Alan Williamson

?If the USA and China can have healthy economic trade despite significant ideological differences, then there's a possibility that those of us in the freedom-loving Java world can engage in healthy economic trade with the many millions who will be locked into Windows and .Net.? Rick Ross, in The Ross Report Back in November, in a move that many Java developers likened to the wily fox inviting the unsuspecting hen round for a candlelit dinner, Microsoft Corp extended an invitation to JavaLobby founder Rick Ross to come to its Redmond, WA, headquarters in December?and check out .NET firsthand. The invitation was the direct result of a public challenge the notoriously MS-skeptical Ross had issued to Microsoft in October: ?If Visual J-Sharp is really so great,? he had written, ?let Microsoft prove it.? Ross promptly accepted the invitation. He flew to Redmond. His resultin... (more)

Live at JavaOne: Alan Williamson Blogs the Project Rave Keynote

(Editor's note: This report is taken from Alan Williamson's JavaOne 2003 blog. Here, he's upfront and center at the debut of Project Rave.) (June 11, 2003) - This is being blogged LIVE, as and when it happens, here at the Moscone. It's raw and uncut! Watching Project Rave live, and it crashed!!! Rich Green is winging it... and is struggling. And still we are waiting... phew... it's come up! And oops - the event trigger didn't work! Demo not going too well here... I wonder what Microsoft thinks now. And that was it ... the big tool for that is going to kill Eclipse and take over Vi... (more)

How to Create a Gadget for Google Desktop

Alan Williamson's Blog Have you played with Google's Desktop tool? This is basically a strip on the side of your screen that lets you house small applications, called Gadgets. The tool is available for Windows, Linux and Mac so no matter your vice there is a flavour for you. There is a wide variety of Gadgets available, ranging from the usual news tickers and clocks right through to games and even being able to vote if a girl is hot or not! Each gadget is essentially a small Javascript application that is built to a given framework that is provided to by the Google application th... (more)

SOA & Cloud Bootcamp: Who Ya Gonna Call? Cloudbusters!

As the theme tune to the classic 1984 Ghostbusters movie goes, "If there's something strange, in your neighborhood, Who ya gonna call?", I am left wondering what we'll all be singing (shouting?) when something goes wrong in our cloud world. When you've got your whole business in the cloud and there is an outage, just what happens to your bottom line? What happens to your customers? What do you do? Register Today for SOA World and Attend SOA & Cloud Bootcamp for Free As the richness of our cloud-oriented world grows, this is becoming a serious consideration. We've come to rely, for... (more)

Let Age Approve of Youth

This month I'm going to go down the route of employment, because here at N-ARY, we're going through the painful process of recruiting. As usual, I'm going to analogize my findings with a human personality trait - this month I'm going to go for loyalty. But I'll come back to that in a moment. We're expanding, and that brings more work with it. We need more bodies. Not a huge problem, one would have thought, to go and hire a couple of Java developers. Boy, were we mistaken! We never realized the minefield we'd be entering. Since we're based in the UK, we began our search on home soil... (more)