Dans La Wi-Generation : WiMedia (WUSB), Wi-Fi, WiMax (WDSL), Wi-Mobile, Jean-Michel Cornu, parle des types de réseaux: les réseaux personnels (PAN), locaux (LAN), métropolitains (MAN) ou distants (WAN) et les réseaux sans fil IEEE qui vont peut-être les influencer. Les réseaux informatique (IEEE Ethernet) semble prendre pas sur les réseaux télécom. Principallement parce que le monde sans fil de IEEE orienté jusqu’à présent plus vers le nomadisme, s’ouvre peu à peu au handover et à la mobilité. La qualité de service pour sa part reste encore un problème pour les réseaux sans fil IEEE.

Wi-Mobile permettra d’ajouter la mobilité aux réseaux sans fil métropolitains (WMAN). Le standard associé, IEEE 802.16e, est attendu pour fin 2005 ou début 2006. La vision du Wi-Mobile est celle de « l’Internet Ambiant » : chaque personne ou objet doit pouvoir se connecter où il le veut quand il le veut, qu’il se déplace ou non. Par contre, la couverture avec ses problèmes de canyons et d’interférances n’est pas mentionnée.

Le handover est une manière d’augmenter la connectivité. Jean-Michel Cornu parle du “handover” qui permet de passer de façon transparente d’une cellule à une autre (à ne pas confondre avec le roaming qui est un accord commercial permettant d’utiliser le réseau d’un autre opérateur). Il définit 3 types de handovers:

• Le handover horizontal : passer d’une cellule à une autre utilisant la même technologie ;
• Le handover vertical : passer d’un type de réseau à l’autre (de Wi-Fi, à la 3G, au satellite…) ;
• Et maintenant le handover diagonal : entre W-USB, Wi-Fi, WDSL et Wi-Mobile qui utilisent des technologies sous-jacentes communes.

Since the 4-5 years J2ME exist, I have this ritual of writing an “hello world” example, but without taking time going deeper in the code. So here we go again. I read the current “Survey of J2ME Today“, got in the spirit by reading John Carmack’s “Cell phone adventures” installed Sun’s and Nokia’s developers kits, integrated them to Eclipse with EclipseME and deployed in a few minutes my new jad and jar files. The development cycle go faster and this time! Hopefully, time allocation, won’t make me fall off the wagon once again this year.

Last year’s and the year before, and the year before, … killer network technology, namely Jini, gets yet another opportunity to shine with the release of the Jini Starter Kit. The aim of the kit is to make Jini more accessible to every-day developpers. Surprisingly enough, XML’s Tim Bray got interested in lately. In “Jini and the Tokyo Subway” he rightly advocates that MPRDVs (Minimum Progress Required To Delacre Victory) like him would need an even lower barrier to entry.

Jini is great because it is an implementation of many smart network programming and it works! It is also great to learn about network programming. Hopefully, this starter kit is a step for better understanding Jini’s key concepts by providing easier development cycle.

My JavaWorld, Javalobby, SDN, … newsletters have been pilling for tool long. I went throught them today and read:

• javootoo.com, the Look and Feel Source for Java developers, because I am still worried about the work that has to be done to make Java UI look decent.
• J2SE 5.0 in a Nutshell, I still haven’t embraced Tiger.
• Url Rewrite Filter, a Java Web Filter for any J2EE compliant web application server, which allows you to rewrite URLs (like Apache’s mod_rewrite) before they get to your code. Good to know that there is now a solution to avoid having Apache in front of Tomcat/Resin.
• Snap Mobile, for Java multiplayer gaming communities… I am wondering if SNAP is still supported…
• JavaDesktop is gathering place for members of the Java platform’s graphical user interface (GUI) community.
• Understanding Rendering Hints, as I still miss some of the aspects of the control of rendering in Java2D.
• GUI Design patterns, how a certain part of your application needs to behave or how you should present things to the user.
• Changes in Working With ContentPane in JDK 5.0.
• Swing: System Tray Icons, to knwo that a solution exists…
• GUIdebook, Graphical User Interface Gallery
• Professional Swing: Creating Polished Apps and part 2. I really like the advice to uniquily use the GridBackLayout with Packer.
• My favorite Java 5 change, the enhanced for loop, combined with generics.
• Five Reasons to Move to the J2SE 5 Platform
• Go Fishing with the New MIDP 2.0 Game APIs, mobile phone game development could become more fun.
• Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) allows developers to take an existing application model and quickly create a rich graphical editor.
• XFlows, a cross-platform XML and XSLT manager.

Politics-Oriented Software Development is yet another post about software projects disastrously prone to failure. I like that it does not point the problem on the methodology and the structures of business organizations.

Real world companies are made up of individuals working for their own goals: career advancement, more money, or just the chance to slack off. Occasionally it may be in someone’s interest to build a successful project. Usually it’s more useful to sabotage it.

I am not sure if and when I am going to use it, but 93 Photo Street is a real nice piece of free software to generate photo maps. A photo map displays your images arranged by location instead of by time.

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Maps of a wardriving session by the people at wardriving.ch in Zürich in October 2004: Wardriver Treffen.

Jini: Out of the Bottle and Into the Box is the kind of article that make you believe in Jini again. Daniel H. Steinberg makes the open dream of having Jini shipped with every JVM. It would indeed be rather exciting to have Jini on every Java capable device and offer the same services (and more!) as RendezVous. I must admit that Jini is one of the few Java technology that tickles my creativity.

- Dietzen posited that where the current Web is concerned with UI, the next generation of the Web will center around integration.
- SOAP-based web services are being used inappropriately for applications that require only a socket or two.
- It isn’t that Jini or any other technology is right or wrong. You need to understand the fundamental assumptions of that technology and apply it where appropriate.
- We’re buying into the notion that we need all of these WS-* initiatives and can’t imagine that we can send a message “from scratch” with our “easy-bake socket.”
- If you assume Java is present at both ends of the wire, you are mostly set up to take advantage of Jini technology.
- They explained that Jini was all about distributed objects and networked devices, and the assumptions that needed to be made to robustly provide services on an unreliable network. Much of that message got lost.
- Rendezvous is French for Jini
- What we learned in the case of Rendezvous is that having the supporting structure always available leads developers to take advantage of the technology in ways that cannot be anticipated.
- The advantage of supporting Jini at the VM level is, therefore, that you can “assume a network.”
- One of the most appealing aspects of Apple’s Rendezvous technology is the fundamental rejection of the Highlander principle.
- Programmers need to acknowledge and code for potential problems on the network, but the patterns for working with Jini and JavaSpaces are not nearly as complex as the problems with working with EJBs.
- Opportunities abound on the desktop, in the enterprise, and in mobile devices
- There needs to be an ease of use for end users that would require a Jini lookup service be present without requiring any action on their part.

If you are like most, and possibly even all, programmers code sucks. Maybe not all of it, and maybe not all the time, but certainly some of it, some of the time. Dave Astels brings his point of view in Why Your Code Sucks.