Project Looking Glass: A Richer Desktop Beyond Windows/Mac
0 Comments Published December 21st, 2006 in Java.Project Looking Glass - a 3D Java-based desktop project sets off to explore the possibilities of advancing the 2D desktops such as Windows or MacOS by open sourcing the early development prototypes. The project is working with Ubuntu community to make LG3D available via a multi-verse software source. They are also working with OpenSolaris team.
The project is very much in its infancy. The design goals of Project Looking Glass (LG3D) include:
- High productivity to support aggressive 3D exploration
- Solid platform for use in future products
- High performance and scalability
- Powerful 3D capability support
- Existing 2D application integration
- Framework to support two-and-half-dimension window manager
- Rich set of componentized libraries
- Rich user feedback based on animation
- Support for visual designer oriented tool chain
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The javax.persistence.EntityManager is the central service for all persistence actions. Entity beans are plain Java objects that interact with EntityManager to make them persistent. EntityManager has the following role:
- manages the object-relational mapping between a fixed set of entity classes and the underlying data source.
- provides APIs for creating queries, finding objects, synchronizing objects and inserting objects into the database.
- provides caching and manage the interaction between an entity and transactional services.
- tracks state changes to the entity bean.
EntityManager manages persistence context, a set of entity bean instances. When the persistence context is closed, all managed entity objects become detached and are unmanaged.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
CodeGear announced JBuilder 2007 on Monday, 20 Nov. Who is CodeGear? It is a subsidiary of Borland, which is so new that its official web site is not yet ready. The new subsidiary will focus on developer productivity market while its parent company, Borland continues to grow on Application Life Cycle Management (ALM) market.
Just a week after CodeGear is formed, the young company announced the latest JBuilder that is built on Eclipse 3.2.1 core. The “enhanced” version of Eclipse delivers better plug-in management, enhances enterprise customer support and brings JBuilder innovations to Eclipse. CodeGear hopes that by offloading the maintenance of development tools, potential customers are willing to pay a fee to have a peace of mind.
The IDE is carefully crafted to address the software development trend. Open source is more pervasive than ever and development teams are increasingly distributed around the world. The trend creates a need to collaborate among developers. The easiest solution is to integrate collaboration tools right into the IDE. JBuilder 2007 includes TeamInsight, an integrated collaboration portal and Project Assist that extends far beyond just writing codes.
Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz is set to announce the open sourcing of the core Java platform within 30 to 60 days. After months of discussion, it looks like the fears of open-sourcing core Java is finally overcome.
The past discussion about the issues of opening up core Java had always been it opens the doors for competitors to grab and change Java, resulting in the kernel forking and compatibility problems. The biggest benefit it may bring is to keep Java alive with community efforts given that Sun is not adequately promoting Java anymore.
One of the major hurdles of open sourcing Java is the approval of open source license. Sun may not have the rights to open source all the code given that there are codes licensed from third party. As a comparison, it took Sun five years in the case of OpenSolaris project to replace these codes with open source or rewritten codes. The initial components of Open Source Java will likely be the Java compiler and Hotspot.
Jini and Universal Plug & Play are the prominent device coordination frameworks for information appliances. These architectures are essentially coordination frameworks that propose certain ways and means of device interaction with the ultimate aim of simple, seamless and scalable device interoperability.
Device coordination provide a subset of the following capabilities to a device:
- Ability to announce its presence to the network
- Automatic discovery of devices in the neighborhood and even those located remotely
- Ability to describe its capabilities as well as query/understand the capabilities of other devices
- Self configuration without administrative intervention
- Seamless interoperability with other devices wherever meaningful