BarCampSydney v3

At the 3rd Sydney BarCamp, we've got quite a good turnout here and the venue (UNSW) is working out really well!

In a data portability talk now - talking about integrating the data between each online app - facebook, google, etc. Why can't we agree on one data standard?

To me I'd say that it's partly because these app developers don't want to have a standard because it makes their platforms more competitive with each other? (Apparently this isn't so because most companies realise that being competitive means providing better functionality than competitors, rather than locking people in using proprietary formats. This will especially be the case once market expectation makes this a mandatory requirement).

Copying flickr photos from myspace to facebook etc. is a pain in the butt, it's ridiculous that we should have to copy photos from one app to another.

Have photos in a central place?

dataportability.org

scoble

JPA 2.0 - What's coming

A presentation given by Mike Keith from Oracle (co-spec lead of JSR 220) last year at a local JUG meet brought up some interesting information about JPA 2.0. The goal of it is to fill out the standard from 80-90% to 95-98% and the way they plan to do this is to add the features most asked for by developers, which he did at an extended feedback session at the end of his presentation.

The most exciting features they're looking at introducing to JPA 2.0 are:

- Collections of 'basic' objects - like Strings, Dates etc.

- Ordered lists where order is maintained - e.g.

@ManyToMany @OrderColumn(name="EXECUTION_ORDER")
List rules;

- Enhanced query expressions - like Hibernate criteria queries.

I'm currently using JPA with Hibernate extensions, hopefully in the not-too-distant future we can switch to a single feature-rich JPA implementation.