ADF (not free), WebCenter (not free) and SOA (not free). If we specifically look at ADF it is "free" as long as you own an OAS license or pay a per user seat license.

A question arises though, why did Oracle bother to make these tools "free", or more specifically the marketing exercise of "free"?:

Arguably for JDeveloper it was the other competing Java IDEs, namely Eclipse and NetBeans are free, so Oracle needed to compete on the same playing field to entice those sarcastic and critical Java crowd. For Apex the reason is not so clear to me as I don't work in the Apex circles and maybe a reader can put their opinion forward. If Apex only runs on Oracle, why bother with the "free" marketing unless it's just a feel-good? Why not just say SQL and PL/SQL are also free with the database? Why did they pick Apex? To compete with JDev? I dunno.

So the next question arises, how could Oracle go about making these tools really "free" (be it a realistic dream or not)?:

For JDeveloper it's obvious. If you couple a component such as ADF with the IDE, then remove any of the OAS license caveats. Otherwise if you're going to include another part in the base download, either make it free or strip it out as a clear downloadable plug-in.

For Apex, if I use an Oracle non-XE edition (eg. SE, EE etc), and I use no features but those available to Oracle XE, and Apex, then make it free across the board, database included, regardless of edition.

Realistic: no?

Idle Friday musings?: yes.

Give you a good chuckle?: I hope so.

Oh, and I'm still waiting on Oracle to apply the same "free" marketing to Oracle Forms, be it "free" as long as you install to OAS ;)

BTW, take time to check out other articles on PsyBlog. My recent favourite: How Children Learn the Earth Isn't Flat.

4 things I read more recently (which language will make me filthy rich!)

People spend a lot of time arguing their language is best. A pointless exercise. They really should focus on which language is going to make them dirty rotten filthy rich!:

• The TIOBE Programming Community Index is worth revisiting every once in a while to see the popularity of different programming languages, including Java and others:

• Deirdre Blake at DrDobbs Portal has an interesting interview with the managing director of TIOBE Programming Languages: Everyone Has a Favorite One, pointing out that in the last 5 years the market leader language rankings haven't changed much.

• Simon on if by whiskey has a look at the relative salaries of Java, .Net, Ruby and PHP programmers under his post Rails - do you want fries with that? and makes some interesting conclusions about the best career choices.

• Dr Salary (aka Dr Al Lee) takes a detailed look at Software Developer Salaries: Ruby on Rails vs Java

• Java Jobs in Decline? Not So Fast! - James Sugrue on JavaLobby throws the idea in the air that Java isn't on a decline, it's the whole IT industry. Doom doom doom I say! Make sure to check out the comments

Okay, so that's 5 entries. Oops.

New Aussie "Oracle" bloggers

The secretive, sinister, gloomy, doomy and sightly damp Oracle Australian halls maybe opening themselves to a bit of outward inspection ;) Oracle's Barry Matthews, Carl Terrantroy, Paul Ricketts, Saul Cunningham and Steve Williamson have started the GTMi Team Blog - Australia New Zealand (ANZ).

Now to be honest GTMi sounds suspiciously like a marketing **** term, but I know enough about these guys to give them the benefit of the doubt that they know the Aussie and Kiwi crowd will turn their nose to such dribble. Instead I hope they will aim at some very interesting down to earth local content rather than towing the Oracle corporate line (which mainly involves wearing suits and attempting to talk like an American I might add ;).

Good luck to the crew and hopefully we'll see more bloggers from the Aussie Oracle halls soon?

New Oracle Community groups

OracleCommunity.Net is up and kicking, and I'd like to advertise the fact that I've created the following groups that you may join:

• Australia
• Bloggers
• Designer
• Express Edition
• Forms
• Portal
• SQL Developer

.... + many others by other great Oracle enthusiasts. Please join and participate in some great Oracle discussions!

New Aussie Oracle database blogger

Yah, my 100th blog post! You just can't shut me up.

