Xavier Ducrohet has just announced the availability of Android 1.5.
If you are a developer you can go and grab it. Phone owners will have to wait for a few weeks before the new version is pushed to the phones.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Rod Johnson on Oracle Aquisition of Sun
The founder and CEO of SpringSource Rod Johnson shares his view of Oracle-Sun deal.
The corollary quote:
The corollary quote:
We agree with Oracle that enterprise Java has a big future. But Oracle does not own that future. One of the great strengths of Java is its developer and open source community. This is something that cannot be bought in the same way as a PeopleSoft or WebLogic application server business.Well said.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Oracle to Buy Sun. Doh
Quote from a Sun partners page:
SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 20, 2009 -- Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt.
Friday, April 17, 2009
MSE360: Next Gen Search Experience
I continue being impressed by the newcomer search engine MSE360. As I already mentioned this is a full-blown search engine rather that a decorating facade to something, of which there are plenty.
To be competitive in search today you have to be on par with Google in the core functionality and provide something else.
For my search interests MSE360 is at least on par with Google. On top of that there's a very nice presentation combining standard, media (video, images), social media (twitter, blogs), and wikipedia search results.
Each standard search entry has two little right-justified icons that currently lead me to the same "Site Details" page that provides basic site info, search engine index data comparative chart, social exposure meter, and other information.
Here comes my wishlist:
To be competitive in search today you have to be on par with Google in the core functionality and provide something else.
For my search interests MSE360 is at least on par with Google. On top of that there's a very nice presentation combining standard, media (video, images), social media (twitter, blogs), and wikipedia search results.
Each standard search entry has two little right-justified icons that currently lead me to the same "Site Details" page that provides basic site info, search engine index data comparative chart, social exposure meter, and other information.
Here comes my wishlist:
- Hopefully one day there will be a service a la Google Alerts that would allow me to get notifications about new search results
- I wish I could stop the auto-refresh of the Twitter "portlet"
- A more visually inspiring color scheme of the search results page would be great
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Android 1.5 "Cupcake" to be Released by the End of April
According to Xavier Ducrohet of Google, the next version of Android, codenamed "Cupcake", will be available by the end of the month.
There are tons of new slick and nifty features in the release such as iPhone-like accelerometer-based screen rotation, on-screen or "soft" keyboard, video recording, and stereo bluetooth.
My question is how backwards-compatible the release is. In other words, what will happen with the existing applications the day Cupcake hits the phones?
There are tons of new slick and nifty features in the release such as iPhone-like accelerometer-based screen rotation, on-screen or "soft" keyboard, video recording, and stereo bluetooth.
My question is how backwards-compatible the release is. In other words, what will happen with the existing applications the day Cupcake hits the phones?
Saturday, April 11, 2009
No Way to Programmatically Access Calendar on Android?
It looks like Android SDK does not currently provide a way to access the calendar application, i.e. you can't query, create, update, or delete calendar events programmatically. Pretty pathetic...
Hopefully Cupcake release of Android will have this "feature".
Hopefully Cupcake release of Android will have this "feature".
Blank Page in GWT Hosted Mode and Your IE Friend
I've started playing with the recent release of GWT and got puzzled right away by a virgin-empty page. What puzzled me even more was that the sample applications, as well as the ones I created from scratch, were showing up fine in my default Firefox browser.
A while later I figured that blank page is GWT-preferred way of saying that something went wrong. Not too inspiring but that our dull reality. And you are welcome to correct me and point me to that elegant way to see where things break.
Having browsed through a myriad of "gwt hosted mode empty" search results, I was still blank-stared and the blank screen.
Then it dawned on me that GWT relies on IE (Misrosoft Internet Explorer) for hosted mode and I've recently started upgrading mine to the most recent version.
As you might have already learnt, IE upgrade is a milti-step process that requires several reboots of your machine. Judging by the error dialog that was popping up when I was selecting "About Internet Explorer" Help menu item, I was somewhere in the middle of my reboot sequence.
I rebooted my machine and made sure I got new and shiny IE 8 installed and working. Then I tried the GWT stuff again - everything worked as a charm.
The moral of the story... If you plan on using GWT on Windows, you have to be friends with IE no matter what relationship with Microsoft you have otherwise.
A while later I figured that blank page is GWT-preferred way of saying that something went wrong. Not too inspiring but that our dull reality. And you are welcome to correct me and point me to that elegant way to see where things break.
Having browsed through a myriad of "gwt hosted mode empty" search results, I was still blank-stared and the blank screen.
Then it dawned on me that GWT relies on IE (Misrosoft Internet Explorer) for hosted mode and I've recently started upgrading mine to the most recent version.
