Dr. Dobb's Journal September, 2005
Sun Microsystems has announced a slew of new features available in Java EE 5, the next edition of Java (http://java.sun.com/ee/). New features in Java EE 5 will include annotations, simplified common coding scenarios, streamlined deployment, and new utility classes and helpers. New APIs and services include a JSP standard tag library, StAX, web-services metadata, JAXB, easy web applications with JavaServer Faces, Common Annotations, and a new persistence API.
eBay has launched its Community Codebase initiative, which open sources some of its search and access applications to members of eBay's Developers Program and PayPal Developer Network. The free program (http://codebase.ebay.com/) lets developers access source code for a variety of eBay and PayPal tools and applications. Initial projects available in the eBay Community Codebase include a Firefox MyeBay toolbar, Eclipse plug-in, and TiVo/eBay sample application (all built by eBay), and five payment scripts for integrating PayPal.
Top500, an organization that ranks supercomputer performance (http://www.top500.org/), has named IBM's BlueGene/L as the most powerful supercomputing system in the world. With a sustained performance of 136.8 Teraflops, or trillions of floating-point calculations per second, the system developed by IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Eventual plans call for it to run at 360 Teraflops.
Graduate engineers at Stanford University have designed a "smart" ankle brace to reduce falls among the elderly. Working with Thomas Andriacchi, professor of mechanical engineering and orthopedic surgery, the smart ankle brace designed by Tim Ramsey, Ryan McDonnell, Buzzy Bonneau, Tejas Mazmudar, Jeremy Dittmer, and Surag Mantri corrects imbalances and prevents falling (http://www.stanford.edu/group/biodesign/). The device is built around a microcontroller that continuously monitors the roll of the ankle. If the chip detects a roll that is greater than normal, it provides a correctional vibration. This vibration helps the wearer change position or shift balance to avoid a fall in much the same way that sensory nerves provide correctional feedback to the brain. One in three individuals over the age of 65 fall every year, and one fall in 200 results in a broken hip. Falls account for $26 billion in medical costs each year.
Nick Benton and Gavin Bierman, a pair of researchers in Microsoft's Cambridge Lab, have extended C# for greater support of concurrency by developing the Comega (Cw) language (http://research.microsoft.com/Comega/). Cw is a strongly typed, data-oriented language that connects semistructured hierarchical XML data, relational SQL data, and the .NET Common Type System (CTS). Comega also extends C# with asynchronous concurrency abstractions.
Sun Microsystems has begun open sourcing some of its Java applications, although the company isn't open sourcing Java itself. In introducing a new open-source license, Sun announced that the upcoming Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9 (http://glassfish.dev.java.net/) and the Java System Enterprise Server Bus (Java ESB), will allow developers to examine and use the application server's source code under the terms spelled out in the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). To do so, however, developers first need to sign Sun's Java Research License (JRL) agreement.
The head of Microsoft's mobile and embedded division is promising that the company will have the lead in the smartphone market. Zhang Ya-qin claims Microsoft can do it within the next three years, but that could be a tough sell, given that Symbian currently has 76 percent of the smart mobile device market, compared to 7.6 percent for Microsoft, according to market researcher Canalys. Microsoft's roadmap is based in part on providing for additional features in Microsoft's Mobile 5.0, released last month. Version 5.0 sports a Blackberry-like push e-mail system, although according to Zhang, Mobile 5.0 uses a more direct approach for linking users with e-mail, bypassing proprietary servers. Microsoft has teamed up with manufacturing-services provider Flextronics (http://www.flextronics.com/) to develop the Peabody platform, which will reportedly be based on the OMAP730 GSM/GPRS processor from Texas Instruments and will include 32-Mbytes of RAM and 64-Mbytes of flash memory. It will also include a 1.9-inch color LCD with a resolution of 176×220 pixels, USB, and IrDA ports and a miniSD slot. A 1.3 megapixel camera is optional. The first devices should come on the market in 2006, Zhang said.
The President's IT Advisory Committee (PITAC), a panel of industry and academic experts mandated by the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 and the Next Generation Internet Act of 1998, has been disbanded. PITAC (http://www.nitrd.gov/pitac/) members included representatives from Salesforce.com, Microsoft's SQL Server group, Akamai Technologies, Dell, the University of California at Berkeley, MIT, and Purdue, among others. What turned out as the committee's final report focused on U.S. competitiveness in computation science and recommended a study on how government can better connect computational science research across academia, industry, and government.
Twenty young scientists and engineers whose work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) have received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), considered the highest national honor for investigators in the early stages of promising research careers (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104239). The PECASE awards include four computer and information scientists: David V. Anderson, Georgia Institute of Technology for his work in embedded signal processing; Elaine Chew, University of Southern California, for creating computer assisted methods for making music; Shalinee Kishore, Lehigh University, for innovative research wireless networks; and ChengXiang Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for research into user-centered, adaptive intelligent information access.