April 2008 Archives

The launch of the DevXtra Editors' Blog is bound to raise the YAB (yet another blog) questions: Why, and why now? Those are fair in an age when everyone with an Internet connection and an opinion is blogging. Let me explain.

Simply stated: The DevX editors have more to say. Being located in Silicon Valley places DevX at ground zero for developer news and events. In the past month alone, Eclipse, RSA, and MySQL/Sun (I'm still getting used to that) have hosted conferences in the Valley, and JavaOne kicks off on May 6 in San Francisco. While that's a blessing for keeping us in the know about major developments in the application development space, it's also a curse in terms of managing the information overload that can accumulate--while still producing the practical how-to content you've come to expect from DevX.

The DevXtra Editors' Blog enables us to pass along the observations and interesting tidbits that in the past have been relegated to water cooler discussions and editorial meetings--too short to be full articles, too extemporaneous to be tutorials. Now we have a space to share this (we think) valuable information, and DevX readers get to see who's behind the curtain, find out what's got us buzzing, and participate in a dialogue.

We hope you'll find the DevXtra Editors' Blog informative, enjoyable, and provocative. Most importantly, we urge you to share your thoughts about our postings and help make this more than just YAB.

The Semantic Web is a vision, an idea, a base-set of technologies. It's not something Dad picks up at the computer store. It's not something the press understands very well. It's certainly not on the minds of the general public. It's not even something my brother-the-developer fully understands. Lots of head nods from that one as I describe it's several aspects. 

A great example of Semantic Web technologies at work is the calendar on the 2008 Semantic Technology Conference site. While it's main purpose is a calendar—it also has a favorite's feature—but ultimately it's a search function on overdrive. The calendar contains a little of this and a little of that; which compliments the many aspects of Semantic Web technologies. And that's awesome to have a clear-cut example of a real-life application. We need more.

It's time the Semantic Web moves out of the idea phase and moves into the application phase. And that leads to a clearer understanding for everyone.

Here's the average developer's newest dilemma: Intel and other CPU manufacturers have moved full steam ahead into creating multi-core chips to speed up computing. These chips increase processing speed not by improving the speed of a single CPU as has traditionally been the case when new chips debuted in the past, but by adding additional CPUs. These new chips contain two, four, or (soon) eight CPUs. The idea is that developers can (potentially) double, quadruple, or octuple the speed of their applications by writing code that can split operations across all the available CPUs. That's great--in theory. In practice, however, it turns out that few developers are comfortable writing and debugging even multi-threaded code running on a single CPU, much less writing and debugging code intended to run in parallel on separate CPUs. Moreover, the languages most working developers use don't yet contain constructs that allow them to target multiple CPUs, nor are the debuggers all multi-CPU aware or capable. Nonetheless, hardware manufacturers are already touting the speed increases businesses should expect from their software when it's running on the new chips. And no doubt, managers will soon be asking why their new dual-CPU hardware is no faster when running their existing applications than their old hardware was.

As usual, the hardware cart has been put before the software horse. Sure, the C and C++ guys can find some first-generation tools for writing multi-core code. But for business software, the miracles won't start appearing until developers get multi-core tools that work with their common standard languages.

You have to be truly geeky to get it, but do you know what the inside joke is with the proposed C++ 0x standard? Simply that it has been labeled C++ 0x. Not much of a punchline unless you consider that it might be 2010 before it is fully ratified.....