Sylvain Wallez

Three important Cocoon-related news lately:

• Cocoon 2.1.5 is out. This is mainly a bugfix release.
• vnunet.com, a high traffic website is now powered by Cocoon.
• Cocoon is better represented into the ASF: David, Bertrand and Gianugo have been elected as ASF members, and Stefano has been elected to the ASF board.

Two recent events that are worth correlating:

• JBoss Group people use disgusting disinformation practices to spread FUD in opensource communities. Fortunately, this can't be hidden forever.
  
• BEA opensources some of their proprietary software. But this doesn't mean it will gather a successful community.
  

Where will be the convergence point? Or will they just cross roads (until JBoss dies after shooting in its feet so much)? Don't know.

One thing for sure is that all this shows the opensource movement entering a mature age, with all the hesitations and errors that becoming mature and adult means.

Wow, a PowerPC emulator for PCs, able to run MacOS X on ugly beige boxes.

Mmmh... what if we run VirtualPC on a virtual Mac running in PearPC? A good way to waste lots of CPU cycles for fun!

Via Marcus.

It's a one month old news (rather old compared to the blogosphere's usual speed), but I stumbled across this today: bytecode transformations using XSLT!

Wow, this is something I dreamed about when writing J-Fit two years ago. J-Fit is our in-house pipeline-based bytecode transformation tool that is used to shrink Cocoon to its bare minimum and adapt its bytecode so that it runs on J2ME virtual machines (see my presentation at the 2002 Cocoon Get Together for more on this).

I wonder however how fast this is (the XML document for a class is quite huge) and if it's actually usable to process several hundred classes as part of a build script.

Via Brian.

Following Steven, Justin and David, the mighty gods, I tried the test:

You are a MASTER of the English language!

While your English is not exactly perfect,
you are still more grammatically correct than
just about every American. Still, there is
always room for improvement...
How grammatically sound are you?

Mmmh... this quiz should be too much easy. Or is it that average americans are really bad at grammar?

... I became a Cocoon committer. Since then, I became committer on Avalon, and member of the Apache Software Foundation.

Many thanks to the Apache community that brought me so much, both professionally and personally.

Some people will think this should be the other way around and that the community should actually thank me for the work I did which they benefit from. But this really is a win-win situation, as we found many customers because of our implication in the development of Cocoon.

Yep, this little bird just came back from its long winter african trip. I heard it singing all night long. Again. Grrrrr...

In a few hours, I'll be flying to Paris to give a 3-days Cocoon training. These people aready use Cocoon, and some of them regularily participate to the discussions on cocoon-users (for which I unfortunately lack time).

A good occasion to put faces on names, and for them to go to the next level in their Cocoon knowledge with Flowscript and Woody Cocoon Forms!

Read this announcement, and this one. No April's fool here, as they're dated April 2nd.

Microsoft gives 700+900+350 = 1.95 billion dollars to Sun Microsystems to solve antitrust and patent issues!

Oh man, is Scott McNealy crazy? Does Sun really need money to survive? What does this mean for Java's future? Will it be absorbed by Megalosoft?

I remember back in 1997 when Microsoft injected 150 million dollars into Apple for similar reasons. 7 years later, Apple is still there, but Microsoft is way bigger and just bought today the silence of one of its latest oponents in the antitrust battle.

How many days of Micro$oft benefits are 1.95 billion dollars? Not that much, certainly...

I was involved in an April fool's joke yesterday on http://www.application-servers.com/, a french Java technology portal managed by Didier Girard.

They first announced to have hired Floyd Marinescu from TSS, and then announced the organization of a conference involved many well-known frenchies, including among others Marc Fleury, Cedric Beust, Vincent Massol, Eric Thauvin, François Letellier... and me. I'm honoured to be in the "well-know frenchies"!

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