Booting up here with some jargon snobbery: software has “different reusable units—toolkits and frameworks. Unfortunately we tend to use them more as buzzwords than what they mean and what they stand for.” Alas! What follows are sensible-sounding made-up definitions. In reality, software words fall in and out of fashion; everything is a “framework” now. (Except trend-bunking Databinder.) Someone even came along in the comments to say it’s “generally accepted” that using IoC defines what is a framework. Gross. (Weren’t both toolkit and framework first used in Apple/NeXT APIs? That’s where we first saw them, and we’re freaking Java programmers!)

More jargon hand-wringing: Are you a developer or a programmer? Faler claims that programmers are unsociable types who only write code, while developers are empowered dudes who work with users to create cool stuff. Maybe in 1995! Much more than framework, developer is a fancy label that has been wrung dry. Are there still people with business cards reading “programmer” ? If so, we’re jealous. Developer is played out, and engineer is the title everyone will have in two years because that is what the sun-god Google uses. The original programmer is the unambiguous, unashamed term we like around here. Programming is what we do.

How cool is the Palm Folio? Going by Palm’s “mobile companion! buy you more treos!” pitch we’re guessing not very. Nokia’s N800 with a wireless keyboard would probably be more fun. In any case, a tiny computer is something the world just needs for composing its weblog entries at odd times. If not for the iPhone we’d probably have one from Apple by now. That’s okay, because it gives Linux based devices a chance to play before the iWhatever slices them up with working cut, copy, and paste shortcuts.

The OpenOffice.org project has released a Mac alpha. (We don’t count the X11 version as a Mac-anything.) Seeing as it’s “not even possible to print,” they’re still well behind the Java-aided NeoOffice fork, which has been able to print for years.

This screenshot of JavaLobby from two minutes ago is pretty hilarious for anyone who’s been bitten by PermGen before. (Yikes, that’s the post where we called Geronimo “lovely.” Rewrite!)

Some people see evidence of a Dashcode iPhone kit in this Surfin’ Safari post: “For those of you attending the Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, there will be much WebKit-related excitement.” We’ll see next week! A Dashcode-only kit has been our call from the start.

Wowzers! “ZFS will become ‘the’ file system in Leopard.” Keep it up, Apple, we will be your happy slaves.

Someone implemented a Tapestry page in Scala. It looks a lot easier than Wicket in Groovy, which was hard because Groovy doesn’t do anonymous subclasses. (K.G.’s builder is cool, but it left us thinking that Wicket would need to be rewritten with closures to really suit Groovy.) Scala, however, “creates anonymous classes and subclasses with wild abandon and very little syntactic prompting.” So! Who’s going to make us a Wicket page in Scala?

Speaking of Scala, there’s this new web framework called Lift that claims to be “as clean and brief as Rails, yet performs 6 times faster and is multithreaded.” On the other hand, Rails uses plain old proper noun capitalization for its name, while the makers of Lift prefer to write it in lowercase italics (lift) except where their blogging software refuses to cooperate, which is all very silly! Lift’s rendering tech is templated (unlike Rails) but is not component based (unlike Wicket). It has controllers that return HTML strings from render methods. That’s an okay compromise for some purposes, but it won’t be tempting any Wicket fans.

Daring Fireball reports that Leopard’s entire UI is going to resemble that of iLife 06: “Dark Gray: (exultant) My gig for the system UI theme in Leopard.” So, no more Aqua! That will take some getting used to.

Incidentally! Making Swing and SWT look nice in the new Leopard UI would explain Apple’s horrible withholding of their surely-finished version of Java 6, and why it probably won’t ever be available for 10.4. We’ve been complaining about this forever, and recently even some professional-like blogs have joined in. (That post is worth looking at for the loser hall-monitor commenters who scream “licence violator!” at the guy for daring to even talk about the then-inexplicably absent Mac Java 6.)

So, now applets made with Dashcode can run on Mac, the iPhone, and Windows, because Apple announced two minutes ago that they are releasing Safari for Windows. Crazy. JavaScript is the new cross-platform for user apps. JavaFX can dream on. As can whatever that thing was that Microsoft was pimping last month that we already forgot about.

And Coderspiel was right in its January prediction that Dashcode-built JavaScript apps are the only thing Apple trusts us kids to write for their iPhone, according to the keynote stream. Update: Ars has a write up. Only thing they missed is the interest telecoms have in keeping Skype-like apps off the phone.

