This revolutionary feature was given the acroynm WORA – “Write Once, Run Anywhere.” How did Java pull this off? The Java libraries are packed with every bit of information needed to operate in a variety of platforms – memory and file management, network operations and management, and thread creation for cross platform purposes. Java proved an immediate hit since many veteran programmers, especially C++ and C coders liked the high amount of abstraction found in Java. This gave them the freedom to focus on application logic.

Java’s WORA strategy was so appealing that, by 2005, Java became the language of choice for open source projects listed at Sourceforge. Eventually, other languages incorporated Java’s winning WORA philosophy. In fact, WORA has now become the default standard for Javascript, Python, and PHP.

Given its mass adoption by competing languages, does WORA still have any relevance? Yes it does – on the client side. Users access the Internet through web browsers and these applications use a wide range of technologies to compile and organize the content. There are still many proprietary technologies that lack a common standard (for example: Microsoft’s Silverlight versus Adobe’s Flash) interacting with differing standards (HTML vs XHTML). This poses a special challenge for browsers which have to accommodate all these elements to properly render a page. This leads to either bloated browsers handling increasingly complicated sets of operations or less than optimal interpretations of the differing standards. Regardless, to the user, content is all that matters. The underlying technology is just a means to an end.

This problem is highlighted in particularly stark terms in the mobile web browsing environment. There is a fast-rising conflict between native mobile apps written for a particular platform and mobile webapps. Mobile apps have to be rewritten and recompiled for each new platform it will run on. This is similar to the pre-Java computing days of having to recompile and tweak C, C++, and Perl programs as you switch from one OS to another. Thankfully, HTML 5 holds the same promise as Java did in the past. While native phone apps can boast of better performance and more effective access to their native phone platform’s features, the days of this advantage against web apps are fast disappearing with the rise of HTML 5. Its feature sets are fast approaching parity with mobile apps. The proverbial handwriting might be on the wall regarding HTML 5′s triumph as mobile computing’s WORA champion: first, much of the confusion wrought by XHTML was eliminated when the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) agreed to halt XHTML2′s development. Instead, it threw its weight into HTML5′s favor as the HTML standard for the future.

Second, mobile OS heavyweights’ positions lend themselves to natural support for mobile web apps running on the free HTML 5standard. Apple never supported Flash for its iPhone line and Steve Jobs has praised HTML 5 as the future’s mobile web app standard. Google has supported HTML5 development all along by tying it to its fast rising Chrome browser and adding HTML5 support to Youtube. Interestingly enough, Microsoft has decided to change its strategy from Silverlight to HTML5.

Third, Windows 8 treats HTML5 apps as native apps which pushes HTML5′s capabilities beyond the confines of the browser. Content providers are taking notice as exemplified by Facebook’s push for mobile utilization of its content through the HTML 5 standard.

Often, dramatic sea changes in technology standards simmer before boiling over into ubiquity. The developments described in detail above point to an overwhelming change in client browsing technology on the side of HTML5. WORA is poised to triumph yet again.

According to Google engineer Andrew Gerrand’s post on the Go Programming Language Blog, “This means you can take that Go app you’ve been working on (or meaning to work on) and deploy it to App Engine right now with the new 1.5.2 SDK.”

Well, not exactly “right now.” You’d have to get the SDK first by downloading it. The developer kit has 2 versions, 64-bit and 32-bit, forMac OS X and Linux. If you need to get up to speed on Google App Engine and Go, you might want to first check out Google’s docs on getting started.

Although the Go release is quite exciting and broadens the runtime library of Google App Engine, it isn’t exactly polished yet. As Gerrand wrote: “Note that the Go runtime is still considered experimental; it is not as well-supported as the Python and Java runtimes.” Why? Go is Google’s “homebrewed” language and it is still relatively novel. Google has championed this internally developed languageto fulfill its vision of an “expressive, concise, clean, and efficient” language. Google touts Go as “a fast, statically typed, compiledlanguage that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.”

Go was originally announced in May at San Francisco’s Google I/O conference. During the release, Rob Pike, one of Go’s inventors, said”For large programming – programming in the large, like we do at Google, using large systems with many programmers working onthem – static [typing] is a huge safety net. It catches tons of stuff early that would not be caught with all-dynamic typing.

“Go is a real systems language, a compiled language. You can write really efficient code that runs closer to the metal. But you can use …higher-level ideas to build servers out of the pieces you put together,” he said.
Give Go a spin and tap into massively distributed computing infrastructure of Google through the Google App engine service.

And share your thoughts in the comments below…We are looking forward to hearing your opinion.

Based on Oracle’s numbers, Java runs on the vast majority of enterprise desktops (over 97%!) and over three billion computing/communication devices run on Java technology.

