crafterm's weblog

General banter... :)

James Gosling is currently travelling through Australia at the moment, talking at various venues around the country about lots of things including Sun, Java, etc.

Alan has some comments from his recent visit to Sydney which are quite interesting.

I was lucky enough to see James speak at JESS 99, the Java Enterprise Solutions Symposium in Paris, 1999. It was quite an cool and funny talk, they drew questions from a hat that everyone had written and he had to answer them on the spot. Some of the questions were FAQ, some really interesting, but all the answers were all insightful from the language designer.

It's interesting to see his comments regarding SWT. Personally I'm really fond of SWT and would take it into any desktop GUI project I'm working on. Aside from the performance quarrels that are abound I find it the better toolkit for a single reason, native integration with the desktop. Swing just doesn't cut it in this regard with it's emulated look and feel, especially on Linux.

Reading Jonathon Schwarz's weblog over the past few months has also been interesting as well - although I do find it far too anti-IBM for my tastes, particularly since IBM has done a lot for the Java and open source movement in general.

Talking of IBM and Java, I came across some rumours yesterday about a potential open sourced JVM from a large 3 letter unnamed vendor - who could that be. Quite interesting. An open and free implementation of Java that's industrial quality would be awesome, and only a good thing (TM) for the community. The real key though is opening up control over the standard language and API specificiation. Torsten and I were having a chat about this yesterday.

Torsten's just had a book published BTW which is awesome news, about the Jakarta Commons libraries. Great to see these libraries getting some more rap, they totally rock, I couldn't imagine working without them now!

Well, back to it I guess. :)

Posted by crafterm at February 2, 2005 11:47 AM