Musings of a Trained Monkey

People have trying installs of BEA WLS on OS X out for awhile. I remember installing WLS 9.2 back in 2005. I recently ran across a blog entry about installing WLS 10.0. I’m still using a PPC Mac with not nearly enough RAM, so I thought I would try to see how the 10.0 performance would be compared to my 9.2 experience.

Surprisingly 10.0 is much slower to start up. I appreciate that OS X and Apple’s JVM aren’t a supported platform, but still it took almost 7 minutes for the MedRec sample domain to start up! Under 9.2 it was only 2 minutes. Back when I installed 9.2 Apple’s JVM was 1.5 and I have 1.6 running now.

I wanted to do a fair comparison, but apparently installing 10.0 with Apple’s 1.6 JVM overwrites the PointBase configuration such that 9.2 won’t even start up the MedRec sample domain (incompatible serial uids for javax.xml.namespace.QName if anyone cares). Also Apple says that uninstalling their 1.6 beta is a bad idea?!? I’m sure I could probably clean it up and get it running, but that would exceed my ten minute or so attention span for working on Java stuff at home.

This looks to be some exciting news from Adobe about open sourcing Flex. Flex is a developer oriented way of working with Flash. I had the good fortune to work with it back in the Macromedia days when it was still a beta product.

Flex facilitates the creation of a superior user experience on the web. It is my belief the expen$ive licensing terms for the technology was always the barrier to larger adoption. Get ready for a flood of better looking, more functional web applications in the next few months. I know I will be adding Flex into my open source toolbox.