Searching for something

Searching for something different.

I received 18 photos around the world as part of a game and I should find where they were taken. In the meantime I succeeded with 17 of them and one last is missing. Since I am allowed to use all means of help (except the photographer himself) I am asking you if you recognize the place where the image was made.

Will you succeed?

My first guess would have been either somewhere around Punta Arenas (Magellan Straight) or Ushuaia (Beagle Channel).

In the meantime, I found the solution:

Patagonia is completely wrong. The picture shows the Aoraki (Mount Cook) in New Zealand.

After day two at Jazoon, another short summarization of my thoughts and impressions.

This day started with a keynote by Roy T. Fielding, talking about his work on RESTful APIs. Was quite interesting to hear how the work on his PhD thesis evolved into a widely used principle of interacting with resources in the web – and how unwelcome it has been to certain people. However, if someone did not have and idea about Representational State Transfer, I don’t think that he would have found out on that occasion. Later on, Philipp H. Oser of Elca had an entertaining talk on fighting the heterogenity when working with Java frameworks. Besides of – not meant to be serious – ideas of Sun acting as MS-like dictator or someone implementing an Uberframework (10% better than the rest), he explained the two most promising approaches. One being the Spring way: the usage of a dependency injection framework that allows developers to interconnect various frameworks in a common manner. The other approach would follow the principle of LAMP: bundling the most commonly used frameworks and adding some extensions, easy installation and template applications to it. And what technology would you use for weaving the parts of this bundle? Of course a dependency injection framework.

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Some impressions and thoughts on the first day of the Jazoon conference.

The future of Java seems to be about support of various programming language. Is this not paradox? Isn’t Java exactly one programming language? The situation reminds of the Bible’s story about the Tower of Babel, built by humans in order to reach a state equal to God. Following to this they got punished by speaking different languages, unable to communicate with each other again.

The use of several programming languages does not necessarily need to be a punishment for developers. Java’s attempts to compete on the presentation layer of web applications by technologies and frameworks such as JSPs, Java Server Faces, Struts, Spring MVC and various others never allowed an efficiency comparable to Jython, JRuby or Groovy. And in addition, Java is more than a programming language. At first place, the core of the technology stack is the virtual machine, allowing to run bytecode on any platform that has a Java Virtual Machine developed for it. That you could write Java bytecode compilers for any other language is obvious. And not that the Java platform is to be open sourced, everyone will be free to dig in deep and start working on that.

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Is Switzerland a competence center for Java development?

Not If you take the large developer conferences as an indicator. While JavaOne already took place in San Francisco earlier this year, Antwerp in Belgium will host JavaPolis and the various JAX conferences will be held in Munich, Singapore, Jakarta (where else would you expect a Java conference?), Wiesbaden and Bangalore.

Switzerland is left out there. Well – it was until this year. Beginning from next Monday we will have our own Java Developers Conference: Jazoon ‘07. It is branded as “the international conference on Java™ technology”, revealing the plans of the organizers to establish an event with – at least – European reputation. However, you could not expect them to reach this goal already in the first year. Most of the speakers are earning their money in Switzerland, with the sponsors it’s the same. Audience however is expected from 28 different countries, still most of them being Swiss. This does not tell anything bad about the conference itself but there are still some miles to go on the road to international relevance. Anyway, they managed to acquire some high-class people for the keynotes, such as Roy T. Fielding and Erich Gamma. (more…)

You probably know the saying “you should eat your own dog food”. It means that you should use your own products – everything else would tell your customers that you’re not trustworthy. Or would you buy a Mercedes if Dr. Dieter Zetsche was driving a Toyota?

With search engine vendors it’s the same. You would surely expect that the companies are using their own technology for searching their corporate websites, and of course they do. But how good are they at it? With most of the commercial search engine packages you can get average results with out-of-the-box configuration. For adding a really helpful service to your website however, you need to tweak and tune both data and software in order to being able to answer your users’ questions. No wonder that all vendors do not only offer their software but consulting on data aggregation, data cleansing and configuration of their products. So they must be experts at these tasks. But does this show as well on their own websites? Let’s chose three different vendors, navigate to their sites and ask them some questions – because they will know.

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After serious thoughts about whether to start my own blog or not I finally decided to do it.

Following my interests in internet technologies, software development and information retrieval you are supposed to find comments, ideas, experiences and critics on these topics. The mentioned subjects have become steady companions of mine anyway, as I am currently working for local.ch.

Since I just set up this blog, I will probably restructure, rename and redesign it constantly during the next few days / weeks.