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)

Yet Another IDE War

To view our full selection of recent Eclipse stories click here Well, you may have seen the Java Industry Newsletter's hot story, "Eclipse versus NetBeans." As an editor of this fine publication, it's my privilege to see all of our feedback arriving at my inbox. My first reaction was, oh please, not another IDE war. But I dutifully suppressed the urge to delete the e-mails and started to read them. Most of the posts tried to be helpful by offering advice like, "Eclipse rocks, its user interface feels more natural and is very snappy." There were other comments like "NetBeans rocks,... (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)

Customizing Ant

You have a task that your Ant build process needs to perform and none of the built-in or dozens of optional tasks fits the bill. If at this point you're thinking that Ant won't work for you, then the authors of Ant have some wonderful news. The framework they use to run built-in tasks is also available for your own task. If that piques your interest, you'll be happy to know that in the next few paragraphs, I promise you'll have all the information you need to use this framework. If you haven't used Ant yet, read the excellent article by Joey Gibson, "A (Brief) Introduction to Ant... (more)

Where Is Open Source in the App Server Surveys?

Just recently Gartner reported that IBM has overtaken BEA in application server market share. The interesting thing is that Gartner's expression of market share is in a single number, dollars. While dollars are certainly an important factor in declaring a market leader, is this an accurate measure of market lead? If it is, where does that leave open source offerings such as Jonas and JBoss? My past experiences have taught me to question claims or proclamations that one company has a lead in a particular market share. Take BEA for instance. When the application market was immatur... (more)