March 2008 Archives

Fusion-Powered, Too

Tim Berners-Lee is written up today, spewing about the miracle-to-be, the Semantic Web.

This from the visionary that brought us HTTP and HTML, the twin papier-mâché columns upon which the mighty WWW is built. Here’s what’s coming:

Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web,

Sure you can buddy. Internet Explorer eight still supports quirks mode, but you can get the whole freaking world to mark the concepts in their text so everything links together perfectly.

Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar—spoke the same language and could share information with one another.

Uh, would that be Same-Language 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.2, 4.0, or Same-Language 4.01 Transitional? There I go again; quibbling. Lets talk about the magic!

You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.

Handy! But wait, there’s more:

If you still weren’t sure of where you were when you made a particular transaction,

Because you forgot where “Six Flgs Mgc Mtn” is.

you could then drag your photo album on top of the calendar,

And the…

• Calendar would show you when you bought your digital camera?
• Photo album would show you every picture you took on this day of the week?
• Calendar and photo album would morph into hot lesbians and start making out?

No?

and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park. So you would know not to claim it as a tax deduction.

You really can’t make this stuff up. Sir Tim, apparently, has rolled and smoked his own colossal, leafy, reputation.

Reality Calling

1. The magic of the web is that any bonehead with a text editor and an IP address can make it go.
2. The web is built on incompatibility, because it’s built by the above-mentioned boneheads, who couldn’t stick to a standard if their lives depended on it.
3. The semantic web would have to be built on compatibility.
4. Semantic web, DOA.

The good news, of course, is that Web 4.0 (“the Emetic Web”) is juuuuust around the corner.

Here, take the radio. If I don’t get back by 2200 hours, you call in the airstrike. —Capt. Willard, Apocalypse Now

Java is apparently losing tech-book market share. The implication is that geeks are losing interest in the language. I think it’s true. Java looked pretty good a few years ago, when the main competition was C and C++. Nowadays, not so much.

But it doesn’t end with the language. Some of the frameworks out there for doing important things in Java are just terrible. From the article:

Still, it’s undeniable that the Web and its dynamic programming languages is upstaging Java.

Uh, yeah. Rather than hiring Python guys and making the VM language-agnostic, Sun should call in simultaneous airstrikes on the developers of Struts.

Struts is the dominant “framework” for Java web app development, so when an unsuspecting project picks a web app framework, Struts is the default.

Struts is like, well, … you know the look a dog gets when you make funny noises at it? That “what the f**k” look? That’s gonna be your face when you use Struts for a couple of days.

“Why,” you’ll ask yourself, “are there so many moving parts?” “Howse come,” you may well wonder, “does my Struts config file look like a core dump?”

Well, bunky, I’m here to tell ya. It’s not because you got stupid all of a sudden.

Version 1 of Struts sucked so hard that the developers decided to bag it wholesale, and to re-badge another web-app framework as “Struts 2.” A slathering of Struts 1 compatibility lubricant is added to make the “transition” as painless as possible.

Like XML? Like typing? Well then, Welcome to Struts Country, coordinates 090264712.