Dependency Injection with Guice

I'd heard about Guice being a Dependency Injection framework, and was curious to see how it differed from Spring.

One big difference seems to be that Guice, being Java code (plus annotations) is strongly typed. It can check dependencies at compile-time.

Bob Lee also mentions that ease of testing is a big motivator for Guice. I wonder how that limits Guice vs. Spring, for example.

The talk also mentions similarities to Seam. It looks like features from Seam and Guice are going to be blended into Web Beans.

Looks like playing with it is the next thing to do...

P.J. O'Rourke on Starbucked by Taylor Clark

I don't read book reviews a whole lot before buying them. I check to see if the book made it on a decent list, like a NYT or WSJ review, and whether I care about the subject.

But, I happened to read this review today. I don't think I care about the book, but I've discovered P.J. O'Rourke. One choice gem:

Clark talks a lot about the determination, drive and persistence of the Starbucks Corporation. But if those were the sole qualities of success, toddlers would rule the world. Clark makes much of Starbucks’s discovery that it could put one store close to another and both could thrive. But you can line a street with fire hydrants and dogs will use them all; that’s not necessarily a recipe for wealth, especially if you try to charge the dogs.

Looks like I'll have to read more of his stuff..

Wireless networking..but what about power?

For the past few years, wireless networking came with the promise of being untethered by wires. You could sit in a cafe and work on your LAN. Wireless sensor motes could be scattered in a forest or on the ocean, and would faithfully transmit data. Intel even ran some ads a few years back, where a user would be working on a Centrino-equipped laptop in the middle of a nice, green lawn.

And I would always think, what happens when these gadgets run out of power? What we really need is to be able to transmit power wirelessly.

Voila!

Closures in Javascript

This is one of the most accessible explanations of closures (in Javascript, specifically) that I've read.

Pipes for the web

I used to think of web service orchestration as (UNIX-like) pipes for the web, where the output of one operation can be fed as the input to the next one.

So I was surprised to stumble across Yahoo Pipes. It's an RSS data (for now) processing and transformation service. It would be more interesting to able to wire together arbitrary web services (they do mention that's coming), but this might be worth checking out.

The other issue with a public mashup/data-flow service accessing public data is that joins, transformations and rendering take precedence over authentication and authorization, both of which are critical first steps in an enterprise application.

OpenInfoCard

I just joined the OpenInfoCard project; quite excited about it. It's a CardSpace selector plug-in for Firefox. Once Vista starts rolling out and people start playing with CardSpace on IE7, maybe they'll playing with CardSpace selectors on the other browser, and the other other browser.