Software Development Process and Industry Analysis by the former Editor of Software Development, Computer Language, and Game Developer Magazines
Archive for 12th June 2006
So I’m trying to write a program to manipulate the Tablet PC Input Panel from within a Java application. So I have to use JNI to interop with a native .DLL written in C++. My DLL uses Win32 to find the handles to the Java application edit windows and then uses COM to manipulate the TIP. I dunno’: I feel like throwing some gcroot<String ^>s in there, just to cover all bases.
I just bought David Goldberg’s “The Design of Innovation,” (his book “Genetic Algorithms in Search Optimization and Machine Learning,” is an exemplary piece of technical writing). On checkout from Amazon, I was asked if, for $16, I wanted to upgrade and get digital access to the book’s content. (It’s a $68 book.) I said “yes,” to investigate this new feature. It is not worth it. Look at this screen shot of the 200% zoom. as you can see, the text is bitmapped and hard to read. (You can even see noise from the page background.)
I am not an e-book fanatic, but am beginning to come around. Certainly, for me Zinio is better than waiting a month for a hard copy (the joys of Hawaii). I feel strongly, though, that you have to have vector fonts, this will be doubly true with Vista’s much-improved display model.
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Download: I just bought David Goldberg’s $.one
The first two versions of Enterprise JavaBeans had a crucial problem: “enterprise” objects had a life-cycle different than that of “plain old Java objects.” Types were loaded differently, instantiated differently, and the rules for them going away were different. The justification boils down to “things are different over the network,” which is perfectly true, but ignores the problem that programmers balk at the requirement of juggling different life-cycles within the same solution.
WinFX / .NET Framework 3.0 is flirting with the same issue. Indigo/WCF, while having superior mechanics to EJB, also presents a different life-cycle for “enterprise” objects. As I said in “Should I Stay Or Should I Indigo?” last year, Microsoftian Don Box said WCF “extrud[es] a type system that we can think about independently of our CLR types,” the visibility of the “service facade” is independent of the “in-memory facade,” and WCF has attribute-based life-cycle control. By saying “it’s the .NET Framework 3.0″ I think MS is exactly repeating the EJB mistake. It is important that things that are different be packaged / named differently.
