A little while ago, I wrote a piece about the conflict between "clouds" and the hard boundaries of the political sphere. There's no physical place called "cyberspace", and any cloud computing infrastructure has to actually exist somewhere. Like many U.S. citizens, I really hate the idea that facts about me become somebody else's copyrighted property just because they get stored in a database. Canada has a justifiably good reputation for protecting its citizens' privacy.

According to eWeek, Google will make GAE open to public use on May 28th.  Which would be today. The original GAE site isn't updated at this point, but you can get started anyway.  I just set up my account and registered an app. (I predict tens of thousands of empty apps. Long-tail distribution here, just like SourceForge: an overwhelming majority of empty projects, with a vanishingly tiny minority that have 99% of the traffic.

So, I got a Wii for Father's Day last year. It's been a lot of fun to play together with my kids, my wife, and even my parents and in-laws. It's fantastic to have a game system that we can all play together and be reasonably competitive.  My six-year old can hold her own in Wii bowling, but she cries a lot when we play Halo. (I'm just kidding...)

Just now getting my hands on the SpringSource Application Platform. It's deceptive, because there's very little functionality exposed when you run it. It starts up with less ceremony than Apache or Tomcat. (Which is kind of funny, when you consider that it includes Tomcat.) When you look at the bundle repository, though, it's clear that a lot of stuff is packaged in here. In a way, that's like the Spring framework itself.

Apparently, there's a virus attack. Not a computer virus. A real virus. Hot zone instead of a hot spot. From my inbox this morning: The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the "stomach flu", which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours.

Sun opened the final day of JavaOne with a general session called "Extreme Innovation". This was a showcase for novel, interesting, and out-of-this-world uses of Java based technology. VisualVM  VisualVM works with local or remote applications, using JMX over RMI to connect to remote apps. While you have to run VisualVM itself under JDK 1.6, it can connect to any version of JVm from 1.4.2 through 1.7. Local apps are automatically detected and offered in the UI for debugging.

The notion of a service-oriented architecture is real, and it can deliver. The term "SOA", however, has been entirely hijacked by a band of dangerous Taj Mahal architects. They seem innocuous, it part because they'll lull you to sleep with endless protocol diagrams. Behind the soporific technology discussion lies a grave threat to your business. "SOA" has come to mean top-down, up-front, strong-governance, all-or-nothing process (moving at glacial speed) implemented by an ill-conceived stack of technologies.

Much of the interest in dynamic languages like Groovy, JRuby, and Scala comes from running on the JVM. That lets them leverage the tremendous R&D that’s gone into JVM performance and stability. It also opens up the universe of Java libraries and frameworks. And yet, much of my work deals with the 80% of cost that comes after the development project is done. I deal with the rest of the software’s lifetime.

SAP has been talking up their suite of SOA tools. The names all run together a bit, since they each contain some permutation of "enterprise" and "builder", but it's a very impressive set of tools. Everything SAP does comes off of an enterprise service repository (ESR). This includes a UDDI registry, and it supports service discovery and lookup. Development tools allow developers to search and discover services through their "ES Workspace".

I am not a language designer, nor a researcher in type systems. My concerns are purely pragmatic. I want usable languages, ones where doing the easy thing also happens to be doing the right thing. Even today, I see a lot of code that handles exceptions poorly (whether checked or unchecked!). Even after 13 years and some trillion words of books, most Java developers barely understand when to synchronize code. (And, by the way, I now believe that there's only one book on concurrency you actually need.