Just back from @media Ajax with a few ideas buzzing around. One based on this comic:

It's patently absurd. And yet it's what we do with accessibility all the time, and in some ways the differences between someone with a visual impairment and someone with dexterity difficulties could be greater than the differences between a Spanish and Italian speaker.

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One of the difficulties implementing Comet on Java is the lack of any acknowledgement in the current Servlet spec (v2.5) that any HTTP connection may be anything other than short-lived. Unlike many of the other components in the JavaEE stack, servlets are ubiquitous so we don't really have a choice to use an alternative.

Servlet version 3.0 is in the works, several of the people that blog at Comet Daily are on the Servlet spec expert group and want to see this oversight fixed, but it will be a while before the spec is done, and even longer before we can rely on it’s support everywhere.

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I’ve just had a whirlwind trip to Stockholm for JFokus 2008. It was a focused conference with some really interesting presentations. I came back wishing that I wasn’t on such a tight schedule so that I could have attended more talks.

Kirk Pepperdine was there, and despite not hearing his talk we had quite a bit of debate about it (we met due to a wrong turn on the way back to the hotel by the conference center). Maybe his talk turned out differently, but it sounded as though he was going to be ringing the warning bell for big databases. The argument essentially went: transactions don’t scale over multiple CPUs (something Amazon etc. have already discovered) and since we’re all going multi-core, we need to look to ways of doing things that are not transactional. Kirk’s answer was object databases.

I did a tutorial on DWR, and updated the ‘Case for the Open Web’ talk that I did with Alex at TAE. I managed to add 50% more material and finished early to boot. I guess with 2 people talking there’s a lot more banter.

One of my contentions was that monopolies are bad for the web, no matter who holds them.

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