It seems the EU are interested in introducing legislation to make big tech companies open up their technologies by using standard formats and interoperable interfaces. On one hand this vision of the future seems like a bright one, but on the other there is a big question as to whether it is really realistic to do this and how on earth the rules relating to this interoperability would be possible to define.

Trying to legislate on technology related issues is an extremely difficult thing, largely because only a very small minority of people will fully understand both the technology involved and the legal consuquence of imposing such legislation. This is why law suits involving technology companies are so horrendously expensive. There is also the issue that technology has been a world-wide market for some time now and it is impossible for the EU to introduce laws that affect distrubuted systems which operate outside of Europe.

One slashdot contributor summed up my feelings on the subject with the following comment:

What? (Score:5, Insightful)

by jim_v2000 (818799) writes: on Thursday July 01, @12:59PM (#32759272)

“Any kind of IT product should be able to communicate with any type of service in the future.” [EU]

What does that even mean?

Indeed defining what any statement so sweeping as that above really means is impossible and the statement reflects a chasm between recognising the intention for good in this proposal and understanding the reality of what it actually entails.

What VirtualBox enables you to do is host any number of VMs which can be launched on your desktop as required. For those that are uninitiated VMs are very clever software virtualisations of physical machines

. They have applications ranging from a home user trying out a new OS such as a linux distribution, to software developers using them for testing and simulation of distributed software.

The system compares well and has many similar features as the most popular VM products from VMware. As far as any detailed analysis goes, as yet I can’t really offer an opinion, I’ve not enough knowledge of other VM products and haven’t used VirtualBox enough to really say anything much. From initial impressions it seems to compete well. Here you see a screenshot of VirtualBox running a Damn Small Linux image.

Unfortunately for me this means some of my web-sites don’t seem to get listed as highly as they used to and my inevitable bias is telling me that this change is bad!

In fact, I can’t help but point out a few criticisms:

1. Aesthetically everything seems to be aligned to the left hand side and leaves a massive gap on the right – why not fill the space instead of giving me ‘blah blah blah…’
2. The screen doesn’t resize, its fixed to your screen size so if you make the window smaller it doesn’t wrap the text.
3. More importantly searches seem to be ordered differently, something I wouldn’t mind too much (as I’m sure its a very difficult job to please everyone with the search ordering), however the options on the side menu allow you to search for everything apart from just plain old web sites. Perhaps they just aren’t web 3.0 enough to be considered important these days?
4. Why have we got two menus which seem to do the same thing now – one up top as has always been, and one new side menu which only seems to be different because it has a pretty icon beside it?

The more I think about it the more I’m starting to consider alternatives, and that says a lot: The fact that I’m prepared to waltz over to bing or altavista is quite a paradigm shift, especially as I generally use Chrome as my browser of choice and generally largely support Google’s end-user services.

I am confident if I have a little to say on the issue plenty of people are completely up in arms about it and this will not be an issue that will easily disappear.

Personally I just want Google’s search engine to be what it has always stood for – a simple way to find web sites. I don’t really care about customizing the look, and its much higher on my priority list to find the most relevant web site I’m looking for, not the page or specific content such as images, blog posts and most certainly not updates/tweets. And before anyone would suggest otherwise – I am a young person and I’m sure I can speak for plenty of us when I say I’m really not interested in gimmicks like twitter.

But then consider this rather different scenario – you’re in a dingy back-street hovel of a hostelry, the beer they serve is stale. The night was looking alright when a lovely looking member of your preferred sex shows up and flashes you a smile. But they’ve gone home early, and you’ve no reason to stay – you just want to be tucked up at home and watch your favorite DVD to cheer you up. Unfortunately for you: along comes the manager and guess what – he’s declaring a lock-in, oh dear!

