Not if it merges with Sony, according to this article. Hmmm, sounds like it might actually work. Another way to "bet the company" is to make Java open source, but that probably wouldn't produce any revenue. How about buying/marketing/selling JBoss? Hmmm, not much profits there either I bet. There's got to be something that folks are still willing to buy in this God-forsaken piss-poor economy... What could it be?
One way to do that is through a merger, but the logical merger partner isn't Apple, it is Sony. The two companies have been talking about some kind of strategic alliance. Maybe these are merger talks. Sony is incredibly strong, having just posted its biggest-ever profit. Sony leadership is changing, making possible a bold move as the new management tries to put its own stamp on the company. Sony has both the resources to support Sun and the need for technology Sun can provide.
Laurent Michalkovic has an interesting post on the fact that no one reads the specs. I read them two years ago, that's right - in December of 2001. I read all of the ones that that interested me at the time: JSP 1.2, Servlet 2.4, J2EE 1.3 and EJB 2.0. I downloaded them all and printed them out and read them. It was boring and cost me around $150 just in printer cartridges. They had good information, they're just dry. Luckily, I was very motivated to read them. I was studying for the Web Component Developer exam from Sun, so the JSP 1.2 and Servlet 2.4 specs were essential reading. I read J2EE 1.3 and EJB 2.0 shortly thereafter while studying to become a BEA Certified Developer. Interesting thing about the BEA exam, I ended up concentrating on WebLogic-specific stuff to pass the exam. Not much on standards, mostly questions on server configuration, clustering, etc.
I've skimmed through the latest ones, but I haven't read them page-by-page cover-to-cover. Besides, the mere size of each will scare you off:
- Servlet 2.4: 309 pages
- JSP 2.0: 458 pages
- J2EE 1.4: 242 pages
- JSTL 1.0: 219 pages
- JSF 1.0 EA: 117 pages
That's a heckuva lot of reading. When studying for these certifications, I also picked up Professional Java Server Programming J2EE, 1.3 Edition by Wrox. I actually thought this was a great book and I learned a lot more from it than I did from reading the specs.
Interestingly enough (or maybe not at all), I also bought (and read) J2EE Applications and BEA WebLogic Server. However, the BEA Documentation site turned out to be a better resource than that book!
I did a bit of digging today to find out which J2EE servers support HTTP Digest Authentication. Here's what I found:
- Tomcat: Yes. How do I know? My own experience, and this documentation. Why can't they just state this in Tomcat's documentation?
- JBoss: Yes. How do I know? An earlier comment. Since JBoss can be configured with Tomcat and Jetty, this question is only applicable to those servers. I couldn't find any Jetty documentation indicating support, but I trust the users. Finding any information on JBoss is a real pain in the ass, I hate PDFs.
- Resin: Yes. This documentation says so. This documentation and finding the answer was the easiest yet. Of course, the manual testing on Tomcat was pretty easy too.
- Orion: No. How do I know? An e-mail I received from Nicholas Clarke, who tested it on Orion 1.5.2. Here's the message he received:
Auto-deploying file:/usr/java/orion/wwwroot/antiaction/ (Assembly had been updated)... Error initializing site Alternative: Digest-Auth not supported Orion/1.5.2 initialized. I couldn't find anything on the Orion site indicating support for the different authentication types. Their documentation on web.xml seems to be a regurgitation of the DTD.
- WebLogic: No. They've always had excellent documentation, making this a breeze to find.
- WebSphere: No. How do I know? the 5.0
docs say so. BTW, I had to really dig to even find this documentation. Makes me glad I don't currently develop on WebSphere.
- Sun ONE: No. Easy to find due to great documentation.
- JRun: Who knows. I gave up searching for this documentation after
10 minutes. BTW, looking through JRun's technical whitepaper I found that "XDoclet has been tightly integrated into JRun 4." Very cool!
That seems like a waste of a good hour for a feature that no one ever uses. Oh well, at least you've been edumacated.
I noticed that on JSPWiki's demo site there's an RSS feed. So my question is, why isn't here one for Roller? http://www.ecyrd.com/JSPWiki/rss.rdf
works for JSPWiki, but a similar URL (http://www.rollerweblogger.org/wiki/rss.rdf) doesn't work for Roller. Is the Roller Wiki an older version that doesn't have this feature.
Speaking of Roller, I've updated this site to cache everything to disk, rather than in memory. Hopefully this will result in a more stable site.
I stumbed upon the :: Introspection :: blog this morning, written by Jeff Haynie. I really dig Jeff's theme, and that's the reason for this post. Jeff - any chance you want to donate that sucker to Roller's out-of-the-box themes collection?
