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Kirk Pepperdine

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Top Stories by Kirk Pepperdine

We've all heard the news: JBoss has received $10 million in funding and now it's time to sit back and mull it over. Without a doubt this infusion of capital is a signal of confidence for JBoss Group. But is this investment a good thing for open source? Not an unimportant question for those of us who have decided to use open source in our enterprise applications. If organizations are just now deciding to use open source, this announcement could cause them to rethink their decision and weigh the possibility that their choice may not be so open as it has been. We do have a few exemplars that we can draw from to help us understand what could happen. The most obvious are IBM alphaWorks, the Apache Foundation, and the various Linux vendors, some of whom have IPOed. alphaWorks is home to a number of open source projects. We don't hear about this IBM-funded effort as much ... (more)

A Multiple Application Launcher

By necessity, the operating system loads each VM into its own separate process slot. Consequently, each VM is forced to duplicate the other's initialization efforts and resource allocations. Specifically, each VM is required to load the JDK core classes into their respective heap spaces. Running several Java applications in the same VM would eliminate this duplication of effort. There's an analogy in the world of operating systems. System engineers have long recognized that portions of statically linked executables contain read-only text that's potentially shareable. They knew t... (more)

Unleashing Tiger

Up till now, changes to Java have been pretty much constrained to APIs and the inner workings of the Java 2 platform. All of this will change once the JDK 1.5 has been released. The extent of these changes was revealed in a recent interview with Joshua Bloch (http://java.sun.com/features/ 2003/05/bloch_qa.html). As illuminating as the interview was, it left me with a number of questions, so I started to search for answers by reading JSR 201. If you read this JSR, you'll find that it doesn't include a critical discussion of the proposed changes, nor is there any supporting document... (more)

WebLogic JRockit 8.1 by BEA Systems

The JRockit engineers made two assumptions when they first designed JRockit. First, server VMs run for a long time and, second, memory is cheap and plentiful. This motto still rings true in BEA's offering of the 8.1 (J2SE 1.4.1_03) version of this product. And, unlike the more familiar JVMs, this VM comes with a face. Acquiring and Installing JRockit JRockit runs on the MS Windows and Red Hat Linux platforms and is available in a 25MB download. The install was as uneventful as all installs should be. As expected, the directory structure followed the standard JDK/JRE structure. T... (more)

JDJ Meets Sun's JCP 2.6 Maestro, Aaron Williams

In a very brief 8 months Aaron Williams, spec lead for the largest expert group currently functioning in the JCP, guided the group to a consensus on the next version of the JCP. Highlights of the next-generation JCP include processes to increase transparency, encourage broader participation, and improve overall efficiency of the process while support specification leads. In addition, it offers resources to reduce the burden on the spec leads. "We want to involve more people sooner" said Williams in a recent interview. This version of the JCP opens up the first review period to all... (more)