Java Developers and Skill

Maybe it was the Internet boom but I've always thought Java did more for bringing non-developers into the IT industry than any other language before it including HTML, VB and Javascript. This is rather unscientific and is instead based on two personal experiences.

1. A friend of mine in New York who's an aspiring rapper working service jobs while awaiting his big break bought a copy of Java in a Nutshell.
   
   
2. The last time I went back home I exchanged email with a couple of friends and one of them who I remember as being very uninterested in anything remotely academic [who even got held back in high school] asked me to purchase as many Java books as I could get my hands on for him.

What really impressed me about the Java adoption amongst my non-developer friends was the fact that Java is actually harder than WYSIWYG design doing Web or VB development. Of course, there is the problem of leaky abstractions.

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RDF Brokenness and the Semantic Web Pipe Dream

RDF has popped up in conversations a few times in past couple of months. I don't know much about it besides the fact that it is part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity which I've been quoted as saying

the semantic web is on the same level as flying cars and elevator rides to the moon; a nice but impractical and infeasible dream.

However my thoughts today aren't about the semantic web just RDF. I recently noticed that my favorite Java zealot has been looking into RDF. In the past few days I've seen a couple of noted XML luminaries pronounce it as broken. Actually, I'm wrong. I've seen them pronounce the RDF/XML syntax as broken.

Basically the W3C Technical Architecture Group is working on making some pronouncement on namespace documents which would probably affect my employer, myself directly and probably anyone else who uses of XML and owns a number of namespaces. In coming up with a version of RDDL that supports RDF, Tim Bray ended up against a number of shortcomings of RDF which bothered him enough that he's proposed an alternate XML syntax for RDF. Not much will probably happen with it though since the RDF Working Group's charter explicitly prevents them from working on alternate syntaxes to RDF. Without support from the W3C, it's hard to see how any RDF or Semantic Web XML activity can survive for long. Then again I might just be jaded.

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XQuery: Before and After

Yesterday was one of those late nights at work. I was working on estimates for testing the XQuery type system when myself and a co-worker realized an amusing difference between previous versions of the working draft and the current one.

BEFORE
XQuery is designed to meet the requirements identified by the W3C XML Query Working Group [XML Query 1.0 Requirements] and the use cases in [XML Query Use Cases]. It is designed to be a small, easily implementable language in which queries are concise and easily understood.

and

AFTER
XQuery is designed to meet the requirements identified by the W3C XML Query Working Group [XML Query 1.0 Requirements] and the use cases in [XML Query Use Cases]. It is designed to be a language in which queries are concise and easily understood.

Hmmmmm. It looks like somewhere along the line someone realized that small and easily implementable were no longer adjectives that described XQuery. Testing this language is going to be such a bitch.

Then again this is all part of a Micro$oft conspiracy to make a W3C standard so hard that only they can implement it. Yeah, right.

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Disclaimer:The above comments are my opinions and do not reflect the opinions, plans, strategies or intentions of my employer