Category: Geek

Bruce Eckel (author of Thinking in Java) on his personal transition from Java to Flash/Flex for RIAs (rich internet applications). He chronicles his disillusionment with client-side Java on the web/desktop, from the early, optimistic days of “Write once, run anywhere,” to the current state of affairs, where Java applets on the web are virtually non-existent, and Ajax / Flash have become what Java always wanted to be. And Ajax, he argues, has already pushed JavaScript just about as far as it’s going to go, leaving Flash/Flex as the only real contender for quality RIAs. Only he says it much better than I can.

It’s not impossible to build GUI applications with Java, but it’s been 10 years and there are still installation hiccups with applets, Java WebStart, and regular applications. After 10 years, people don’t trust it anymore. If it’s not there after 10 years, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that someone doesn’t consider this problem important enough to fix. And even if they did, there have been so many bad experiences among consumers that it would take years to get the trust back.

Digital camera consumers tend to think of megapixels as simplistically as some car shoppers view horsepower: More must be better, right? Shoppers are blinded by increasing megapixel values, at the expense of better image sensors, higher quality lenses, image stabilization, etc. Result: Many people are wasting more storage and ending up with noisier images, rather than getting higher quality images, as they often think they are. c|net, calling the megapixel arms race on the carpet.

As the digital-camera market matures, consumers are becoming aware that lens quality, processor quality and image stabilization technologies are at least as important as pixel counts when determining image quality.” … “We went past the point where more megapixels made a difference years ago,” MacAskill said. “In the last 3 million prints we’ve made for very discriminating eyes, none were returned for lack of pixels.”

Andrew Leonard reviews Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg’s new book, “Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. For several years, Rosenberg followed the (now largely stalled) development process of the open source PIM Chandler, and was also dragged through the development process for Salon.com’s custom content management system (a process I myself went through last summer). On why Vista and other large development projects are almost predictably over-budget and very late:

… the incredible difficulty of estimating the time it takes to do this stuff, whether you are building a little content management system for a relatively modest-size Web company or whether you are building the operating system that will be used by three-fourths of the known universe. The difficulty in saying, A) How long will it take to do what you want to do? And B) When are you done doing what you want to do?

The answer, it turns out, is incredibly elusive, and very few people are capable of estimating these things with anything approaching precision. On build vs. buy:

And the programmer who says “it will be faster for me to write it, rather than to learn it,” is usually correct. Except that what he will write, most likely, is something that will work but will not have its rough edges worked out.

Touche’. I’m becoming convinced that the ideal middle-ground on the build vs. buy spectrum is to use a development framework like Rails or Django. Then you aren’t building all of the plumbing yourself, and you still get to lean on the hard work of others, but you also aren’t constrained by the models and methods of fully-baked systems (like pre-rolled content management systems). The downside to frameworks is that, to be productive, you need more up-front training than you would when building from scratch, or when using an existing product. To that end, I’ll be doing another week of pure research/training next week – this time on Python/Django (after I get some molars removed, that is). Whether a week will be enough to start feeling productive with it is something I’ll soon find out.