System Mobile, Inc

Three weeks into the 2006-2007 football season, Mobile ESPN has announced they’re going to shut down. Apparently the legion of fantasy football freaks didn’t flock to the service, leading to the discontinuation of the service.

From the article:

“There’s certainly some disappointment,” said Salil Mehta, executive vice president for ESPN Enterprises. “I think the focus of the ESPN organization is that we took a risk, but in doing so we have the benefit of having created the industry’s leading wireless application, and we’re going to figure out a way to bring that to fans and make the most amount of money.”

Calling a failed venture the “leading wireless application” is corporate spin if I’ve ever seen it. At least ESPN has had the good sense to optimize on their content, rather than on trying to be a full-blown MVNO.

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Justin’s been writing a book on JasperReports. I think this is probably a good idea, since the online docs are pretty sparse. He’s got a poll up if you’d like to voice your opinion.

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I’ve never been much of a fan of Java’s JNDI API. I find it verbose and confusing for the simplest of tasks and poorly document for anything complex. Ideally, anything used to access LDAP should look more like Netscape’s old LDAP API rather than JNDI. But the Java community is stuck with LDAP, so we should just try to make the best of a bad situation. Luckily the Spring folks seem to be feeling the same pain, so they released Spring-LDAP.

Spring-LDAP provides a simple abstraction over JNDI that looks just like their JdbcTemplate stuff. I won’t bother to reproduce any code samples here since the project documentation is more than sufficient.

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