Technologies

Toward Real Extensibility in Sakai

At the Sakai conference in Boston, I sat on a great panel with other developers and discussed what it would really take to make Sakai the platform for innovation that we want it to be. The audience was active in the conversation as well. We heard a lot of analogies to other systems. Here are [...]

What if a Hard Drive is Only a Cache?

When computers like the MacBook Air started coming equipped with solid state drives (SSDs), I thought the technology is cool, but it seemed like a drag to have to give up 50% or more of the storage capacity we’ve grown accustomed to in our hard drives. My laptop has 250GB of capacity. As of this [...]

IMS Learning Impact

Last week I was at IMS Learning Impact 2008 just up the road in Austin. The Sakai Foundation generously sponsored me to go, since I have been involved with Sakai’s support for IMS Common Cartridge for a couple of years. Michael Korcuska’s blog post about the event is here.

I have been guilty of moving exclusively [...]

The Winding Journey of Java DB

Java SE 6 has finally arrived on the Mac with a recent update, so I was over on Sun’s website reading about all the new stuff and Java DB caught my eye. This is a small, all-Java database that can be embedded in applications on a desktop, a server, or a mobile device. The reason [...]

The Business Value of SOA

Having heard about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) for a long time without having any idea what it is, I was happy to discover this talk by Anne Thomas Manes which finally sheds light on the subject for me.

Key points for me:

SOA aims to tackle the problem of too much cost and redundancy in enterprise IT If [...]

WordPress 2.5 coming soon

Matt Mullenweg gives us a preview of the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5.

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-rc2/

They’ve been working with the web geniuses at Happy Cog and the results look awesome.

WordPress is seriously firing on all cylinders. It’s a Good Thing.

Interface21 now SpringSource

I guess this happened late last year, but it escaped my notice: Interface21, the company behind the Spring Framework, has changed its name to SpringSource and has a spiffy new website to go with it.

The Spring Framework has come to be synonymous with enterprise Java. It’s a great example of the cream rising to the [...]

IMS Common Cartridge Alliance

I just signed up as a dues-paying member of the IMS Common Cartridge Alliance. IMS CC is a standard that has been evolving for several years, with the ultimate aim of creating a single format for publishers to create course materials that can be loaded into any learning management system.

I wrote the underpinnings of IMS [...]