Talking about people you can't shut up, with Marcel Kratchovil this year I had the chance to meet Richard Foote from the Australian Capital Territory (you know, where Canberra the capital of Australia is) at OOW this year. Richard is an ex-ACT Oracle User Group President, is full of great DBA stories and good opinions to boot, and I note he had a number of people rapped at his OOW Unconference session on indexes.

Richard has decided to finally dive in as an Aussie Oracle blogger, with his new blog Richard Foote's Oracle Blog. While I'm not going to give Richard any points for an inspiring blog name (sorry Richard, with a surname like "Foote" you had so many great puns you could have gone with), I wish him all the luck in his new blog endeavours.

+1 to the Aussie team. 0 for the rest of the World.

In the Mix - Oracle User Groups

It didn't take long for Oracle user groups and SIGs to be represented on Oracle's new site mix.oracle.com. The Mix proves to be a particular good fit for the user groups, because it allows non-technical discussions and posting of ideas for each group, unlike other technical forums hosted by Oracle or the user groups in particular.

If you're a registered user of the Mix, take the chance to dive in and start posting ideas and questions for your respected group. Given enough votes your ideas could persuade the group to take action.

User groups:

• Australian Oracle User Group - AUSOUG
• German Oracle Users Group - DOAG
• Higher Education User Group - HEUG
• Northwest Oracle Users Group (USA) - NWOUG
• Oracle Applications Users Group - OAUG
• Oracle Development Tools User Group - ODTUG
• Quest International Users Group
• San Diego Oracle Applications User Group - SDOAUG
• Standard Life Oracle User Group - SLUG
• Turkish Oracle Users - OracleTURK

Special Interest Groups (SIGs):

• Contracts SIG
• Quest Public Sector SIG
• UKOUG Development Engineering SIG

Miscellaneous:

• International Oracle User Council Product Development Committee - IOUC PDC
• OAUG Customer Support Council
• Second Life Oracle Users Groups

Apologies to any groups I missed out. Note I also haven't had the chance to check that these are all legitimate user groups, but you get the idea.

4 things I read more recently (about all things "developer" and "programmer")

4 things I read more recently about "developer stuff":

• Cost of Developer Interruptions - having been a consultant at many customers' sites, I'm used to being stuck in all sorts of odd locations, including cupboards, hallways and kitchens. Mostly the environments are noisy, and interruptions are undoubtedly a productivity killer, especially to my Internet surfing. David Carr blog's about his observations on this issue.

• Programming can ruin your life - boy, I nearly feel like Marvin the Robot after reading this article posted on devizen. I'm not depressing you am I?

• Thirteen Patterns of Programmer Interviews - it would be funny if it wasn't so true -- I haven't had to undertake a serious interview for just on 7 years, having realised they're all a farce. Greg Jorgensen blogs at Typical Programmer the kind of joke interviews we all need to go through at some stage. Thanks to devizen for the original link.

• Younger developers are better & faster? - apparently old people "learn dumber" at programming. Rey Bango asks should old programmers retire into management and let all the whipper-snappers take over the programming world? At 32 years my opinion is, um, ah, am I considered young or old? Dunno.
  

Drowning in Oracle blog aggregators

Have you ever wanted to merge all the separate Oracle RSS aggregators into one, and subscribe to the merged feed?

Lazytom's FeedJumbler provides such a service, where you can list a number of RSS feeds, and FeedJumbler will publish a single RSS/Atom which you may subscribe to instead.

This has been a godsend for myself, having nearly drowned in Oracle aggregator feeds more recently. The FeedJumbler site feed makes it very easy to see duplicate entries and only read what I need to.

Now, if I could only find another RSS service that eliminates duplicates from a feed, I'll have 100% perfection.

4 things I read more recently (about Java)

This is a my usual regular post on links around the web I've been reading, this time posts specifically related to Java that may interest those in the Oracle Java and JDeveloper arenas:

• Get to know Java EE 5 - the last few months has seen the publication of some good "new features" Java posts, including this one from Roland Barcia at IBM that specifically looks at JEE. Articles like these are good for those who don't have time to read the huge array of publications but would like to keep up to date in a concise form. Obviously being from IBM this article has a Websphere focus but looking further afield to see what others are doing can provide some valuable information.