When I heard that Apple were not supporting Flash on the iPad I was somewhat dismayed, I was even more surprised to learn that they don’t support it for the iPhone either. It’s not that I care hugely about having Flash support, what is concerning is not having the choice and being subject to a technology lock-in. It’s a sad state that the health of a technology is not determined by its technical brilliance or its popularity, but by whether it is supported by the big players in the market. Personally I think if there is one overriding thing that rational people want out of a computer it as much freedom as is completely possible. Everyone knows what bad software and hardware look like, because they’ve all experienced ‘an unexpected error’ occurring, and we should have the right to say – no thanks I’ll use an equivalent product because its more stable (or offers more features or just because it looks pretty!). What’s the solution? Well if you like freedom, do shop around because your purchase is more than just a shiny product [which is re-branded old technology that doesn't come with a proper keyboard] – its an investment in the producers ideology.

As a caveat to this post – I’m not saying Apple is a bad company, or that their products are bad. I wouldn’t want to put those words in people’s mouths, I’m just advocating considering the overall philosophy of the company you are buying from and whether it matches your needs.

Nevertheless I tried to be open minded and receptive of the platform and relate it to possible uses I can see emerging for it. However after some inspection I can only conclude that while the intention is good and a lot of hard work has obviously gone in to Mozart, the current version has many areas in which it could be criticised. Firstly and most notably, the language is very unlike any other language you may have used previously, which I suppose is what you would expect if you were trying to merge so many different ideas. However this is instantly going to turn many less fastidious programmers off. I actually think this may be the intention in the sense that the authors of Mozart are not aiming at a mass market. Unfortunately I can’t help thinking this is a bad move if you want to drastically change people’s opinions. A better strategy might have been to gently break people in to new programming constructs in the context of familiar scenarios. Even in the fast moving tech industry it takes a long time for people to move on from the recognised norm. Another issue I can see which will not help adoption of the language is its lack of really practical usage examples and of familiar API features. For example when looking at a promising ’servlet’ implementation in the tutorial I was a bit disappointed when the code was essentially transformed into a CGI script for installation on a web server. This is old technology and leaves one wondering – where is the .NET and Java EE competition in Mozart? Software industry developers want to know about data exchange and persistence and how they can deploy their applications. As far as I can see these are somewhat neglected areas. From a theoretical point of view some of the benefits offered by a multi-paradigm language seem attractive and no doubt the Mozart platform does have some very real uses. I just can’t see how it can compete on all frontiers, particularly web  based business applications.

My final concern is that in combining programming paradigms you risk polluting the very nature of them. Object-oriented programming is not just a means to an end, it is a view of how to model abstractions of real world entities: as objects containing data and operations which govern themselves. Logic programming is not just a convenient way of expressing logical statements, it provides a domain in which everything is represented in predicate logic. The question is can you really combine such differing views on the ‘problem domain’ (or ‘universe of discourse’ as it is sometimes called) and do you lose anything in the process? Without more examples of Mozart programs written in the intended manner it is difficult to tell.

I may be missing a big chunk of the puzzle, perhaps multi-paradigm programming really is the way forward. From my own perspective though I think the interoperability provided by web services is where programming is going in the future and I value common communication standards between languages over combining language features in one monolithic place. However it is a very interesting language and a provides genuinely different approach to programming. The platform is clearly mature enough for anyone interested to develop useful applications with, but it is a big investment in terms of learning curve and probably also in time spent writing your own APIs.

What ThinWire does is push everything out to the server side code, which is written entirely in Java. There is no conversion of Java into JavaScript, the view the user gets is simply handled entirely by some server side code. This seems to me not a terrible model as your user interface can still be contained in a separate .jar than the main application logic to stop the wrong code bleeding into both. Additionally one can presumably use all features of the Java language as the UI components are simply Java classes all the way through. There seems to be a reasonably extensive library of visual components. Like GWT-Ext the UIs created with the ThinWire AJAX platform are event-based. The only downside seems to be that the project hasn’t been updated with new features for sometime, though bug fixes appear to still be being released.

Still if the whole package is essentially all Java, there shouldn’t be anything stopping a user extending the thing themselves for their own purposes. The key ’selling’ point of it is the pushing of the code responsible for the client side view out to the server.

