I’ve decided to start including work related items in my blog here. Please view the About page to see the standard disclaimer. A fair number of the things I do at work can’t be discussed in public until they arrive somewhere in product form, by then they usually feel like old news to me and often information has been leaked via other channels. Thus, some of the work related posts might seem a little boring to those “in the know” but I hope to help people put 3+4 together by linking to various bits of information, or simply provide a “straight from the developers” viewpoint. I guess we’ll see how it goes, requests and feedback are welcome.
Recently Rick DeNatale posted a nice personal history of Smalltalk, I’m quite proud to have been part of building several of the products he mentions. The OTI VM team started out building Smalltalk, but moved on to Java by first doing VisualAge for Java, followed by J9 for embedded. Currently we still actively develop J9 which is primarily used as the core of the IBM JDK, but we still do embedded work as well as a Real-Time Java offering.