In addition to formally releasing SE 7, Oracle also announced that it is planning to work on the next version of the platform, Java SE 8. This is all in keeping with Oracle’s long-term plans. According to Oracle Fusion Middleware and Java Products senior vice president, Hasan Rizvi, “Oracle has a strong vested interest in the success of the Java platform and is firmly committed to delivering a consistent, high-performance, high-quality Java SE implementation and will be supporting the Java SE 7 release across the Oracle FusionMiddleware product portfolio.” In fact, Oracle is increasing the amount of resources it is investing in the platform. Based on an Oracleblog entry, Oracle’s senior VP of app server development, Steve Harris, said the company’s goals regarding Java are to keep Java’s features and offerings “vibrant” as well as “free and open,” and to boost support for the platform’s developer community.

The problem revolved around data management for each user and transaction intelligence. The opportunity centered on how this mass of users can be used as a collective source of intelligence for user experience upgrades. As startups reached breakout sizes in scale and user population, analyzing data at this large of a scale required precisely the type of infrastructure LAMP was originally designed to sidestep. Expensive software deals and even hardware began to appear as options. A free new open source framework called Hadoop fixes this problem.

Hadoop is a Java-based framework that provides support for distributed applications running on tons of computers processing huge volumes of data. Hadoop lets startup engineers plan for the future while leveraging free resources. No expensive custom software needed – Hadoop is customizable and can be made to fit your network’s ever rising application management and coordination needs. Hadoop definitely takes the spirit of LAMP development one step further in servicing startups’ needs.

As most of you know, in Minecraft you can build structures using various “materials” that come in the form of different cubes. Using a somewhat unusual but specific combination of these blocks you designate a three-dimensional area. The combination has to be unusual so that you won’t end up printing the whole Minecraft world. Afterwards, the script written in Python converts the area into a standard file for 3D printers. Sumter and Boggess have a put a video on youtube that shows you exactly how its done (see below). Their site also features a nice collections of 3D models that they have created using their “little project”. The one question that I just cant seem to answer: When do these kids ever study?

Check it out on: http://minecraftprint.com/

Or see for yourself, here is the vid:

After a successful first version of the event, the organizers hope to attract a diverse crowd again this year, preferably with a slight increase in numbers (last year’s event was attended by 200). Accordingly, they will cater to beginners with tutorial-style presentations such as Python 101, Python’s Dark Corners, and Python for Science and Engineering while also offering lots of beef for the connaisseur of “Applied Pythonomics”, everything from serious business – like the presentation of Geoscience Australia’s Duncan Gray who will talk about the ways in which his organization has used Python to develop scientific software – to fun and games, for example Chris McCormicks lecture on infiniteplatformer.com, a Free Software multiplayer user-created-content platform video game written in Pygame. Should be good! Prices range from $440 for corporate clients to a $44 fee for students.

For more, check out http://pycon-au.org/2011/about/

Anyways, the point is this: While, of course, the D-Wave One (which sounds a lot like Air Force One) is full of exotic technology, very little specialized knowledge is required to operate the system . Via an Application Programming Interface, users can interact with the system, which means that you can communicate with and access the system from several pogramming environments and one of them, you guessed it, is Python. I haven’t quite figured what needs to be done to get started but the first blogs on how the program the monster have already appeared on the net:

http://dwave.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/learning-to-program-the-d-wave-one-software-you-should-install-a-book-you-should-buy/

Here is a link to an HPCwire article on the topic:

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-05-26/d-wave_sells_first_quantum_computer.html?featured=top

D-Wave is obviously pretty excited about their sale. In a press release CEO Brownell is quoted: “D-Wave is thrilled to establish a strategic relationship with Lockheed Martin Corporation. Our combined strength will provide capacity for innovation needed to tackle important unresolved computational problems of today and tomorrow. Our relationship will allow us to significantly advance the potential of quantum computing.” If they work with LMC too much, they might cause problems, too. But that is neither here nor there…

Credit: Image courtesy of EPSRC

Been there, you might say. How is that a new invention? Well, the trick, of course, is Python. Developed by researchers at City University London and Coventry University, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), this card solves a problem that other cards have not been able to address: Different hospitals, different systems. MyCare uses software that is written in a portable way and Python is just the ideal language for that. Now, data can be easily transferred from one computer to another even if they use different computer operating systems.

But there is more: The system functions on an open-source basis which means that scientists, programmers and physicians can collaborate on the development process. Extensions, add-ons, new database record types – the necessities of the future can be implemented in this system. No wonder the science community is getting pretty excited.

Science Daily carried a story last week:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110608122548.htm

and even the HuffingtonPost published something:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/09/mycare-the-card-that-coul_n_874512.html

If you are interested in the development process:

http://www.myc2.org/trac