JFluid is a Java profiler developed at Sun research. Yesterday it was announced that Sun is integrating JFluid with NetBeans. It seems only a matter of time before we get a JFluid plug-in for Eclipse. I can’t wait.

So, one of my former Senators had this to say about the Bush tax cuts:

I would not have voted for [President Bush’s] tax cut, based on what I know…There is no doubt that the people at the top who need a tax break the least will get the most benefit…Too often presidents do things that don’t end up helping the people they should be helping, and their staffs won’t tell them their actions stink on ice.

That Senator: Jesse Helms.

I’d love to see the rest of the story on Friendster’s migration from JSP to PHP. The fact that the post mentions only JSP and not servlets, or some MVC framework would seem to indicate that site was an exhibit of J2EE worst practices.

In another time and place, this would have been my dream job.

If, as he tells anyone willing to listen, George W Bush thinks history will take care of itself and he’s only focused on the present, then why did he write a stupid little message on the note announcing Iraqi sovereignty? Nice prop for the Bush Presidential library.

What’s with Sun and version numbers? I remember back in the day when we had Solaris 1 and Solaris 2 and SunOS 5 and SunOS 6 and then Solaris 7 and so on. If you were a Sun afficionado you know that some of those things were really the same thing, but it was a big freaking mess. Now we’re seeing even more bizarre version number antics from Sun when it comes to Java. Sun has decided that the next release of Java will be called J2SE 5.0. The version string that the JVM reports will still be 1.5. So that means all developers will still call it Java 1.5. What makes this weirder is that this harkens back to the days when Java 1.2 was released. Sun decided to call it Java 2, hence J2EE and J2SE and J2ME, because 1.2 had so many new features. So now we’re keeping the 2, which used to stand for 2.0, so when 1.5 is released, we’ll still have the old 2.0 around, and the new 5.0 number, and the original 1.x number. Does this make sense to anyone? What happens when we have the next really big Java upgrade? Will we keep the 5.0 number around for historical purposes as well? Does anyone else find it odd that Java has never managed to actually leave a major version number behind?

Billmon is shutting off comments at the Whiskey Bar, for the same reason that so many people end up shutting off comments. Oddly, perhaps, I’ve been toying with the idea of enabling comments for some posts here at rc3.org. Generally when I pose a question, I get lots of really thoughtful responses, and it’s a shame not to be able to share them with everyone verbatim.

Apparently when a politician becomes a Presidential nominee, they’re judged by a different standard, and I don’t mean as regards fitness for office.

Microsoft is coming out with cheap, slimmed down versions of its development tools for dabblers who don’t have the cash to pay for the full version of Visual Studio. This weekend when I was fooling around with .NET, I used vim and the C# compiler that comes with the .Net framework, and it worked fine for a smaller app, but I don’t think that approach would scale well. If you’re a Java programmer, you can be incredibly productive without paying for anything but hardware. The entire Eclipse, Tomcat, Apache, Linux, MySQL stack is free. Productivity enhancing frameworks like Hibernate and Struts (insert your favorite persistence and MVC framework here if you prefer) are free, as are plenty of other libraries that are widely adopted. The situation is the same for PHP and Perl developers if that’s your bag. I don’t think this is as big an issue for corporate developers, but if you’re a tinkerer, the ability to get all of this stuff for free is just amazingly valuable. Even outstanding tools like IntelliJ IDEA are relatively inexpensive. I guess Microsoft is recognizing that their prices for tools are a problem.

I’ve seen pointers here and there to a site called javadocs.org. When you type in a class name (or package name), it will bring up the JavaDoc for that class. What I find amazing is that the site is somewhat redundant, in that Google’s index is good enough to take care of this for you most of the time. For example, check out the first result from Google for these searches: actionform, hibernateexception, or arraylist. If you want to really be impressed, try out string, object, or vector. (Google doesn’t return the JavaDoc for those classes as its first result, but you can see it on the first page.) Including the package name in the search is just cheating, you get a guaranteed hit. I used to have tons of JavaDoc bookmarks, but the miracle of search engines (Yahoo is just as effective as Google it seems) has released me from that burden.