Digital photography is hot, just look at all the different sites where people can share their photos. However, when you get a little more serious about photography you quickly run into an expensive area of software packages. Just do a search for image organizers, image manipulation programs (Adobe Photoshop being by far the most popular). [...]
Rails is hot, but the Java guys are making it even hotter! Watch out for http://shale.apache.org/ and http://www.jboss.com/products/seam … ok, so I am biased
Looks like rapid web app development is kicking in gears in the Java world, should make for interesting times..
In many applications you often want to perform a series of operations on data. Normally you would just chain a bunch of method calls that pass along the data, however, as anyone realizes, this approach is far from ideal.
The ACE library contains something called Streams which allows you to utilize the ‘Pipes and Filters’ pattern. [...]
For years the movement of portable data structures to XML has been going on. XML is used everywhere, from storage to domain specific language implementations (look at hibernate for instance), and as most programmers realize it is an absolute pain when it comes to performance; parsing XML is just slow.
I have joked with past colleagues [...]
I have done some work with ACE in my spare time and one of the greatest things, besides it being the top of the line framework for network applications, is its logging facilities.
A great article explaining this facility in-depth is at the aw professional website, taken from the ACE Programmer’s Guide.