As you might have already learnt, IE upgrade is a milti-step process that requires several reboots of your machine. Judging by the error dialog that was popping up when I was selecting "About Internet Explorer" Help menu item, I was somewhere in the middle of my reboot sequence.
I rebooted my machine and made sure I got new and shiny IE 8 installed and working. Then I tried the GWT stuff again - everything worked as a charm.
The moral of the story... If you plan on using GWT on Windows, you have to be friends with IE no matter what relationship with Microsoft you have otherwise.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Google Favors Jetty Servlet Container
According to a number of reports Google uses Jetty in both GWT and App Engine.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
GWT 1.6 Released
Somewhat shadowed by the announcement of Java support on App Engine, the news of GWT 1.6 release deserves a post of its own.
Release 1.6 features new project structure, enhanced hosted mode, overhauled event processing, and a couple of new widgets.
Ext GWT 2.0, due in a week, will be based on GWT 1.6.
Release 1.6 features new project structure, enhanced hosted mode, overhauled event processing, and a couple of new widgets.
Ext GWT 2.0, due in a week, will be based on GWT 1.6.
Google App Engine Supports Java
Yesterday at Campfire '09 Google announced App Engine for Java "Early Look".
While it's still to be understood what quality level "early look" thing stands for, the fact is the solution is out and beats my expectations to the punch. Wow.
I call it a "solution" as there are many pieces to the puzzle and a lot of them received a good thought.
First of all, Google plugin for Eclipse provides an integrated development environment. Yes, IDE stands for that but I'd like to emphasize the "integrated" piece as the plugin allows you to deploy the code directly to App Engine.
Here's a video that demonstrates how to build and deploy an application on Google App Engine with Google plugin for Eclipse:
Third-party frameworks and libraries such as Spring are good to go for the most part.
Data access is abstracted via JDO and JPA.
Overall direction of following Java standards is very welcome and somewhat unexpected.
Batch jobs are supported - a must for any serious undertaking.
The flip side?
A number of popular frameworks such as Grails do not currently run "as is" on the engine.
From reading the datastore documentation I got a sneaky suspicion that JPA support is mostly on paper at this stage. It would be great to have it debugged and documented in a future release.
The concept of datastore based on Big Table will call for application architectures radically different from traditional database-backed systems. Data normalization and joins are important in RDBMS world - App Engine architects will have to say "bye-bye" to them.
It's unknown how restrictive the Java restrictions really are for practical purposes.
The coming weekend should provide some insight on where the solution sits on the quality meter.
While it's still to be understood what quality level "early look" thing stands for, the fact is the solution is out and beats my expectations to the punch. Wow.
I call it a "solution" as there are many pieces to the puzzle and a lot of them received a good thought.
First of all, Google plugin for Eclipse provides an integrated development environment. Yes, IDE stands for that but I'd like to emphasize the "integrated" piece as the plugin allows you to deploy the code directly to App Engine.
Here's a video that demonstrates how to build and deploy an application on Google App Engine with Google plugin for Eclipse:
Third-party frameworks and libraries such as Spring are good to go for the most part.
Data access is abstracted via JDO and JPA.
Overall direction of following Java standards is very welcome and somewhat unexpected.
Batch jobs are supported - a must for any serious undertaking.
The flip side?
A number of popular frameworks such as Grails do not currently run "as is" on the engine.
From reading the datastore documentation I got a sneaky suspicion that JPA support is mostly on paper at this stage. It would be great to have it debugged and documented in a future release.
The concept of datastore based on Big Table will call for application architectures radically different from traditional database-backed systems. Data normalization and joins are important in RDBMS world - App Engine architects will have to say "bye-bye" to them.
It's unknown how restrictive the Java restrictions really are for practical purposes.
The coming weekend should provide some insight on where the solution sits on the quality meter.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Price Android Apps Available in Germany, Austria
According to an email I received from Android Market Support, priced applications are available in Germany and Austria.
Italy is slated next for free applications. Currently free applications are available in US, UK, Germany, France, Austria, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland, Australia, and Singapore.
In the coming weeks priced applications will be available in Netherlands, France, and Spain.
It's interesting to note that Spain is not listed among the countries where free applications are available. Or maybe it's just a typo...
Italy is slated next for free applications. Currently free applications are available in US, UK, Germany, France, Austria, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland, Australia, and Singapore.
In the coming weeks priced applications will be available in Netherlands, France, and Spain.
It's interesting to note that Spain is not listed among the countries where free applications are available. Or maybe it's just a typo...
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