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Webcasts

In the last couple days I watched both Steve Jobs and Jonathan Schwartz keynotes.

I like Steve, he's a good speaker. On the other hand, Johnathan is apathetic as far as I'm concerned.

Steve really didn't have much to talk about. The whole thing could have been handled in 15 minutes. I'm also pretty tired of his old shtick. He really needs some new material.

I really had a hard time concentrating on what Johnathan was saying because of his monotone delivery, but he really made some interesting points.

The demos from both keynotes were laughable. I especially liked the Java Studio Creator one. Talk about showing absolutely nothing.

I have to tip my hat to Sun for really putting on a show; multiple angles, props, special effects, etc. Apple took its usual one lonely camera from the back of the room approach.

I have an idea for JavaOne 2005, let Steve Jobs open the show.

Creator

I spend a couple hours playing with Java Studio Creator. It didn't pass the "Can you do something really simple without looking at the documentation" test. But overall it wasn't that bad of an experience.

For some reason, the Sun Java Application Server was not installed the first time around. I couldn't figure out how to have Creator use the one already installed with J2EE 1.4. So, I re-installed.

Everything worked a lot better after that. I was able to create a new datasource (no MySQL by default, btw), create a few queries and display the results on various pages.

I think I'm most impressed with the ability to edit the code directly.

In many aspects it reminds me of the way Dreamweaver deals with datasources, result sets, etc.

If it is what Sun sees as a really easy-to-use RAD tool, Johnathan and Co. need to have another look at Visual Basic .NET.

Java Viruses

During his keynote, Scott McNealy asked if anyone could name a Java virus. Well, I sure can name a couple… and they were all engineered by Sun.

A virus by definition is an application which keeps on replicating itself. It does not necessarily have to be harmful. So…

Java Runtime Engine	Have you ever counted how many JRE are installed on your machine? Many applications install their own to ensure compatibility.
Sun Java System Application Server 8	Which is now installed (in different locations) with everything made by Sun (Creator, J2EE SDK, etc), or so it seems.

In my old Mac days, the top virus was called TeachText.