Carterpants

When Oracle was looking to devour Sun Microsystems it found an untapped treasure just floating in the legal winds. The lawyers’ eyes sparkled and their litigation war-machine started to chug and churn. Over what you ask? Java IP (Intellectual Property) baked into the Android operating system without the proper licensing. Oh boy this is going to get ugly.

Google -vs- Oracle

This is the kind of title fight you pay good money for Pay-Per-View access to watch. Well, tech nerds would at least.

But, why is Oracle going after Google like this? How can they claim Google is using Java within Android when the following is true:

1. Android uses the Dalvik JVM, not a traditional Java JVM
2. The Dalvik JVM is a register-based machine, while all other JVM’s are stack based
3. Dalvik uses its own type of byte code, not Java byte code
4. It was only recently that Dalvik began utilizing a JIT (just in time compiler)

It would seem Google made their own “Java” in a sense, right? Maybe even improved on basic Java concepts a bit? They sure did; development tasks for aspiring Android app makers are less tedious and verbose compared to iPhone app developers.

So what is (Sun)Oracle’s gripe. Well I’m tired and kinda lazy at the moment, so I’m just going to link to a comment posted on ComputerWorld’s article on the subject. That comment seems to explain this situation the best without getting too gory into the patent details and legal mumboly jumboly. In short, it seems like Oracle does have a leg to stand on due to a few corners Google cut while coming to their final product.

This could get expensive for both sides, and fast. What does this mean for Android? Java? Open source in general?!

If you haven’t guessed, last week was a “backwards run through a corn field naked” kinda week at work. Long hours, frustrating issues, just your basic bad week. Not going to dwell on that though, I’ve managed to suppress that rage deep, deep down inside me like a good boy. Let’s focus on the good!

By some miracle, the company finally eeked out a little spending cash for off-site training this year so I punched my ticket to the Des Moines stop of the No Fluff, Just Stuff Java conference. Yeah, I had a week from hell and I was looking forward to a conference on programming, I’m a nerd get over it.

All of the sessions I was able to attend were excellent, however the Scala and Groovy presentations by Venkat Subramaniam really stole the show for me. I spent nearly an entire day’s worth of sessions with Venkat after he hooked me with his first Scala demo. I’m seriously considering his Programming Groovy book to get me started in the right direction.

I’ve always wanted to explore these functional languages even if the chance of implementing them at work was a long shot. We’ve been playing with Groovy for one-off admin tasks, however no plans exist to move the language into the Production environment. I’d like to change that, and soon. All I need is a great example of the code in action..

I certainly enjoyed myself at the SD West conference in 2008, but NFJS may be my favorite training conference to date. There was an equally beneficial collection of presenters but NFJS focused solely on Java-based topics rather than hitting the whole tech-spectrum at once. And.. they had an endless supply of bacon for breakfast. No I’m not kidding. I ate a plate of bacon Saturday morning. What.. its brain food I swear.

Since NFJS consumed my weekend, and last week was just plain consumed, I’ve been playing catch-up around the house so far this week. I’m trying to grab a day off here soon, but never fear for the weekend of Jonny’s bachelor party is near!

I’ve been pretty much heads-down coding this week, so my updates have fallen thin a bit. My gosh I didn’t even post yesterday’s Yahtzee video.. I must be busy!

Got word today that I will be attending the Des Moines tour of the No Fluff, Just Stuff Java conference July 30th – Aug 1st!

Its no SDWest, but certainly a valuable conference in its own right. Sessions range from basic Java security, architecture considerations, and javascript, to in-depth examination of OSGi, encryption API’s, and data compliance. There are a few courses I’m especially interested in, including HTML 5, Grails, and Maven.

There’s no travel involved since the conference is held in West Des Moines, but sounds like I may get a few days comp’d.

I’ve been toying with the notion of completely rearchitecting my site with a new coding language of some sort. I’ve thought about Flash, but paying through the nose for some propriety development tools to spew out CPU intensive content just flew in the face of everything I believed in, mostly FOSS.

So my search began for a new, fun to use, web tooling language. I’ve dabbled in PHP enough to know I don’t really care to reinvent the wheel since so many bundled solutions already exist (aka WordPress). A heavy DHTML/XML page can be pretty, but ease of post updating seems to be lost in that realm. Finally, I found Ruby on Rails.

After watching their 15 minute demo of some guy building a blog site, I was immediately hooked. Wow, a completely functional, data base interacting, slim code, and efficient API solution that actually looks fun to work with. Sign me up!

Well, not so fast cowboy. My hosting provider does in fact support Rails, however our account is so old that we’re on the “old” hardware which does not actually support Rails.. they offered to move my account to the new machines with some minor exceptions though. How nice. Now when I say minor exception I really mean a huge time consuming pain in the ass. They would only move my account information but absolutely none of my data, associated SQL databases, email settings or content.. nothing. I would have to do a complete and total backup of all our WordPress data, reinstall WordPress for each domain, and restore the database. Even if that all went off without a hitch I’d still be investing 20+ hours!

Needless to say I’ll hold off on that move for now. I’m playing with Rails on my local server (yay Linux) getting a feel for the language and its endless possibilities.