Tear down

For some reason, the pub/sub does not work as I expected in ActiveMQ. I feel it is some configuration issue, and it act just like a regular queue (one consumer at a time). I'll try for a few more days, and then I'll tear down the activemq part and switch back to the ZeroConf topic implementation.

JSquiggle find its way

Stomp, ActiveMQ, and Tinyline

Ever since I tried the Apache ActiveMQ, all of a sudden, the decision become easy. Actually, JSquiggle is a typical textbook pub/sub paradigm. However, most of the pub/sub tool are considered the "Enterprise" feature. They usually cost a lot of CPU cycle, memory footprint, and money.

ActiveMQ is really simple. It does not depends on any J2EE server. The installation on Mac OS X takes less than 20 minutes (unzip, drop, modify a few lines of config), and then it is up and running. The optional wire protocol, Stomp, looks quite promising to me. I'm not sure if I'm able to implement a distributed clock using Stomp (to embbed Lamport timestamp in message). I hope I could.

And then comes the great Tinyline SDK. It is really easy to use. I don't need to touch any XML parsing code, and the SVGDocument object is created. No wonder it is so popular.

JSquiggle 2 will use these light weight implementations to make things happen faster. I've been thinking of doing this rewrite for long time, but everything I feel like reinventing the wheel. Finally there are reasons I don't need to reinvent everything.

Firefox and SVG

OK, I'm slow. I just found that Firefox run SVG natively without any plug-in. All we need is to give the right xml namespace. Great job Firefox! Now its the time to include the Tinyline library into JSquiggle 2. JSquiggle is think of using Tinyline for at least three years.

ActiveMQ

In the development of JSquiggle 2, I found a great JMS implementation that does not require heavy full scale J2EE server. Apache ActiveMQ project is such an easy solution to the pub/sub communication. JSquiggle 2 is using ActiveMQ in early development phase. After the user interface is settled in, it will switch back to the original Zeroconf + Lamport timestamp implementation for J2ME Personal Profile.

JSquiggle 2

JSquiggle 2 is on its way. We don't have any functional upgrade for the upcoming release, but JSquiggle 2 will be based on more stardards just like the previous one.

JSquiggle is based on SVG since the first release more than three years ago. Unfortunately, SVG does not take place on the browser as I expected. With the upcoming Windows Presentation Foundation from Microsoft, I see SVG faces more challenges in the future. The last hope is on Firefox. If SVG does not come by default in the next version of Firefox, I will look for alternative solutions.

IoC and JSquiggle

It seems that the Pico container is a great framework for JSquiggle. Pico container is the leading container of constructor injection. This is very helpful when the dependency doesn't require furthur change after initialization, which is the same case as in JSquiggle. With Pico container, JSquiggle can be easiliy moved from J2ME Personal Profile to J2EE container: Simply use a different configuration.

SL-6000

I'm lucky. I got SL-6000L from Amazon at $379 last week. The price goes up after a few days. It has the most beautiful display I ever seen in any PDA, and it has wireless LAN. This is the first time I really tried JSquiggle on SL-6000L. Yes, JSquiggle 1.5 runs fine without modification, but it runs at the original resolution (320x200). It looks like there could be a lot of improvement on JSquggle for this new gadget as it has much faster CPU speed than my SL-5000D.