Symphonious

I noticed today that The Kleptones have released an mp3 version of their broadcast on "The Rinse" entitled "From Detroit To J.A."   It’s not as good as "A Night At The Hip Hopera" but it is definitely enjoyable.  It involves a lot of Motown material but unfortunately they too often took the average lyrics instead of the sensational music.

My pick of the series would have to be "Really Rappin’ Something" mostly for it’s driving baritone sax line.  I must admit though that the use of the music from "Ben" (early Michael Jackson) as the backing for "Revolverlution" was an inspired choice.  I’m not sure where the words over the top came from but they are also brilliant - "The Revolution Will Be Televised".

Ben Fowler points to AppFuse, a quick way to set up J2EE projects with more buzz words than you can shake a stick at.  Specifically it sets up a Tomcat/MySQL apps that:

Uses Ant, XDoclet, Spring, Hibernate (or iBATIS), JUnit, Cactus, StrutsTestCase, Canoo’s WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, OSCache, JSTL and Struts (or Spring MVC)

That’s a huge number of different technologies.  It’s not necessarily bad to use all those technologies together (in fact it’s probably very good) but it’s important to be aware that pragmatic programmers don’t use wizards they don’t understand.

So unless you are already very familiar with how to set up a project using all of those technologies and understand exactly what AppFuse is doing for you, don’t use it.  At some point the code and configuration files that AppFuse sets up are going to become code that’s a part of your project and they will be yours to maintain.  If you don’t understand what they do, how are you going to fix problems that show up or make changes later?

Having said that, for seasoned veterans who understand all of those technologies well, AppFuse should be a big time saver.  I can see a lot of beginners getting into very deep water with it though.

It’s funny, last night I read this reuters article about Microsoft beginning an initiative to improve their interoperability and thought wow that’s excellent!  I bet Slashdot completely misses the point of the message and rants on about how Bill Gates also mentioned that opensource doesn’t necessarily lead to interoperability.  Sure enough, Bill Gates Claims Linux Has Poor Interoperability.  Sigh.

Gates of course is right - there are plenty of open source products out there that aren’t interoperable in one way or another.   Further, while Linux systems generally adhere to standard network protocols well, they have an abysmal track record of interoperability on the same system.  The best example of this would be the lack of robust drag and drop support.

Where predefined standards exist, open source software generally follows them very well.  Where predefined standards don’t exist, open source software typically struggles to agree on a new standard.

Far more important than the typical marketing debates going on between the Microsoft and Linux camps (both of which are happily spreading falsehoods about the other) is the fact that Microsoft is going to focus on improving their interoperability.  That should be applauded, not criticized.  Sure it came along with a shot at Linux but that’s what happens when there’s competition.  The response from Linux advocates should be "we applaud Microsoft’s decision to improve interoperability and are proud that the determined efforts of open source projects have driven them to this point".  In other words, applaud the good thing that Microsoft is doing and then tag along your own marketing hype with that response.  Don’t just run around like a spoiled child who has just been rebuked.