2008 Bossie Awards

Greetings:

Still about as hot as Hell's Back Porch here in Texas but here's some "News You Can Use" - not the normal fluff. InfoWorld recently announced it's Best Open Source (egro, BOSsie) awards for 2008 - the whole thing is at http://www.infoworld.com/archives/t.jsp?N=s&V=107881 were you can check your favorite category. Naturally, I was interested in the best rulebased system (BRMS, if you must) aware that is at http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/2008/08/166-best_of_open_so-6.html for those who care to read the blurb on Drools. There is another interesting one just before that at http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/2008/08/166-best_of_open_so-5.html that deals with Parallel programming. If you are developing today and you want to be among the "elite" class of programmers, then you will have to learn how to program applications for parallel programming.

InfoWorld covered this in the same eLetter with an article at http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/3399854/121129892/130373/0/ that covers what and why you need to be able to program in threads in the coming world of programming. (Just when you had it all down, something else pops up - just like "Whack-A-Mole" at the fair.) True enough, you can trust the vendors to do this for you, but if you are developing your OWN software AND you hate J2EE because it took away threaded programming, now is the chance to get it back. Unfortunately, you'll have to pull out all of your old books on Java Threads and C++ threads and do your best to remember what all that did for you. But, and here is the kicker, if you do that and put in the necessary time and work, you will be among the best 1% of the best 1% of the world's best programmers, an even tighter niche that knowing rulebased systems. Hopefully, it will pay better but I'm not sure. More than likely you will have to write your own multi-threaded program (that probably won't be J2EE compliant) to make any money off this deal.

But, if you are a speed freak (like yours truly) then you probably will do it just for the fun of it. Major vendors will pooh-pooh the idea as being not practical or not really necessary ONLY because they don't want to re-architect and re-write their applications.

Congratulations to all 60 of the winners from a pool of more than 500 nominees this year. If you didn't make the list it may have been because InfoWorld was not aware of your product OR because your product is not true Open Source. (I found a couple of non-Open Source that made the list this year but not many.)

SDG
jco