Microsoft should buy Sun

[update 2011-03-27: Kind of funny reading this now and thinking about Oracle being the one to end up buying Sun last year. Sun’s days were truly numbered when linux started to really gain traction in the server space]

This is to go along with every other “MS should buy X” story out there… Ok this sounds crazy, but really this is the best strategy that MS could have… buy Sun. It would probably end-up being a hostile takeover, but it would make sense for MS whatever the cost. MS keeps talking about their current strategy to run a command line interface (cli) on top of windows. In fact they already have it and are working to make it robust enough to woo unix types over to the windows platform. But this is a joke of the largest proportions as the problem with running windows with the cli on top, is that it does not solve the code problems with both security and performance underneath.

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AJAX: just another buzzword

[Update 2011: OK, so back in 2005 I was skeptical of AJAX. At the time you needed to truly be able to write javascript in order to deal with the browser compatibility issues. The situation with the GAP site failing was a major foobar on their part and showed how much effort it took to do AJAX appropriately with things like graceful degradation. Today of course we have one of the most awesome libraries in jQuery. Which handles all the nastiness of browser problems for the most part. Today it is possible to do things with jQuery that really lead to fantastic interaction experiences. There are many other fine JS libraries and frameworks, but jQuery has really solved the problem in a way that simplifies and yet still provides powerful control to the designer/developer.]

Original Article:
Recently, I’ve had conversations with a few of my developer friends who are all a twitter about AJAX. Saying how great it is and all the cool things Google is doing with it. Honestly, after taking a real close look at it, I find it to be hardly more than another buzzword. It simply does not offer anything of real value for web development. Yes, it can make interfacing with certain web applications smoother, and it solves some problems inherent in web applications. However, it introduces a whole set of other problems, that in my opinion, make it widely unsuitable for most work.

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