Chris Johnston

I was reading an interview with Tim Orielly in the May edition of Linux Format and came across a very interesting statement. Now this is taken completely out of context, but I think the point stands on its own. He said something along the lines of building an Internet OS and creating this great machine of which the current interent is only a prototype. These two statements when placed together have really made me think.

We really are creating a form of giant distributed computer through our creations for the internet. More and more, individual autonomous systems are loosing their autonomy as they include RSS feeds and other technologies that allow both for the website to interact with other sites and for individuals to interact with the site. In addition, the creation of web services is allowing for even more conectivity in the world of online applications.

The real question is; what will this global distributed machine be like? Considering what technology can already due — SETI at home and other distributed computing applications, Grid computing, web services, etc — the future should be very interesting. The most interesting thing about all this is what will power the future. Unless someone really does come up with a totally new internet OS, the current pick seems to be Linux. This may be a race that Microsoft eventually looses. From everything I hear, they are loosing the internet server race to linux and open source based technologies like php and mysql.

I really know very little about J2EE and the way that it is suppose to be used to construct websites. It just seems to me, in my limited exposure to it, to be overly complicated. I have built websites using PHP, ASP, and ColdFusion and have never seen a mess like what I see when I go into work each day.

I was always under the impression that web applications were rather straight forward. You had your webroot under which was housed all the files that made up that application. At least this is the way that is works in php, asp, and coldfusion. In the j2ee applicaton that I have to work on, everything is buried deep inside java packages under a src directory, this includes the jsp files, not just the java classes. Is this the way it is suppose to work?

Now granted, I work for the government and governments like to make things incredibly complicated.

All that aside though, I keep seeing articles expressing the idea that J2EE and EJB is way to complex and needs to be simplified[1]. Even netcraft has a graph showing .NET overtaking J2EE[2] in terms of server use. There has got to be a reason for this. I have not created a website using ASP.NET yet, but is definitely looks simpler than creating one in J2EE — another thing that I still have yet to do.

Maybe it is just this whole government over complexity thing that has got me going. I am working on what should be a very small, very simple application. All that it is being used for is to track the projects that are being worked on. That is all. This is an applicaton that would take about a week to properly implement in ColdFusion and they have been working on it for 6 months now! The question is this just them or an inherint problem with working with J2EE?

Anyway, hopefully over time I can find an answer to my question: is there really any use for J2EE? I can definitely see a use for Java and Java based desktop applications, but I am not so certain about J2EE.

[1]On mountain biking and J2EE
This links to the actual article, but it contains some interesting comments that are worth reading.
[2]ASP.NET Overtakes JSP and Java Servlets
Cool thing is that this graph shows ColdFusion still in the lead.

This is very cool;

“Sun Microsystems scored a big sales win Monday, landing Canada’s elementary and secondary schools as its latest customers for the open source-based StarOffice 7 office productivity suite. The Ontario Ministry of Education acquired StarOffice licenses for all the province’s 72 public and Catholic school boards, making it potentially the largest StarOffice 7 delivery in North America. As a result, about 2.5 million students eventually will have access to one of the leading alternatives to Microsoft Office.”

The only thing that bugs me about the article is the comments at the end of it. Sure, StarOffice isn’t open source, but it ain’t Microsoft either and it is still opening the eyes of children everywhere another alternative.

If Linux is about choice, than this choice is a good one.

Article link

I posted an update to the codebase that powers this little website about 2 weeks ago. However, when I did this, I had not completed the admin console. this meant that I could not post any new news items to the site.

Never do this!

Actually, I think I need to add a little disclaimer to my site that says something like:

This site is a live experiment in creating a Content Management System. As such, you may encounter bugs during your visit. If you do, please visit later and hopefully they will be fixed. Or use the contact page to let me know what went wrong.

Anyway, as you can see, I now have an Admin console (a tad primitive, but it post news items) and I am back on the air.