At the last JavaOne I did a walk-on talk during the AMD keynote where I talked about how incredible HotSpot’s performance had become – beating the best C compilers. I ended my talk with a joking comment that “the next target is Fortran”. Afterwards, Denis Caromel of Inria came up to me and said “you’re already there”. He and some colleges had been working on some comparisons between Java and Fortran for HPC. Their final report Current State of Java for HPC
has been made available as a Tech Report and makes pretty interesting reading. There are a lot of HPC micro benchmarks in it which look great. Thanks!

I’m a web developer who has design and programming experience. So, VB, ASP, PHP, Coldfusion, Perl, even C and C++ I have in my belt. I also use Dreamweaver and/or do a lot of my HTML/XHTML/JavaScript coding by hand. So, the DOM, DHTML, etc, all good to me and even OOP thinking and design I have when I code. And I even have MySQL and other databases, again, not an issue here. So, my weak point is — Java — I see so many jobs out there with J2EE, Hibernate, Eclipse, Netbeans. Beside the obvious, which is to learn Java the core language, I don’t know where else to go from there. There is so much! What should I read? in what order? What software do I require? UML? Swing? I mean, what is the curriculum required for someone to say they are a solid Java developer? Even assuming I have to go through Java itself, what are the good books out there?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dave Kuhn has put together a comprehensive guide to piecing together GWT and Spring, a nice recipe for the Java heads among you.
Dave starts out by detailing why you would want to do this, and how it changes the architecture of your application.
He then gets to a tutorial that has you creating the project correctly, [...]

I’m spending this week in LA at SIGGRAPH. It’s really great to be at a conference where I can concentrate on learning. Lots of interesting papers and folks doing cool experimental stuff. One group that I ran into, OnLatte, had whacked together the mechanical bits of a flatbed scanner, and old inkjet printer and some bits of electronics to come up with a wild printer that made images jetting caramel syrup onto the foam on top of a latte.

Tuesday was “Pixar Night” at the animation festival. In a really classy move, John Lasseter started by not showing something by Pixar: instead he showed the phenominal
The Man Who Planted Trees, an animation by
Frédéric Back of the story written by Jean Giono. It really shook me when I first saw it years ago: this was a beautiful print on a giant screen with a great sound system at the Nokia theatre. Nothing digital in this one: hand drawn, frame by frame, by one incredible artist. After the screening, Lasseter brought Back up to the stage,to a standing ovation, and the two of them talked about the film for a while.

The preview release of JavaFX is now available, along with libraries, samples, documentation and some early tools. If you like to make pretty things fly around on the screen, this is a pretty tasty piece of work. It really shows what Swing and Java2D can do. A pile of folks have been working hard on it for quite a while and have done a lovely job. Try it out and let us know what you think.

It’s been
all over the web this
morning that Randy Pausch’s battle with pancreatic
cancer has finally come to it’s inevitable conclusion. We overlapped at CMU as grad students,
and his work on Alice has been hugely important in teaching,
for which I am very thankful.
There’s a lot that could be said… he gave the world a beautiful example of
dying eloquently. Randy, you will be missed.

Peter Dibble has just published the second edition of his
Real-Time
Java Platform Programming book. It isn’t just about the realtime APIs: it covers a lot of the theory behind realtime programming (warning: contains Actual Math), along with a lot of examples. It’s got a good mixture of pragmatics and theory and does a good job of de-mystifying many of the scarier aspects of realtime.

I installed Solaris 2008.05 on my laptop a short while ago. Being my usual goofy self I was playing around as root in places I shouldn’t have been and managed to really mess things up and render my machine totally unbootable. It was nosediving within a small fraction of a second after booting… I only had one kernel image, and that file had been overwritten Ending up in an infinite reboot loop. In past days, with either Linux or Solaris, I’d have reinstalled the system, possibly preceded by ripping the disk out and plugging it into another machine so that I could rescue any important files. But since 2008.05 uses ZFS for everything – even the root filesystem, all I had to do was boot the 2008.05 LiveCD,
zfs rollback
the root filesystem, and like magic all my screwing around was undone.

I
just installed
OpenSolaris 2008.05
from the OpenSolaris.com site. It’s pretty sweet.
They’ve had the installer nailed for quite a while, the big thing in this release (for me,
anyway) is that it installs ZFS on the root device, and sets the system up to boot from
ZFS. No more disk partioning! One big happy pool-o-pages! No more UFS!

I spent the afternoon at the

Computer History Museum
at an event
celebrating the 70th birthday
of
Ivan Sutherland.
He’s famous for a whole lot of things, the earliest being
Sketchpad, a
man-machine graphical communication system that he built in 1962.
In a lot of
computing fields, and particularly in graphics, if you read any paper and follow
the bibliography links back, you’re almost certain to find something written by
Ivan or one of his students. Bob Sproull
MC’d the event and
Alan Kay
(one of Ivan’s student’s) gave a long talk. The list of people that showed up to honor Ivan was amazing.
A couple who’s names you might know were Henri Gouraud and John Warnock.

When I was working on my PhD thesis, I noticed that all the papers I was reading had
backpointers eventually to Sketchpad. When I finally read Ivan’s thesis, I was totally
blown away. I ended up with Ivan on my thesis committee and I think of my thesis as
a macro-expansion of about half a page from Sketchpad.

You really should read his thesis.
It will blow you away. Among many other things, it can be fairly said that Ivan invented
Object Oriented Programming.

For another life-altering experience, you should read one of his few non-technical papers,
Technology and
Courage. Besides being an outstanding researcher, he’s also started a couple of
companies and is a venture capitalist: his advice on courage is mandatory reading.