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Object database technology has never really taken off in the industry, but it has a lot of valid purposes, and in many scenarios can be very quick and powerful for developers to work with.

Relational databases carry a certain aura of reliability and reusability that make them appealing for businesses. Buying a pre-packaged product (whether it is a database, a reporting engine, an application server, or whatever) has a certain appeal to most businesses; the warm-blanket effect.

Charlie Nutter (head of JRuby development) has posted information on a new variant of JRuby - Ruboto. Ruboto is JRuby running on the Android/Dalvik VM. As a G1 owner, and a JRuby fan this is pretty exciting news!

JRuby 1.1.4 has been released.

There are a huge number of repairs and performance improvements related to the Java integration in this release. This is great for me, as I have hit some real stumbling blocks trying to build Swing GUIs with JRuby 1.1.3, and the bugs I was being tripped up by, have been fixed.

Highlights after the break:

Tonight I officially kicked off the process of moving to Google Apps for my email, calendar, and also for google docs, which I use quite a bit.

I plan to blog on it more, but for now I will say the process was relatively simple, although moving from a fully configured GMail account to a Google Apps account should be less painful than it is.

When coding in Eclipse RCP or, for that matter, any JFace based UI, you often times are implementing viewers, which require a content provider and a label provider. In most cases, you’re dealing with the IStructuredContentProvider API, which would be appropriate for both the ListViewer and TableViewer classes.

If you have a need to populate these views with data that is effectively static, you can use the org.eclipse.jface.viewers.ArrayContentProvider class to get you up and running quickly; and it is really quite functional in many cases.

Okay, so I guess my CAPTCHA has been broken on realjenius.com for a while now. I don’t know how long because nobody was able to comment or for that matter contact me through the contact form… because the CAPTCHA was broken.

I’d say I’m sorry, but… well, I’m not really. Anyway - you can comment again - enjoy!

This week at my Clark-Kent-day-job, I was working with JQuery, which is usually a pleasure. However, in this particular occasion, Microsoft, circa 2001, stepped in and defecated all over my happy times.

Well, at least according to C|Net Crave the format wars are now over. Toshiba has (unofficially) closed the lid on the coffin for HD DVD.

Overall, I’m glad that this is finally happening; the industry doesn’t need competing, incompatible media formats for long. It’s just a shame that I dislike Sony so much…

Drupal 6 was released today after several months of development, and over 1600 issues being closed. Drupal 6.0rc4 was just released on February 8th, leaving the final release a mere week in the future. As is typical, contributed modules (many of which are fairly integral functionality for many users) are not all up to spec to the 6.0 infrastructure. As such, for some Drupal users, 5.0 may still be the best release for some time yet. Also of note, Drupal 6.0 is the last major Drupal release that will run on PHP 4 - as part of the Go PHP 5 initiative, Drupal is using their clout to help push the industry to PHP 5.2 - and Drupal 7 will be PHP 4 incompatible.

The changes in 6.0 are significant as usual - here are some of the interesting ones: