Dr. Dobb's Journal March 2002
The Web Standards Project, initiated in 1998 to promote compatibility among browsers, is taking "a gentle leave of absence." The group served for three years as a quasienforcement wing for the W3C, goading Netscape and Microsoft closer to compliance with W3C recommendations. While the project gets credit for improved CSS support in browsers and the like, it also took some heat when Netscape, after receiving a stinging rebuke from WaSP regarding the many delays plaguing the Netscape 6 browser, released a version that many regarded as premature.
According to a farewell message posted on the project web site, the group believes that browser makers are no longer likely to ignore web standards, "and The WaSP's mission would seem to have been accomplished." The final missive, however, did not lack a sting. "Most of the Web remains a Balkanized mess of nonvalid markup, unstructured documents yoked to outdated presentational hacks, and incompatible code fragments," the group rebuked. The blame, however, has shifted. WaSP now believes that designers and developers — rather than browser makers — are responsible for the state of the Internet.
WaSP will launch a new site some time in 2002. Meanwhile, a few initiatives (like the Browser Upgrades effort) will continue at http://www.webstandards.org/.
The Eclipse Project, a consortium of software development tool vendors who want to create a standard development tools platform based on plug-in technology, is nearing a 2.0 release. The comment period on the 2.0 plan has concluded, and development stream builds are posted at http://www.eclipse.org/. The project includes Java development tools, a plug-in development environment, and the Eclipse Platform — an open extensible IDE.
The 2.0 release focuses on bug fixes and performance improvements, with new features and APIs taking secondary priority; the release will also include a new SDK. The code is mostly Java, and will be targeted to either Version 1.3 or 1.4 of the J2SE run time. A final release is expected in April 2002.
The Eclipse Platform itself is not designed to support any specific programming language — language support is added through plug-ins. Currently, the SDK comes with a Java IDE. A C/C++ development tool plug-in is under development.
Access to the Eclipse Platform code is granted under the Common Public License, which allows royalty-free redistribution of derivative works. Members of the consortium, which includes Borland, IBM, Merant, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, RedHat, SuSE, TogetherSoft, and WebGain, have pledged to release Eclipse-compatible tools, which will be made available under their own licenses.
The 2001 edition of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicts that chip features will scale down in size more quickly than previously thought. Two years ago, a gate length of 25 nanometers was projected for 2013; now, it's thought that dimension will be achieved in 2007. The advance is largely due to new post-lithographic process techniques that let features be refined after printing.
The roadmap looks 15 years into the future, at which point it predicts that physical gate length will be only 9 nanometers. The creators of the report note that "this is essentially equivalent to the most optimistic current projections on the extendibility of MOS transistors as well as the smallest experimental MOSFETS ever built. These experimental devices used a special source/ drain structure that has not been demonstrated to be practical for high-performance circuits yet." For more information on the roadmap, see http://www.semichips.org/pre_release.cfm?ID=203.
According to another report, this one from the Semiconductor Industry Association, chipmaking challenges in the immediate future include minimizing interconnect cross coupling, developing integrated tool sets to deal with signal delay, coupling, and power management, and increasing reuse of blocks known to be good. For more information, see http://www.semichips.org/downloads/Technology_Trends_and_2000_Technology_Agenda.pdf.
The U.S. Department of Commerce has officially approved Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 197 that makes the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) the official government encryption tool for protecting sensitive, unclassified information. AES is based on the Rijndael (pronounced "Rhine-doll") algorithm, which supports key sizes of 128, 192, and 256 bits. For a 128-bit key size, there are approximately 340 undecillion (340 followed by 36 zeros) possible keys. The AES replaces the aging Data Encryption Standard (DES), which NIST adopted in 1977 as the federal encryption standard. For more information on AES, see http://www.nist.gov/aes/ and "Rijndael: The Advanced Encryption Standard," by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen (DDJ, March 2001).
New Zealanders worried about excessive exposure to the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays are using SMS, the "short message service" available via mobile phones, to find out how long they can safely be out in the sun. Designed by software developer The Hyperfactory Limited and delivered by the Vodafone New Zealand network, the SMS application lets users send text messages to check the ultraviolet rating any time of the day for several locations. The ultraviolet information is downloaded from New Zealand's National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (http://www.niwa.cri.nz/) on a daily basis. Hyperfactory also plans on releasing similar weather- and emergency-related SMS applications in the near future. For more on SMS, see "Short Message Services," by Ron Hume (DDJ, October 2001).
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C, has been awarded the prestigious Japan Prize for 2002 in the field of computing and computational science and engineering. The prize, which is awarded by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan, is given to scientists whose achievements contribute to the progress of science and technology and the promotion of peace and prosperity for mankind. Berners-Lee, who receives approximately $400,000 as a Japan Prize laureate, was cited for the "advancement of civilization through invention, implementation and deployment of the World Wide Web." The award ceremony will be held at the National Theatre in Tokyo on April 25, 2002.