jeffrschneider wrote: > 2. Gregg Wonderly will suggest either JXTA or Jini as an alternative > to some solution on each and every post.
Quite while back I observed that most of the posts to this group were by fairly limited focus people who make money from products or services which they offer and which make it impossible for them to consider anything remotely capable of upsetting their focus. I've given up trying to convince anyone. Few if any of the disputers have actually deployed a Jini system in a production environment, from what I can tell. There are several misconceptions about Java and the RMI programming model that keep getting into printed text as supporting argument. Remember Anne's statement about everything in RMI being a remote reference? Here's my view on what's up for the next year or so... Microsoft is still pushing .Net as if they invented the concept of a virtual machine. It's really just a recreation of the basic principals of Java, which they recognized early on. The JVM has hundreds of languages that target it, most, it seems to make use of the large library of software provided by Java. It will be interesting to see how the evolution continues. The opensourcing of Java has created some different momentum in the Linux world it seems. There is an interest in moving towards a single execution environment it seems to me. We'll see how much the Java vs .Net camps move this year. We seem to continue to see the proliferation of scripting languages into more parts of production software. There is an ever evolving need to support people with limited programming experience and training to create more and more software. The result seems to be that less and less real design is creeping into more and more critical software (scripting happens the most at the top layer where software services are controlled by scripting). I think that over the next couple of years there will be dramatic number of computer system exploits and catastrophic failures as more and more broken software creeps out onto the network being used by people who have no idea how software could possibly be a security risk to them. Everyone seems to think that only one representation is needed for inter-machine communications, and that is XML. The semantic meaning, which is creeping into more and more XML document structures, indicate we are creating another programming language/layer. This requires everyone to support those semantics at all usage points with explicit coding, which will cause disparate implementations. So, I predict that this will be part and cause to many of the key problems which XML users get to deal with. Microsoft seems set on making XML become part of the accepted syntax of at least one .Net language. This seems to be certain to cause people to use more XML and less programming language code structure. The result will be less reusable code and more application specific code. It will be difficult to extract out application specific XML from general code structure. Thus, code base sizes will expand, perhaps dramatically, in this environment. We will all get to continue to depend on machine and OS vendors driving how we write software, instead of our real needs being met. For me, Jini allows all of my real needs to be met on all platforms/OSes with all the performance and security I need. Sigh...Hope everyone has a good 2008... Gregg Wonderly