My take – brilliant; put yet another spanner in the works delaying Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and therefore jeopardise all of Sun’s products including Java which put simply seems to me much more important than MySQL.

At the end of the day business decisions are all about compromise, sometimes you have to sacrifice certain things in order to save others. In an uncertain economical climate the more the buy-out of Sun by Oracle is delayed the more damage could potentially occur. To take it to an extreme Oracle may never actually complete the purchase of Sun and then the future is bleak for all Sun technologies which would be a very bad thing indeed.

Firstly any web developer worth their weight will know that Internet Explorer is indeed a frustrating platform to accommodate. IE does not support web standards in the same way as most other browsers and behaves very differently with each version. IE8 is better at consistently interpreting web pages and javascript but it is still not perfect (then again neither is any other particular browser IMO). However regardless of these inconsistencies web developers should still support IE to a certain extent as it is still one of the most widely used platforms for web browsing.

What makes me confused about Google’s admission they are finding IE support difficult is the fact that their own web development platforms for user interfaces, GWT and GWT-Ext, are relatively well supportive of IE. There are still bugs present when using many of the layout combinations, but I’ve worked with GWT-Ext for long enough to know that these are not insurmountable by a few CSS based bug fixes. And if I can resolve these problems I’m certain there are plenty of much cleverer individuals at Google who also can.

I know that Google Wave is not necessarily developed from the GWT/GWT-Ext framework, but regardless of the way they have developed it I find it hard to believe they cannot support IE directly.

The fix seems to be some kind of add-on to IE to make it support Google Wave which seems to me a counter-productive step. If you start treating one target platform very differently from the rest, surely you’re setting yourself up for further cross-compatibility problems down the line?

adverts that are for products I have no interest in or products that I in fact dislike the very idea of, are where the frustration lies. Unfortunately that’s a subjective thing, and makes me think that perhaps much or all of current internet advertising should be axed or at the very least better targeted to the user

So I found it interesting that groups such as the Centre for Digital Democracy are building a movement against targeted advertising on the grounds of privacy.

However as I explored in my last post the alternative to adverts that are not targeted is shoving adverts that bear no relation to the user in their face. Mike Zaneis, vice president of public policy for the Interactive Advertising Bureau told the BBC that

…the beautiful thing is they don’t have to click on that advert, or pay attention to it or do anything.

This statement aggrovates me just about as much as inappropriate advertising does because most online advertising demands you do pay attention to it, especially if it is animated. I defy anyone not to at least notice moving advertising on an otherwise static page, particularly if the advert obscures the content you are trying to read.

I fully understand the need for advertising to support online business, however I feel that people on both sides of this argument are missing the mark. There needs to be a compromise between privacy and how appropriate the advertising is to the user. And the visibility of internet advertising has gone way too far, with adverts even imitating common parts of the websites they appear on and sometimes requiring user interaction to minimise them otherwise they take over large parts of the page. In my view this is a borderline adware tactic.

Internet advertising needs to evolve in a more intelligent way otherwise it may suffer the fate of many ‘pushy’ sales techniques in alienating the potential customers and therefore websites declining to opt for it in fear of losing their user base. In my opinion there is nothing ‘beautiful’ about internet advertising in its current state, and simply saying it can be ignored is just the same as saying television and printed media advertising can be ignored. The difference is a computer is the domain of the user, they like to have control of what they are viewing and the world of the internet has the technical infrastructure to make this possible and could be a sophisticated medium for subtle and acceptable advertising. At the moment it is simply yet another annoyance built into our technology among many that will eventually fall prey to technological natural selection.

It seems the development of Java and the Java web platform will continue on the same track and remain open source, however obviously Oracle would be quite capable of imposing any changes they may decide to make.

The only ‘at risk’ part of Sun’s method of operation I can see from looking at the currently available information is Sun’s web application server technology such as Glassfish due to Oracle involvement in the development of the server technology. This could potentially mean that Glassfish itself may no longer be freely available although this is pure speculation on my part.

Until the deal is closed, and any collaborative changes or developments take place, it will be business as usual for both organisations.