Isn’t it likely that the iPhone will be able to not just browse “web apps” but also retain Dashboard-type widgets? That have a bit of local storage? And an extended Canvas that has CoreAnimation and iPhone specific APIs? Daring Fireball and Waffle don’t think so. Maybe we missed something. Or maybe we just got over this news back in January. Update: these comments go back and forth about whether the iPhone will allow “widgets” or just “web apps.”

Spam poses an annoying problem for everyone and everything, including Wicket’s request processing code. As I have my exceptions e-mailed to me, I just received thirty error mails relating to WebRequestCodingStrategy addInterfaceParameters as some doofus tried to game Typeturner’s commenting system. Please. Even if his lame script could post the right form parameters, he’d never get through the Akismet filter.

Finally, some good news about Java on the Mac: “it definitely sounds like Java on Leopard will take advantage of several of Leopard’s core technologies … 64-bit Java and resolution independence. These two items alone can explain the perceived hiatus that Java 6 has been on.” That and the new appearance. I guess we’ve been all worked up over nothing. Swing on Mac OS X has always looked at least as native as Java 6 does on Windows and GNOME, so we aren’t missing on on that. The annoying part is that Apple keeps doing this to us, but such is life under a peaceful dictatorship.

Hibernate Search’s author writes a rebuttal of some pretty sloppy criticism. Anyone writing a “J2EE Blog” just doesn’t want things to be easy. (That would have been our rebuttal. Emmanuel’s is longer and has good deets on Hibernate Search.)

Buzzword Bingo posted an essay on complacency: “the brain is like any muscle: if you exercise it regularly your knowledge and learning power should be greater at 50 than at 20.” That is it! Reading trade magazines and demanding training passes for “exercise” in some circles, but it works about as well lifting food to your mouth to lose weight. Update: Bingo completes this thought.

Soon, Wicket will be safe for complacent old people because the Wicket in Action book is almost finished. The only question left is what crazy costume Manning will put on the cover.

Did you see the new effect on the archive page? We added it because otherwise it’s hard to tell which archive item was the target. Check it out. It doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, not even 7, which is weird because we thought 7 would support properties like opacity that work in everything else. Oh well! IE can dream on if it thinks we are writing unpaid code special for it.

Chillenious outlines a neat session keep-alive technique for Wicket. Typeturner should probably use it for comment entry—its session timeout is a full hour, but with such lengthy posts even that might not be enough.

We poked fun at Coda for integrating FTP transport instead of version control. But so far, the Subsclipse plug-in for Eclipse has been the only Subversion client worth using on a Mac besides the command line (even though it’s—screech—The Java). But finally someone is making what might be a decent Mac client. And we signed up for their beta notification newsletter so you don’t have to!

Daring Fireball has some fun with WSJ’s silly piece quoting IT guys who like to scream “enterprise” at the iPhone. (The iPhone for its part responds calmly, “IMAP.”) Is there anything more boring than proprietary office e-mail systems? It rules that Apple is ignoring all that nonsense and giving Exchange admins a hissy.

Speaking of Daring Fireball, John Gruber is speaking tonight at the Soho Apple Store. He’s talking about consistency in UI design, and we’ll be sure to ask him how he feels about Swing or SWT interfaces because “crippity-crap” wasn’t clear enough.

This walk-through for running Jetty inside a project in Eclipse should comfort those who’ve upgraded to Java 6 and found the beloved JettyLauncher broken. We had to puzzle out how to do it a few months back.

The case against (half-baked) templates: “If you can check a simple boolean condition in a template, why shouldn’t you be able to do conditional processing based on the comparison of two numbers [or] invoke a function that requires a parameter?” Those arbitrary rules are what suck about JSTL and other semi-programming languages used in markup just because. But with web component programming, templates are entirely under the control of executable code. You’re never wishing to do more inline because you can already do everything from the source file paired to the markup file.

Jonathan Locke casts his vote for Scala. And he links to that Scalazine article that we meant to link to around word one thousand of the epic but forgot. (It’s the sole Scalazine article for now, but we hope the zine will be an growing resource as we learn the language.)

Everybody loves Scala, even Erlang programmers: “OK, playing with scala for just a couple of hours forces me to take back all the crap I have dished out about the futility of the jvm when it comes to erlang-like programming, which I think we all should be doing.” That’s from June 7—in the past two months Scala has gone from the language everyone willfully ignores to the language everyone is posting blog-mash-notes about (including us, obviously).

If house builders had to work like web site builders: “I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.” Okay that was actually written for “web designers,” but it totally applies to us too.