• Java EE 6 wishlist part 2 and part 3 - the wheel never stops turning and JSR 316 has been approved for the development of JEE 6.0 specification. Already the Hibernate Team have jumped forwards for suggestions on improvements and issues to be addressed from J2EE 5.0 and earlier. These discussions I find interesting because I find my learning of JEE is fairly boxed in by the Oracle world and others sources can provide useful insight into what needs to be improved in the technology I use -- either that or I just like reading stuff and not doing any work. I linked to part 1 in a previous post.

• Why do people insist on doing EVERYTHING in Java? - I've encountered sites where I have to ask why are we using Java? -- where the only serious answer seems to be we're using Java because Java is Java. Huh? Anyway, Gregory Pierce has started a bit of a barney on why some sites insist on doing all development in Java. Your opinions may vary.....
  

• JUGs Offer More Than Free Pizza - okay, Jason Lee's post here could equally apply to any technical user group including Oracle User Groups. Given my own background as an Oracle Ace Director which was greatly facilitated by my committee participation in the Australian Oracle User Group, Jason's words ring true here for me, Java User Group or not. Forget all that Web 2.0 social website belavar, head out to your local user group meeting and meet some real people.

4 things I read more recently

Yet another 4 things I read more recently that you may be interested in:

• Comparing the GlassFish and OC4J Admin Consoles - I haven't had much time to look at other J2EE server consoles in comparison to Oracle's OC4J console. Jason Lee puts together a good summary of the consoles for these 2 popular products. Worth a read to see if the grass is greener....

• The grass isn't greener on the other side - talking about the green grass of yonder, there seems to be a large amount of negativity about the Java platform. Is the grass oh so greener on the .Net side? Cay Horstmann has a look at a few .Net woes.

• Is .NET or Java dying? - James Crisp undertakes a comparison of the .Net vs Java vs RoR job market, including some information from an Australian perspective.

• Developer Ramp up time - as a developer-consultant I've always taken the head-first approach into new work. Partially it's from the perspective of saving clients money, but more for the reason I just get bored waiting around for some organisations to get their act together to give me what I need to do my job. Such an approach apparently isn't the forte of everyone though. Derik Whittaker discusses his thoughts on why some developers ramp up faster than others on new projects.

My top 8 JDeveloper technical blog entries

I'm in the process of moving houses, states and family in Australia so time is just a little limited at the moment. This presents a great time to post a little re-hash of my blog and the top technical JDeveloper blog entries as ranked by my web counter, giving new readers a chance to look at some of my older material:

1. Using multiple faces-config.xml files in JSF
2. Back to programming: Programmatic ADF Faces Tree component
3. Some explicit language about implicit EL objects
4. Don't constrain yourself: displaying alternative database constraint error messages with ADF BC
5. Bah! What is JBO-35007?
6. Handy JDeveloper utility: the Http Analyzer
7. JDeveloper and the art of the rollback
8. I rest my case: Converting ADF BC EO/VO attributes to upper and lower case with custom properties

Of all the articles definitely the multi faces-config.xml files page gets the most hits each day, mostly from Google searches.

Happy reading..... and I intend to start posting again once I've driven to the other side of this big brown country of ours.

4 things I read more recently

Yet another list of 4 things I read more recently:

• New Features in Java Server Faces 1.2 - With the release of JDeveloper 11g TP, and its adoption of JSF v1.2, Rakesh Manganellore provides a summary of what new facilities are incorporated into the v1.2.

• What is the history of Structured English Query Language and what is its relationship to SQL? - I've taught SQL courses before, and even teach about good ol' Dr E F Codd to give students a perspective on this whole RDBMS gig, but never knew the history of SQL as separate to the RDBMS. Chris Collins tells us a SQL tale from yester-year.

