A decade ago, I switched from Windows to the Apple Mac. Fortunately, my employer knows that developers need good hardware, and was happy to buy us top-of-the-line MacBook Pros.

Not everything is perfect on the Mac, but it’s still a joy to use such excellent hardware and software (fast, beautiful, high quality). And I love working on a Unix-powered machine. I can’t see myself going back to Windows for another decade.

My first MacBook Pro 17" (photo from 2008) and Dell 21" monitor in portrait mode:

Here’s the Digital Asset Management articles from April which had a lasting impression on me – picked from the constant stream of blog posts you can see float by on Planet DAM. For more curated DAM links, see the weekly Digital Asset Management.com Links.

If you’re attending the DAM New York conference this week, I’m sure you’ll have a great time hearing and talking about DAM. The rest of us must make do with reading about DAM, and waiting for your conference report blog posts…

My favorite DAM article in April was Max Dunn’s Ten DAMs from the InDesign out; a rare, detailed compilation of the unique qualities of ten major DAM systems.

Finding Signs Of Life In DAM: The Role Of Integrated Digital Asset Supply Chains by Ralph Windsor (DAM News) is another excellent post with deep insights into metadata mining and entry. (See also Evelyn Kent of MarkLogic on Metadata capture during – not after – production.)

Despite my almost 20 years of professional software development, I haven’t learnt a lot of programming languages (see my honest résumé). So far, it’s just been PHP and JavaScript (plus SQL, XSLT, and – back in the day – Object Pascal and Visual Basic).

Now I’m trying to teach myself some Java. This blog post lists differences between PHP and Java, from the perspective of a PHP developer just getting started with Java. (Please let me know if I got something wrong!)

Running “Hello World”

In PHP, you create a hello.php file:

<?php
echo "Hello World\n";

… and simply run it:

$ php hello.php

In Java, almost everything is an object – even “Hello World” requires defining a class with a main() method. Here’s a hello.java file:

class HelloWorld {
  public static void main(String args[]) { 
    System.out.println("Hello World"); 
  } 
}

And you need to run it in two steps:

$ javac hello.java && java HelloWorld

Java code must be compiled to bytecode first. That’s what the javac invocation does, creating a .class file for each class definition. The java command runs the main classes’ file. (You should name the .java file after the class – I didn’t do this to make that point.)