Simon’s Blog

Tim Bray, of Sun Microsystems, has an interesting post on his blog, discussing in public his views on what he believes the future direction of his employer should  be.  While I think some parts of what Tim suggests in his post have merit, overall, my opinion is his analysis and conclusions are totally wide of [...]

For those anticipating the imminent JavaFX 1.0 launch, a few more relevant details emerged during yesterday’s AYDJ podcast:

The 1.0 launch date is no longer fixed at Dec 2.  The new JavaFX.com web-site may go live a few days before that, or a few days after (there is a launch event planned for Dec 4)
At launch [...]

There’s some great software coming out of Sun Microsystems at the moment, with new product releases being seen right across the board.  There are new versions of virtualization and OS software; a new version of the MySQL database; a new version of the Glassfish app server; a new version of Java focussed on the client; [...]

Sun Microsystems could be in trouble.  Not in terms of its products, which are great; but because of its share price.   One of the problems with public equity markets is that they almost never get the value of technology companies right.   The share prices of such companies spend most of their time either significantly above [...]

I wrote yesterday that it was time to get excited about JavaFX.  Now, the official release date for JavaFX 1.0 for the Desktop has been confirmed.  It will ship Dec 2, a little bit later than originally scheduled.  Sun has taken the extra time to try to make it as polished as possible. For example, [...]

Sometimes, perception is, to all intents and purposes, reality.   For many, the perception has been that Java is a monumental disaster on the desktop.  To such people, graphical Java software is synonymous with ugly, buggy, slow and generally all-round crappy desktop software.   Naturally, those people don’t want Java software anywhere near their computers.  They [...]

A month ago Apple saw the light and finally lifted its silly NDA that stopped people talking about iPhone software development.  With the restriction lifted, it hasn’t taken long for on-line materials to emerge that help developers learn to program the device.   Stanford University, which has one of the best computer science departments in the [...]