Semergence

Aloha Spring Framework fans! To celebrate the release of my (*) new book, Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow, I’m holding a little contest right here. Someone, maybe even you, will win a free copy of the book!

I will send a copy to the person that can best express what it will take for the Spring Framework to continue to remain a strong force in web application development through the next 5 years. What’s your vision for continued relevance for the Spring Framework, especially in web application development? What might be missing that would be required to continue to compete in a crowded and active market?

The winner will be judged on most creative and practical vision for the future of web development with the Spring Framework. It’s completely subjective, and I’m the only judge. Write your entries with this post’s comments fields, and I’ll close the contest one week from this posting.

This is not a Spring love-in, as we all know it’s a no-brainer for Java web application development today. I want to know what does it have to do to compete in the future?

Think outside the box! Think inside the box! There’s no box at all!

(*) With Darren Davison, Steven Devijver, and Colin Yates

OWL Rules in JESS includes Jess rulebase based on OWL Semantics. This implements a lot (how much?) of OWL inside JESS.

Add metadata about your tables to your models in Rails.

>Rails model files contain no information on the tables they represent. This is a good thing in general, because it reduces duplication—add a column to a table, and there’s no configuration to update in the model.

>However, when you’re writing code, it’s sometimes nice to be able to see just what attributes a model has.

>Enter annotate models, a really trivial Rails plugin I hacked up in the plane back from the first No Fluff of the year. The plugin adds a comment block to the top of each model file, documenting the schema. If you update the schema, run it again and it updates the comment.

What (will be) new in Rails 1.1

> It’s been just over two months since the Rails 1.0 milestone, and the long push of testing and refining that lead up to it. Surely, the contributors have been taking a much-deserved rest in the time since then. Surely?

> In fact, the core team (and over 120 other contributors) haven’t slowed down one bit, and the next major release of Rails is imminent. If you’re running Edge Rails, you already have access to all the latest features, but perhaps a few have missed your radar. So I’d like to round-up what’s new since 1.0 (or at least, everything that’s interesting to me — I’ve skipped a ton of bug fixes and smaller changes.) Let’s start with the easier parts.

JTP: An Object Oriented Modular Reasoning System

> JTP is an object-oriented modular reasoning system developed by Gleb Frank in Knowledge Systems Laboratory of Computer Science Department in Stanford University. JTP is based on a very simple and general reasoning architecture. The modular character of the architecture makes it easy to extend the system by adding new reasoning modules (reasoners), or by customizing or rearranging existing ones.

> The system is implemented in Java. The reason for this choice is that Java is ideally suited for easy integration of object-oriented systems, which facilitates both extending JTP’s functionality and embedding JTP in other systems. The abundance of supplementary software available in Java also helps.

SpringOne 2006 is the European Spring Framework conference. Just in time for Spring 2.0!

> SpringOne is a brand new premium quality conference focusing on enterprise Java, which is brought to you by Interface21 and the Belgian JUG. The organization has only one objective; provide you with a first class environment in which over 40 of the industry’s thought leaders, share their vision on current and future developments with you.

The Semantic Technology Conference looks really cool. It’s the “Everything about the Semantic Web” conference. Wish I could go! Plane ticket + registration fee is a bit out of price range at the moment with the last minute notice.

Now, if there was some sort of system or program that could inform me of upcoming conferences based on my availability and preferences… some sort of system that took into account data semantics. Now that would be nice!

In the meantime, I’ll stick to reading Dave Beckett’s blog.

> The SemTech conference is where customers, developers and researchers converge to discuss the commercialization of Semantic Technologies. It’s also your fast track to learning what Semantic Technologies are all about, and how to exploit them in your organization.

My book Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow is mentioned on springframework.org. Thanks, Thomas! And thanks to my co-authors, Darren, Steven, and Colin for their excellent work.

My friend Chris has a great question:

> Did some reading on the issues in building the connection between items that have multiple definiations. Such as the word bug. Is it a software bug or a insect? Do you think it may be easier to take a clean slate approach and do it right versus trying to smash something into XML such as RDF?

My response is as follows:

Good question. If it’s just the string “bug”, then context is king. Through statistical analysis, you can determine to some relatively high degree that bug is a software problem or an insect.

Now, on the web, “bug” can also be a Resource (see WWW Architecture for what a Resource is). If it’s a Resource, it has a URI. Therefore, it’s not “bug”, but http://example.org/bug. Now, that’s globally unique. Now that the name is unique, it’s easy to all say things about it without being ambiguous.

Of course, you can say that http://www.example.org/bug is a software problem and I can say it’s an insect. But this is where ontologies come in, for example. They let us formally describe things in the world, such that we can easily determine if think the thing is two different *types* of things. But at least we’re talking about the same thing, even though our perceptions of it are completely different.

The important thing to note is that there’s a big difference between wide scale web searching, like what Google does, and knowledge integration, which the semantic web does.

Pretty as a Picture offers very nice XHTML and CSS templates.

> Pretty as a Picture is a web site born from the love of web/graphic design. Here you will find tutorials on how to create the visual and constructual elements of web pages that we really want, as well as free CSS & XHTML templates to download and use for your web site.