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JavaFX – In more places than Flash

In a recent podcast put out by the good guys over at JavaPosse, Brian Goetz made an interesting comment near the end

JavaFX code compiles down to ordinary Java classes, so a simple JavaFX program can run anywhere you have a JVM. now hardware support for acceleration is different for different devices, but the intention is to have a program that will run on a phone, on a desktop, on an Applet, in a Blueray device, anywhere where Java can run. Flash dominates in the RIA space and there is excellent support in Windows, and pretty good support on the mac, and random support on other platforms. Java has the advantage where there is good JVM support on many more platforms, including mobile platforms. ~ Brian Goetz

If having your application work mobile and on the desktop and in the browser matters to you, I feel this will be a big consideration for you when choosing your RIA platform

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Quote of the Weekend

I think web 3.0 is going to be about the real time web. XMPP is going to play a major role in this movement… ~ Ezra Zygmuntowicz

I found this quote in an article up on InfoQ discussing EngineYards ‘backbone’ work in Cloud Computing. They are developing a new platform called Vertebra that will use Erlang and Ruby to ‘automate the cloud as well as distribute real time application development’. It sounds like Vertebra will be both a deployment tool and a back end messaging platform, using XMPP. XMPP is the messaging protocol used by the Jabber community.

This is exciting stuff, especially when Ezra mentioned that they will be open sourcing their technology. Imagine if hosting providers could standardize on one distribution platform whereby work could be passed along beyond institutional borders. One hitch may be billing, but I don’t think so. The math behind atomic charge-backs has already been calculated by the phone industry, a model they have always operated under.

Real Time Web. It makes more sense to me than a semantic web as far as a web 3.0 stake in the ground.

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Google – Good Software Overcomes Bad Hardware

Webware.com has an article on the technology behind the search superpower Google. The article covered a presentation by Jeff Dean in the 2008 Google IO conference. Google is somewhat famous for having shunned conventional wisdom a bit by building their empire on throw-away hardware. Quoting the article:

In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover

For most any other company, that would have been a very unhappy story. Yet for smart companies like Google, getting service reliability without reliable hardware is part of the advantage. All of these outages are handled skillfully by Google software. Its the software that redirects queries around these outages, distributing the work across hundreds of servers all at once. The little Network Engineer in me is screaming ‘That’s what I’m talking about!’ That isn’t just fully redundant, that’s approaching biological complexity. The brain’s software can do some amazing things despite the hardware being unreliable. Does that then imply that the google search service has reached phone company levels of availability? A hint might be in their next big engineering hurdle; Datacenter to Datacenter switching of jobs, seemlessly. In otherwords, one big Namespace.

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