Evolutionary Goo

After reading this article on artificial intelligence and the possibility that robots will require rights similar to humans, I thought I was reading something from The Onion. Creating a robot that has a conscience? What arrogance. So far the best innovation to come out of AI seems to be that little robot vacuum cleaner that bounces off the walls in your house. Maybe I should make such claims about the business applications I write. I guess this is why I’m a developer and not a salesperson.

Am I wrong here, or is this idea of creating robots with a conscience just a bunch of crap?

Google has announced today that their Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is now full open source under the Apache 2.0 license. This is very good news that I believe will lead to a wider adoption of the technology.

Last Friday, ThinWire announced that its project had become fully open source under the LGPL license. With both of these competing frameworks now 100% open source, we should really start to see a lot of innovation in Ajax based Java Web frameworks. From my perspective I don’t see Ajax being adopted in the enterprise on a large scale. It seems like a lot of places are playing around an Ajax control here and there while sticking to page based applications. However, we could be at the beginning of an adoption curve that will eventually show Ajax based applications being very popular within the enterprise. The recent news from GWT and ThinWire will only accelerate that.

I also found an interesting article on the ThinWire Web site comparing ThinWire to GWT. Obviously, it is written to shine a positive light on ThinWire. Nonetheless, it is a good article and helps to identify issues that need to be looked at in regards to Ajax applications.

I’ve been following a very interesting Java Web framework, named ThinWire. It claims to be a framework that allows you to build highly interactive, rich user Web interfaces by writing only Java code (no HTML, JavaScript or CSS). Their tag line is “ThinWire… Beyond Ajax”. Up until today the open source license for this software was under the restrictive GPL, so I never took the next step to actually working with the framework. However, ThinWire just announced today that they have switched the license to the much friendlier LGPL. I am now VERY interested in this framework.

There are so many Java Web frameworks available today, that it is not very often that I see a new one that excites me. ThinWire is probably not the answer for all Web applications, but for business applications, this framework could change everything. Imagine only having to debug Java code. Less experienced developers only needing to be strong in Java. Not having to worry about cross-browser compatibilities. AJAX capability across the board. Security built with AJAX in mind. Whew… the productivity gains could be enormous.

With the change in licensing, I’m now going to take the next step and build a sample application in ThinWire. Stay tuned…

We have all heard by now the tragic story about James Kim and his family. While browsing the Internet for stories related to this incident I ran across this interesting article about survival in the outdoors. This article has a lot of interesting things to point out, including The Rule of Threes.

A person can live for:
Three minutes without air.
Three hours without shelter.
Three days without water.
Three weeks without food.

Question: Which rock superstar auditioned for the Monkees, but was turned down? Answer at the end of this post.

We have all had discussions involving useless music, movie, TV or sports trivia. When it comes to music, there is an excellent site you can use to resolve any arguments that may arise. AllMusic has information on a plethora of artists and albums, including biographies, discographies, songs, credits, Billboard charts and photos. They even cover many local artists not known at the national level.

Answer: Stephen Stills

I’ve been using Firefox since its 1.0 version and it is by far my favorite browser. I think the killer feature in Firefox that caused me to switch to it from Internet Explorer was tabbed browsing and how fast it started up. Last month Microsoft released a new version of Internet Explorer (version 7.0) that includes the tabbed browsing feature. However, Mozilla released a new version of Firefox (version 2.0) shortly after that includes another killer feature - SPELL CHECKING. I would never have thought that spell checking would become such an important feature to me. Now I never have to worry about whether a Web site provides spell checking or not, as Firefox takes care of it for me. Any form field will automatically be spell checked and misspelled words are underlined in red. You even get the option of adding words to a local copy of the Firefox dictionary. This is especially handy when writing blog entries, since the version of WordPress I am using doesn’t have a spell checker.