Internet Alchemy

If you’re celebrating the Christian new year (and according to the news it seems to be everybody, even China) then I hope you have a happy and prosperous new year. See you in 2000…

After poking around WAPAW’s usage stats I thought I’d compile a top ten list of search terms:

1. News (127)
2. WAP (97)
3. Restaurant (56)
4. Hotels (54)
5. Sex (53)
6. Weather (42)
7. Nokia (41)
8. WML (37)
9. CNN (34)
10. Stock (33)

This is out of a total of 2755 searches in the past month. I think number 5 shows an untapped market for WAP devices - 2-colour bitmap porn!

Keith Brown has released version 0.20 of his Perl SOAP client. This version is a complete rewrite to move it closer to the recent IETF draft submission. Also the transport is completely decoupled from the packet handling code so experimentation can start with SOAP over non-HTTP transport.

Back in August I wrote about the Aglet mobile agent project that was under threat of closure by IBM. Todd Papaioannou has written to update us: the Aglet source will be released to the community early next year! This should make a major difference to the mobile agent landscape.

MySpider is a collaborative index that takes some of the open directory and mixes it with the community rating of Alexa. An interesting experiment, but the results need more detail and the links open in a new frame with an intrusive MySpider header. [via Camworld]

According to a Forrester Research report, an estimated 219 million people in Europe, will be accessing the Internet using mobile devices by 2003. That works out to be about a third of the European population.

WAPAW.COM got an upgrade today in the form of a new Wireless Directory. The directory is being constructed in association with XMLTree and any WML sites sumnitted there will appear as part of the WAPAW directory.

For those visiting Internet Alchemy for the first time, it’s usually slightly more active than it has been for the past couple of weeks. Don’t worry it’ll pick up again soon when I’m less busy.

NEW YORK, NY Java Business SM Conference December 7, 1999 Sun
Microsystems, Inc. announced today that it is withdrawing its proposal to formally standardize the Java 2 platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) from the standards body ECMA. Sun is withdrawing from the process in order to protect the integrity of the Java technology and the investment made in it by the worldwide community using Java technology.

This is such a slap in the face for all Java developers. After the debacle that was the ISO fast track to standardisation, Sun have pulled out of the ECMA process as well. There were rumours bubbling up this week through the Java Study Group mailing list. Now the body of opinion is to go it alone - to produce a standard without Sun that encompasses the bytecode, vm and core api specifications. Indeed, last week, the chaiman of the ECMA Java committee (TC41) said:

As you know, TC41 was established to develop a standard based upon Java 2. Sun, who initiated the proposal to establish TC41, was expected to submit its Java 1.2.2 specification to be used as the basis of this work. Sun failed to do this at the first meeting of TC41 in October 1999, claiming that it had unresolved IPR issues regarding the specification.

At the meeting of the ECMA Coordinating Committee on November 11-12, 1999, the CC asked Sun to clarify its position on this matter by December 1 so that the ECMA GA could take appropriate action at the December 16, 1999
meeting.




Sun has failed to respond to this request from the CC.




Today ECMA management requested that TC41 consider proceeding with its programme of work without the Sun submission. Java 2 is well understood in the marketplace and documented in many books and other publicly available materials. TC41 may be able to use these and other sources of information to complete its programme of work. Clearly, we need to choose an approach that will allow us to proceed effectively and rapidly.




Without the Sun submission, there will be more work for us to do. I would recommend that we do our best to produce at least an initial standard to be submitted to the ECMA GA for approval in December 2000. With that in mind, I recommend that TC41 approach this effort by prioritizing its work, first to include the Java language and its core APIs, the JVM, and JNI.
The remainder of the work which would include the very large number of non-core APIs should be addressed at a lower priority. If we are able to complete the full work by December 2000, great. If not we’ll have the key portions of Java 2 standardized in a timely fashion and TC41 can continue in 2001 to complete its programme of work, or perhaps to move on to Java 3.

Understandably, people are angry and hurt:

Sun has played us ALL for fools, and I (for one) don’t see their games to be ANY different than Microsoft’s ones. They AREN’T thinking of the community (as their press release says). They are thinking **ONLY** of themselves.




Let’s NOW move on with the standardization of a Universal Virtual Machine, and see what we can do to free ourselves from proprietary wolves in sheep’s clothing…..

It has finally lost the respect of the developers that it has gradually built up over the past years. Their selfish actions have surely condemmed Java to a painful and slow death. Sun deserves all it gets.

Microsoft has announced that NT has passed the C2 security evaluation in six different modes. Contrary to popular belief, the last version of NT to be evaluated for this security classification was 3.51. Briefly, the required steps to enforce C2 level security are: install SP 6a, install C2 hotfix and then apply the methods detailed in Microsoft’s C2 Admin Guide.