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July 11, 2003
Beyond Struts
I'm in a session by MichaelÊRimov from Centerline Computers and CraigÊMcClanahan from Sun Microsystems, Inc. called "Beyond Struts."
Michael is the lead developer on the Expresso project, an open source framework for building data driven applications on top of Struts. From the web site: Expresso adds capabilities for security, robust object-relational mapping, background job handling and scheduling, self-tests, logging integration, automated table manipulation, database connection pooling, email connectivity, event notification, error handling, caching, internationalization, XML automation, testing, registration objects, configuration management, workflow, automatic database maintenance and JSP tag library etc. Expresso is a significant extension to Struts and demonstrates the ability of Struts to serve as the foundation for other, significant frameworks.
Craig is giving a case study on Struts and XML. While most Struts applications generate HTML, Struts can be used to generate XML. The resulting XML can be used by another machine or translated into HTML or some other mark-up for the client device. There's more information on the Jakarta website on packages for doing this.
JavaServer Faces is a serve-side user interface component framework for Java-based web applications. The goal is to reach out to corporate developers who are more comfortable with VB or other scripting languages and to provide tools for supporting GUI creation. JavaServer faces features an extensible UI component model, a flexible rendering model, and even and listener framework, a validation framework, basic page navigation support, and internationalization and accessibility. JavaServer Faces does a lot of what Struts does, but that doesn't mean that JavaServer Faces will replace Struts. They can be used together. A Struts developer can use Struts and things built on it like Expresso and still take advantage of the rich GUI environment that JavaServer Faces provides.
11:42 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Miguel de Icaza: The Mono Project
MiguelÊde Icaza is talking on Beyond .NET: The Mono Project. Mono is a virtual machine, a set of class libraries, and development tools for an open source version of C#. The project is two years old. Miguel is an entertaining speaker.
Dan Olsen and I have had some Java vs. C# discussions. Dan is sold on C#, I've primarily been stopped by two things: (1) I need a bigger difference than the one that exists between java and C# to learn another language and (2) I'm not happy to be locked into a Microsoft environment---in fact I'll avoid it at almost any cost. Miguel says that C# is a decent language. Better than that, Miguel says that the runtime engine (CIL) makes it a language that will last. Even if he wants to change languages later, the runtime engine ensures that the C# he writes now will be useful with anything that runs on that runtime. With an open source runtime, that's a real advantage.
11:03 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Von Neumann's Universe: Coding (and Engineering) at the IAS, 1945-1956
George
Dyson (Esther's brother) is speaking about Von Neumann's Universe: Coding (and
Engineering) at the IAS, 1945-1956. George is a resident scholar at the
Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and go through the archives. His
father, Freeman Dyson
is an emeritus professor of IAS and a renowned scientist.
He's showing documents, pictures and some of the original drawings and
schematics. The documents are full of names that are instantly
recognizable, Godel, Pauli, Einstein.
EDVAC was the name of the computer designed and built there. The budget for designing the machine was $50,000. George has schematics for and and or gates, adders, and other devices that are still recognizable. Many components and design details that we'd recognize as being part of today's computer designs:
- central clock
- modular design
- "words" representing "order codes" handled in memory just like numbers
The talk is full of interesting and humorous quotes from the documents. For example, James Lighthill, an IAS official said in 1954:
It is time von Neumann revolutionized some other field of study. He has studied automatic computation long enough.
The talk is very appropriate in a conference on OSS because of the way that it was built. As what was largely a large scale university research project, the information was freely disseminated and the documents show NCR, IBM, and other universities checking them out and receiving distributions.