JBoss & Redhat : live happily ever after

I am also really still having a hard time believing that Redhat bought JBoss. When I first read the announcement, I thought that it was some kind of belated April Fool's day joke.. after all the rumours that were out there about Oracle buying JBoss (which was really giving the the chills - I was almost seeing how after 6 months, Oracle decides not to release JBoss as open source and slap some $50,000 license on it).

Now that I've thought about it... what JBoss and Redhat did makes a LOT of sense. I mean that they really seem made for each other , similar business model, similar razor sharp focus on the customer (and a similar desire to sign you up for their subscriptions :-) ). On the other hand, it makes me wonder what will happen to former JBoss partners like Novell/SuSE.. Apparently, they compete directly with RedHat, and so the question is whether they will continue working with JBoss.. Also, in the past, IBM pushed/distributed RedHat with their own J2EE offerings... but now that Redhat has their own J2EE app server, will that continue to be so.

Also, in retrospect.. I remember reading some stuff about RedHat specific J2EE framework... and then I was really wondering "Why in the world are they trying to re-invent the wheel by creating a new J2EE (JEE) framework that nobody knows about". Well, I guess that "I'll invent my own RedHat framework" garbage shall stop...

Opensourcing of Mobility Pack

World, take note, the Mobility Pack has been open sourced !!!! Awesome....
Opensoucing of Mobility Pack. Well, I can't wait to get my hands on the source code so that I can figure out why the hell the WTK 2.2 emulator would not play videos under Linux - it only shows a black rectangle, the media "pretends" that it's playing, but nothing is displayed. What would also be cool is that for my thesis presentation, I would be able to make an "Emulator connector" for the server side of my Mobile Video Streaming project, so that when the media becomes available, I can "send" a text message to the emulator directly from the server side (and not having to do stuff manually)...

All in all... AWESOME !!!

Netbeans Community Chat

Check out the first NetBeans chat - a lot of good ideas of what needs to be done in Netbeans, as well as a good feel of the important people around the development. Lots of good ideas from the chat and I'll be looking forward to seeing them : e.g. setting up a centralized wiki for NetBeans, setting up some RSS feeds about new documentation and stuff, setting up a centralized spot with useful update centers, etc.

Reading through the chat makes me think about something.. I do believe NetBeans is superior to Eclipse - seriously, I've tried to set up Eclipse on a few occasions (e.g. JBossIDE), but after the first hour of trying to install everything I need, I just give up.. In NetBeans, everything just comes in integrated very nicely. However, one thing that I think Netbeans is behind Eclipse is tool support for various projects - e.g. xdoclet tag completion (although there is a pretty good shot at creating a module), better hibernate support, etc. I do think that one of the reasons that a lot of people go for Eclipse is that it just has a little tool that supports what they're currently doing..

Something else that is NetBeans related that I just remembered - I was really bummed out when I found out that Nokia has moved their IDE to Eclipse (with carbidej and I guess carbideC+).. I was really happy to just install their Nokia Developer Suite and have some extensions to my NetBeans install...

wait for another month for e61

Now, Mobilebee says there are 17 more days until the e61 become available. This kinda sucks, since this is the 2nd or 3rd delay in a row.. It says 17 days, but who knows whether there isn't going to be another delay after that. And even if they do release is then, it's gonna be a few days until the handsets become available to Mobilebee, and then another couple of days until they ship it to me... Of course it's not their fault, Nokia was supposed to release it in Q1.. In summary, life sucks today..

On a related note, I am reading a book about developing for Series 60.. The first time I read through the first couple of chapters, I have to say that many of the concepts in developing for Symbian were quite difficult to grasp.. I did suspect that I've been living in Java land for too long, becoming almost complacent cause Java is so great (no seriously)... So, a lot of the things in how things were done in C++ on Symbian were not very clear.. I put the book aside for a couple of days, dove into "Thinking in C++" (thanks Bruce Eckel"), and several days later re-emerged and started reading the Series 60 book again.. The difference is huge, and now pretty much everything makes sense and is much easier to follow... I've only read the first few chapters of the book, but all in all, I like it a lot (it doesn't try to oversimplify things).

waiting for e61

In the next few weeks I'll be blogging about Symbian and the upcoming Nokia E61.

Up until yesterday, I was expecting mobilebee to show that the phone is available. It was initially scheduled to ship in Q1 2006; however, there are delays.. so it's still not available. So, yesterday, I called up mobilebee to check exactly what it means that there are 0 days until the phone becomes available. The customer service rep told me that they were expecting Nokia to announce the availability of the phone on Fri; however, nothing happened then.. So, they said that if the phone is announced on Monday, then I should be able to order it by mid-next week.. which means that I might have it in my hands sometime at the end of next week or the beginning of the week after.. I even though of maybe driving to NYC to pick it up on my own ; however, with their free shipping on orders over $300 (and the E61 is a whopping $499... )