• Ruby (on Rails) vs the world - Ruby and RoR confused me for sometime as there just didn't seem to be any negative publicity. I'm a solid believer in there is no golden chalice in software development, so I viewed the RoR advocacy with a fairly skeptical eye -- I'm not arguing Ruby or RoR isn't great, but technology is at its best when the marketing remembers to include the "not so good bits". Seems Ruby and RoR has been getting a bit of hard going over more recently from Joel, and in turn a reply from the Oracle AppsLab blog. Reminds me of the Apex vs JDev argument I (accidentally) started sometime back.
  

• The Cyclists - having lived in Melbourne Australia for the last few years, I'm an avid bicycle rider thanks to the hellish car-traffic mess that means travel by car or tram is slower thank bike in the inner city, and backed up in my general interest in all things to do with the environment. On a less serious note this YouTube video made me chuckle and reminded me that cyclists can be a fairly arrogant bunch -- me included (Original post thanks to Treehugger).

4 things I read more recently

The 4 following posts caught my eye more recently:

• Is REST Winning? - last time I worked with Web Services, REST had just appeared on the radar. With my head in the JDeveloper ADF box more recently, I missed a whole discussion on WS vs REST. However it's good for once to come in at the tail end of the debate saving me some actual "thinking" about the whole issue on my part. Stefan Tilkov gives his thoughts instead in this post.

• Uses of Pseudo Code in Development - my sweet point in coding is when I have to write a tricky routine, and need to resort to pseudo code to nut out the details. The challenge is made easier by the simple technique of pseudo code, a dry run of coding if you will without the constraint of whatever language you're using. It still surprises me I don't see more coders (read: any) using this technique. Nick Halstead gives a good summary and pointers on this .
  

• The blog is the new resume - technical blogs have other uses beyond documenting technical tips. Adam Darowski opened up an interesting discussion where blogging can help your career too.

• Forgetting may be part of the process of remembering - thank goodness I finally have an excuse for forgetting....., um......, (thanks to /. for the original link).
  

4 things I read this week (sort of)

I'm going to take a leaf out of Eddie Awad's great blog and publish some useful links from around the web. Like a lot of other bloggers I spend a fair amount of time reading other blogs, so it seems like an opportunity to a) catch what I'm reading in my own blog for later reference, and b) share the pain, ah, I mean the useful discoveries from time to time.

So it doesn't look like I'm ripping off Eddie too much, we'll call this the "4 things I read this week" post.

• In defence of the RDBMS - an post from the Hibernate Team about why "Object"-RDBMS just wont cut the mustard compared to good ol'RDBMS technology.

• Rethinking JSF - The Real Problem - JavaServer Faces, a key technology of Oracle's ADF Faces gets at times a bad wrap on the web. But why? According to Joseph Ottinger on TheServerSide.com the issue is the quality of the components in the base JSF specification. I wonder how Trinidad and ADF Faces RC fit into this picture?

• Core JavaServer Faces 2nd Ed - not so much a blog post and I haven't exactly read it yet, but rather a new edition of a popular JSF text by David Geary and Cay Horstmann that I'll get my hands on soon. I find such books invaluable as they give a 3rd party look at the whole JSF framework without the Oracle bias (for want of a better term - no offence intended to Oracle), and a useful insight into alternative explanation of JSF concepts.

• Ban the Bulb - I spend a lot of my time either a) playing games with my daughter, b) hacking with Oracle related stuff, or c) getting stressed about the environment. Australia has recently taken the initiative of banning the incandescent light bulb. A lot of decisions made by the Australian Federal government (IMHO) just show no foresight but for making money for some geezer or other, but this one seems to be all good so far. I'm currently researching if anybody has any cons on the compact fluorescents replacement - the only arguments so far appears to be that CFLs can contain mercury which are a danger when they break, and they don't work with dimmer switches, both of which are pretty trivial issues.
  

This post also allows me to trial ScribeFire for the first time, a blog editor add-on for Firefox.