A New Life

Almost a year has passed since Oracle bought Sun, and a lot of my fellow Sun:ers have left, including me. Not very surprising, maybe, as it turned out that Sun’s and Oracle’s corporate cultures where radically different. Sun was an engineering company, founded by engineers, run by engineers and catered for engineers. One of the mistakes that Sun mad, in my opinion, was to forget that and when we finally remembered, it was too late.

Oracle, on the other hand, are focused around sales. Whereas the most prestigious jobs at Sun was in engineering, the most prestigious ones at Oracle is in sales. Sun developed products and technology in the hope that someone would buy it, Oracle develops products and technology to have something to sell. An attitude difference that is obvious when on the inside, and which colors everything in the two organizations. Maybe Oracle will change…

I’m now at Xebia, a consultancy company from Netherlands that currently is establishing a new office in Sweden. I honestly thought that I wanted to stick to large corporations for the rest of my life, the international organizations, the great resources, and all that, but as it turns out, I love working for what this far must be considered a startup. There’s five of us, three old comrades from Sun Java Center, and our CEO and our office manager. It’s great to get some of the old gang together again. The really fun part is that we have quickly identified programming languages in general and Scala in particular, as a common interest and something that we want to focus on. We’ve already planned two Scala trainings that is open to the public this Spring. One by programming language researchers and amazing teachers Tobias Wrigstad and Johan Östlund, and one direct from the source: Scala Solutions. (More on that a little later)

All in all, my new life is interesting and I get to focus on two things I really like: leading the design and development of complex software systems, and tinkering with programming languages. This will be fun.

And so it begins

The EU Commission has approved the acquisition of Sun by Oracle: press release. I guess it’s finally happening. I will miss Sun, horribly, but this is one of the most welcome press releases I’ve ever read.

Ever wondered …

… what it takes to become an artist?
My fiancee Matilda has just started a blog over at WordPress where she will blog about her struggles to become a glass artist. Currently, she’s studying at the Bornholm Glass and Ceramics School in Denmark.

One of her more interesting projects to date is this “diptych” on luxury that started out as an assignment to redesign a 19th century fruit bowl and ended up as two 24 inch by 24 inch glass cubes, one on Paris Hilton and the other on Guantanamo.

Please join me in wishing her good luck with her future career.

Tactics?

IBM to buy Sun? I think someone is using the Wall Street Journal to overshadow our cloud launch today. I can’t remember how many speculations on who wants to buy Sun I’ve heard during my almost ten years at Sun. Anonymous sources…

Games in Java

This June, I’ll be part of the Jury for the Swedish Game Award, a game development challenge for students at the universities in Sweden. It will be absolutely great fun! I was in the jury last year as well, and it’s definitely one of the best times I’ve ever had. The number and quality of the submissions are stunning and we in the jury get to spend both pitching sessions with talented game developers and one very hectic jury weekend playing about 50 games.

This year, Sun is sponsoring a new category: JavaFX. The only rule for the category is that your game has to run on the Java Virtual Machine, everything else is open. Of course, we expect a number of entries written in JavaFX Script, others to be JavaME games and some games to be something completely different like PulpCore or Scala, that could be fun.)

Anyway, to kick-start the category, we’re holding a Game Developers Evening tomorrow night (Tue 10th of February) where I will introduce the JavaFX Script programming language, and talk some on writing games using JavaFX together with Phys2D, JInput, JOGL and other stuff as well as packaging the game as an applet or as a JavaWebStart application. To prepare for the talk I needed to write a couple of (very simple) games and decided that it would be a nice blog post series. So, over the next couple of weeks I will go through the steps of writing simple games for the Java platform to show you my learning path. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Congratulations America!

Congratulations America! Electing Obama as your next president is one of the greatest things you’ve ever done. You have shown once again that when really want, you can be more progressive than the rest of us put together. To be really honest, I didn’t think you had it in you, but you proved me wrong and I stand corrected. I think I owe you an apology. This week, you made the world a little bit better.

Thanks!

No JavaSE 6 in Leopard

MacOS.X Leopard has arrived,
but alas no JavaSE 6. Worse: I can’t even download the pre-release that was available earlier from developer.apple.com any longer. Which means that as I don’t want to automatically transfer my four year old installation on my old PowerBook G4, I won’t be able to run JavaSE 6 on my new MacBook Pro 15″ when it arrives, hopefully next week. Apple: this was your chance to set things straight with the Java community. We’ve heard rumors of a JavaSE 6 with resolutionless support and other goodies, but no.

Instead, you’ve decided to pull it all together. Not even a pre-release. Not even a road map. Not even a date when we can expect some sort of version of JavaSE 6. I’m this close to canceling my order. I wonder if I can still do that on Monday.

I will run it anyway; on Solaris and Ubuntu on VMWare Fusion. But it’s a hassle to have to start VMWare whenever I want to do use the Java Scripting Framework, which is one of the things I do a lot right now. And it also means that whenever I’m presenting on conferences and other events, it will be Solaris or Ubuntu that will be on the huge screen above my head, not MacOS.X.

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Update: It turns out that there is a version of JavaSE 6 for Leopard, but Apple’s license rules on what you’re allowed to disclose when a member of Apple Developer Connection doesn’t allow me to publish anything about it. According to the terms is any unauthorized disclosure of information on pre-realse software prohibited. Sometimes I think Apple is it’s own worst enemy.

Best News (Ever)

This has to be the best news ever for anyone using a mobile phone. Since my USB-charger that I brought for this trip was broken in Italy and I now have almost no battery left in my phone, this hits very close to home at the moment. Fortunately I’m going to the Montréal Ericsson office today and I have a Sony Ericsson phone, so I should be able to find a charger somewhere there, I guess. It amazes me, though, that it took the industry so long. Chargers are obviously a unnecessary cost to add to a phone. I think I have at least a dozen Sony Ericsson-chargers lying around in my drawers at home. If they could cut that out from the packaging, distribution and support, they could probably save a lot of money. Not to mention the environment, of course.

I’ve long held that the handset manufacturers should stop packaging chargers with the phones and have the phone stores hand out chargers for free to anyone that wants it, and anyone who, like me, already have a dozen chargers wouldn’t have to waste more resources by consuming another meaningless piece of equipment. This could even be a step further in that direction: only one type of charger which means even less meaningless strain on the environment. Let’s also hope, since it’s USB, that all data-communication with the device will be done through that plug and we’ll not need a special cable for that either.

On another note, I’m now in possession of a SunSPOT-kit which I will demo at different kind of events. They are so fun much fun and really, really easy to program. The problem, though, is as always to come up with good demos. Anyone have a fun demo idea for two small Java-computers with accelerometer, light- and temperature-sensors?

ISO Disapproved OOXML

This is indeed great news for the free world and international standards alike: ISO voted no to OOXML. The matter is not settled yet, but at least it means that the rather unbecoming turns around the vote didn’t pay off. It’s not that I want to deny Microsoft their standard, but OOXML just isn’t very good (6000 pages) and there already is a standard: ISO/IEC 26300 – ODF.

Read more here: noooxml, and here: ISO.org.

Project Polyglot

Last night I commited a request to java.net to start Project Polyglot. The ball is rolling. The stuff I’ve been talking about in lectures and talks at different events here in Sweden is finally supposed to get somewhere. I don’t know exactly where yet, but I must admit that I’m rather excited about it. I have more than a few ideas, of course, but they are all over the place so far. If accepted, the first phase of the project will be some serious exploration to come up with a decent model for cross-language interaction. Hopefully, I will be able to talk about it at the Javaforum meeting in Gothenburg and at the Bergen Java User Group next week.