Some authors from Berkeley published a paper about their infiltration of the largest known Spam bot network. The article is an interesting example of carefully interpreted statistical data, but also a good analysis of anti-spam technologies and their effectiveness. Of course, the usual suspects could not resist to draw generalized (and wrong) conclusions from it …
Archive for November, 2008
Java EE 6 on the way
November 7th, 2008 by PeterTime is running so fast …
Sun is about to release a new beta version of their application server GlassFish, which will implement the next J2EE / Java EE version 6. As usual, Java EE 6 is based on a JCP document.
One new focus is on profiles, which allow to take a subset of the (huge) Jave EE API set and build an according “compliant” application server. The major use case are – of course – web applications. So the only profile under discussion so far is the “Web Profile“. This includes the unavoidable inclusion of REST support.
The more interesting part is called “pruning”. The Sun people aim at some cleanup of the historically grown API set, which is really a good idea. Most of the currently discussed removal candidates have more powerful replacements since EE 5, so this is not extremely painful. The early review draft document of the EE 6 spec says:
“Technologies that may be pruned in a future release are marked Proposed Optional below. Technologies that have been pruned are marked Optional below. There are no Optional technologies for Java EE 6.”
The “proposed optional” marking is so far only given for JAX-RPC and JAXR (search for “POPT” in the JCR document). So you can see that Sun remains extremely conservative with non-backward-compatible changes. This is somehow bad, because the burden of nearly unused small API’s is still there. Who ever used JavaMail ?
GlassFish will also add support for several JVM-based scripting languages such as JRuby. This smells like a reaction on the .NET idea, and is anyway a good step. The Java language / component model still contains huge design mistakes from the past (e.g. call-by-value vs. call-by-reference, package structure as directories, naming conventions as component layout, …), so it is wise to open up for alternatives. The realization strategy is nebulous, and the David Wheeler argument again strikes. JRuby wraps Ruby code in Java classes, which are instantiated by a Java application server, which is run by the virtual machine, which relies on operating system libraries, which rely on the operating system core functions, which …. Layers over layers over layers.