Quickly: Conversation on EJB3 continued, Mac Love, Wordpress 2.0
Good conversation between Gavin King (inventor of Hibernate & EJB3 spec) and myself regarding my article on Java Lobby. He takes me to task on arguing to leave JBoss and JEE more open to disruptive technologies like Hibernate was.
Also, I’ve been busy moving all my code and environment over to my new iMac G5 I got myself for Christmas. I have been using Powerbooks for two years now since a lot of my work takes me all over and I needed a powerful system to follow me. However, considering it might be nice to have a dedicated desktop system to use when at home, I decided an iMac G5 was just enough of an investment to last me till the Intel chip switch (investing in a PowerMac at this point without seeing the Intel benchmarks would be a lot of money invested in an old platform). The Apple Store at Kenwood Towne Center did give me an (unintentional?)free upgrade that I didn’t want by giving me the iMac G5 with the wireless keyboard and mouse ($89 extra at Apple Store online). Unfortunately, I didn’t want this option because I was looking forward to getting the Mighty Mouse included for the right mouse click. Yes, I know they are generally bad and I do have a two button MS mouse, but I at least wanted to give it a go. I’m not certain if they were out of Might Mouse iMacs or if it was a packaging error (the employee scanned the box, the additional cost was not there).
If anyone doesn’t know about Apple’s excellent online service yet, .Mac, it is truly an incredible synchronization technology that is woefully missing on the Microsoft platform despite their attempts to do something like it in MSN. I moved all of my important documents, keynote presentations and code projects I wanted to be transparent across my Powerbook and iMac on to my Apple provided 2 GIG iDisk and told both to synchronize but keep a local copy (for speed). Also, .Mac synchronizes all of your calendar entries, address book entries, email, bookmarks, keychains (passwords and forms for the web and drive shares) and other system settings between the Powerbook and the iMac seamlessly. If you code on the iMac for two days, add lots of code to the project, and then open your Powerbook.. there is your code on the Powerbook. Same with an appointment you add to your Powerbook during a meeting, as soon as you go home and log in to your iMac.. there it is.
I knew it did this in theory but I had never before used it to keep everything in sync. It works wonderfully. (Both Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger, your mileage may vary).
It is a platform in itself, with the latest .Mac SDK 2.0 (Developer Preview 2) just released, which allows third party providers to write to this sync technology. Transmit, a great graphical FTP application, uses this SDK so that your list of FTP sites (and username / passwords) are updated between your computers - directly in the application - so that as soon as you launch Transmit the new FTP sites you may have added on your Powerbook now appear on your iMac. NetNewsWire also uses this to keep your RSS feeds synchronized across Macs, even keeping track of which articles you’ve read and which you have not. It’s not hard to imagine the other great applications using this technology.
Also, IntelliJ Idea on the Macintosh platform is a joy, although people should be wary of Apple’s latest J2SE 5.0 Release 4 Developer Preview 3 that appeared on the developer site two weeks ago, it seems to have some Swing bugs on redraw. I’d stick with the Apple J2SE 5.0 Release 3 for now.
Finally, I upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.0 two days ago. If you didn’t notice, it’s because it took 5 minutes (plus about 30 minutes to re-apply my stylesheet and code modifications I made to the old site). Wordpress has made the upgrade very easy, but for a 2.0 release the feature-set has not been added to greatly. However, a lot of the changes are under the hood and the site does appear faster. It even includes the AJAX goodies all web apps must have these days, but they are mostly just visual candy. For instance, when you delete an item the list fades to red and then disappears. Wooooo. Ahhhhh. Pretty!
The best things are to come in the future to be certain, when the plug-in developers begin working with the new 2.0 API. However, if you are holding off on upgrading to Wordpress 2.0 on downtime concerns, it’s not really an issue.
