The first quarter of 2008 has brought about 2 acquisitions, Sun acquiring MySQL and Oracle acquiring BEA, along with talk of a third, Microsoft acquiring Yahoo. I don’t really understand Sun’s need for MySQL, or MySQL’s need for Sun, but they’re both open source proponents so it seems like a good fit. There has been [...]

One frustrating aspect of being a Java developer is it’s lack of popularity in the web browser. There could be a number of causes for this. One is that installing Java, for most people, is not a very pleasant experience. The size of the JRE is much bigger than the size of a Macromedia Flash [...]

In case you haven’t heard yet, Sun has open sourced Java under a version of the GPL. This includes the Java HotSpot virtual machine. I checked out the code for the vm used in the jdk1.6.0 and the first thing that I noticed is that it is written in C++, not C. For some reason [...]