Dr. Dobb's Journal, January 2006
Thanks to one and all for making possible this 30th anniversary edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal. From Tiny Basic 1.0 to Visual Basic 2005, DDJ has been the journal record for the software development community—an accomplishment that wouldn't be possible without your ongoing support.
A lot has changed over the past 30 years, the least of which is DDJ itself. What started out as a single-minded tabloid with hand-written notes (which you can see for yourself in the PDF version of Dr. Dobb's Journal of Tiny Basic Calisthenics & Orthodontia: Running Light Without Overbyte, available at http://www.ddj.com/ftp/2006/200601/) has evolved into a publication that's been the vehicle for sharing hundreds of thousands of lines of source code for countless platforms in dozens of programming languages.
Still, the one thing that hasn't changed is DDJ's commitment to serve every member of the programming community with the best in software development information. You've counted on DDJ to do that in the past, and you can continue to count on us in the future.
Of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Let's face it: When it comes to Basic, a Dim is still a DIM, a Sub a SUB, and a Rem is always a remark. Visual Basic 9 features such as Language-Integrated Queries (LINQ), relaxed delegates, and nullable types may be frosting on the cake, but they don't make Visual Basic any less Basic. Or do they? Just saying that opens the door to another constancy—programming language wars. Is Ruby "better" than Python? What's C# got to do with C? And is the Groovy language really that, well, groovy?
One of the more recent forays into high-profile language wars was sparked by Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen who predicts that PHP will pass Java as the most popular language used for building web applications. Uh...did I mention that Andreessen said this at a PHP—not Java—conference, and that Ning (http://www.ning.com/), Andreessen's most recent venture, has been described as a "PHP development playground"? Sounds like Marc would like to have his druthers and eat them, too. That said, PHP is being used in more than 40 percent of all web applications, at least according to leading PHP vendor Zend Technologies (http://www.zend.com/), catching the attention of IBM, Oracle, and other heavy hitters. Moreover, Zend has released its Zend PHP Framework for standardizing how PHP-based web applications are built. Additionally, Zend has also joined the Eclipse Foundation to further promote PHP by sponsoring PHP Eclipse projects.
At the same time, market research firm Evans Data (http://www.evansdata.com/) claims that the number of developers using PHP has dropped by more than 25 percent in the last year. Go figure. In the meantime, we can wait for fans of PHP alternatives such as ASP.NET and JavaServer Pages, not to mention Java backers, to lock, load, and volley about Andreessen's PHP predictions.
Something else that doesn't seem to change is software patent litigation. It doesn't seem that long ago that I moderated a panel on software patents at a Software Development conference. The people who did the talking and knew what they were talking about (remember, I was just the moderator) included Richard Stallman, Mark Nelson, Jim Bidzos, Dick Gabriel, Woody Higgins, and Paul Heckel. I won't go into details of what was said that day (you can read a report at http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=1063/ddj9104n/), but you can imagine it was a lively affair, as is just about any panel that pits Richard Stallman against, say, Jim Bidzos.
What all this has to do with the price of tea in China is that, since then, we haven't made much progress in cleaning up this mess we call "software patents." For instance, a company called Scientigo (http://www.scientigo.com/) has two patents (No. 5,842,213 and No. 6,393,426) that it claims apply to XML—specifically, a "method for modeling, storing, and transferring data in neutral form." Scientigo representatives have been trying to reach into the deep pockets of Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon.com, among others, in an effort to extract licensing fees.
It may not be that easy, however, if prior art has anything to do with it. While Scientigo's patents were filed in 1997 and 1998, respectively, the W3C actually released a draft of the XML specification in 1996 (http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/#sec-origin-goals). This alone suggests that the Scientigo patents claims against XML might be invalid. In addition, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a precursor of XML, also falls under the "method for modeling, storing, and transferring data in neutral form" claim—and it was defined as an ISO Standard in 1986. And if they want to get really picky, patent examiners might want to take a look at Charles Goldfarb's GML, which he developed at IBM in 1969.
In the meantime, I need to think about getting dressed up to go into the office to get dressed down for not having this column done on time. See, some things never change.