Its about 6.30PM here in Prague and the day 1 of The Server Side Java Symposium (TSSJS) is wrapping up for the day with an award ceremony (sponsored by GigaSpaces). I am too tired and sleepy to carry on after yesterday’s long flight and lack of sleep but thought of posting a few interesting things that I noticed here at the symposium today.

Firstly the venue and the setup is pretty cool and there are over 300 people from many parts of Europe. The day started with a brilliant keynote by Stephan Janssen. His topic being: Supporting the RIA Space. (A Java conference kickstarts with a talk on RIA — interesting! isn’t it?). If you were at JavaOne this year and attended Stephan’s talk then you probably heard a lot of this. I had to step out of his talk a little early to get setup for my own talk, which followed Stephan’s. I spoke about JPA/Hibernate and RIA integration. Was happy to have a house full of attendees at my talk but was surprised when I saw only a few hands go up on my question: “How many of you are familiar with RIA?”. In fact a few were getting familiar with the subject only from the keynote that had preceeded my talk. Very interesting, again!

TSSJS speaker lineup is quite impressive. There were talks by many well known people, including Nati Shalom (GigaSpaces), Alexandru Popescu (InfoQ), Michael Keith (EJB 3.0), Guillaume LaForge (Groovy/Grails), Holly Cummins (IBM) and Geert Bevin (Terracotta, UMYN & RIFE) on day 1 itself. There were many other good speakers today: its just that I presume the ones I listed are better known than others. There are many more good speakers in the next couple of days to come. Obviously I could not attend all the sessions today so it would be unfair for me to comment much about the ones I never even peeked into.

Both the Groovy talks (Alexdru’s and Guillaume’s) were cool and well attended. Java Performance (Holly’s) and JVM Clustering (Geert’s) were very popular as expected.

These days when you go to a Java conference its a lot about dynamic languages (and their existence on the JVM) and the first day here reinforced the same feeling. However, one interesting change was a company called ZeroTurnAround , which promised dynamic redeployment of Java applications (far better than the JVM HotSwap). Their tool is called JavaRebel (I spoke with Jevgeni — who carries a fascinating title of Lead Rebel in the company) and he was kind enough to walk me through a lot of examples where Java code could be redployed effortlessly. There message could be interpreted as: “Java can be dynamic in some ways too, without being dynamically typed or interpreted!” If you are a Scala fan, you will be happy to know that JavaRebel comes built-in with Lift, the emerging Sacla framework. Talking about frameworks, there are too many in the world of Java to catch up these days and that is the topic of my next presentation at TSSJS this Friday. I am not going to miss the opportunity to express my frustration dealing with over supply then! Wish these framework makers found a way to create alternative energy sources; with their commitment there with be no oil crises today :)

More tomorrow!

The Phoenix Mars landing is tonight (Sunday), you can Watch NASA TV starting at 6:00 PM EST. You can expect live commentary to start around 6:30 PM EST.

If you want to follow along and watch the landing, there is an interesting program called Mars24 Sunclock, which is available from NASA. This Mars24 Java application is bundled as an application for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. I was able to download and start it without knowing I was dealing with a Java application, and it is a pretty impressive piece of GIS software for the Martian environment.

Here’s a picture of the Phoenix landing site from Mars24:

I downloaded it, and unpacked it to see what it uses. Read more…

Stumble upon this blog post via Google Reader today, and I don’t think it has received much attention. Michael Podrazik wrote about his prediction that Java will be the next Google App Engine Language. Quoting from Michael’s prediction:

Steve Yegge blogged recently about how you are only allowed to write C++, Java, Python and JavaScript code at Google. He went into even more detail here. So if Google is going to go with something other than these it would have to be the result of an explicit change in policy.

He continues:

So how reasonable would it be to offer a hosted Java environment? While almost any hosting provider currently gives you the option of running PHP, lots of ‘em give you Perl, etc. virtually nobody except boutique hosting providers let you run Java. There’s a good reason for this. First of all, Java is an enterprisey language and the apps that use Java on the server side are not especially well suited to run in a shared environment. Secondly, even if the market existed, there are technical limitations that make running Java in a shared resource pool problematic. … The fact that you can’t just run a Java program using an Apache module or through CGI, and the fact that there tends to be a mismatch in the skill sets that *nix ops people usually have and the skill set required to effectively manage a Java app just further muddies the waters.

This echoes the sentiments expressed Deployment is Colonization but also brings up an interesting possibility. Could Google be getting ready to solve the long-standing issue with Java application hosting by doing something revolutionary?

Podrazik goes on to predict that Google will release a reduced capability JSE and do something along the lines of Android (Dalvik) and GWT’s reduced Java API.

I pinged some people who should know about if it were something that was in the works, and the response leads me to believe that this might just be conjecture. But, it is interesting conjecture nonetheless. The comment threads are equally as pessimistic, but the idea that Java is the next Google App Engine makes sense in the context of Yegge’s statement that Google only codes in C++, Java, Python, and Javascript.

All eyes toward Google I/O.

(C’mon the last post was my JavaOne session notes? Where’s everybody at?)

Sitting in the FindBugs session, it’s pretty interesting. The last time I interacted with static analysis it was a product from Parasoft (?) and it wasn’t that compelling. FindBugs looks interesting, simple, and is integrated with Hudson. Everyone seems to be moving to Hudson, Kohsuke has created a very compelling CI server.

Participated in a Q+A session after yesterday’s keynote. Sat down with Neil Young, Larry Johnson, some Sun executives, and a small group of reporters including Tim O’Reilly. Young and Johnson struck me as animated and excited about both the archive project and the electric car (more below). Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb also covered the Q+A session on ReadWriteWeb. Here are my informal impressions / quotes from the meeting. Read on for quotes and details…

My entries are a day behind. I’m not a reporter, I’m a blogger, and I think it is more important to spend time talking to people than it is to work to some deadline in the press room. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on this year, a general sense that Java has it’s mojo back. Here are some quick observations (a larger piece on Neil Young is in review at the moment):

• Bob Lee has a lot of energy, you can just tell when you meet him. People are flocking to the Google booth to hear him speak of Guice. Go to his BoF tonight, whether you use Guice or not, he’s an interesting dude.
• The video codec is welcome to many. This neutralizes hundreds of negative blog posts from me about video on the Java platform.
• Rod Johnson is impressed with Glassfish. He’s as surprised that he said this as you are. Rod talked to me about the new application platform Springsource released, the Covalent acquisition, and business in general. In short, the app platform is all about OSGi, the acquisition with Covalent gives them really deep coverage of both Tomcat and HTTPd, and there’s more to come.
• Schwartz is definitely “on message” this year. He does seem a little weary, no? Maybe that’s just me seeing the conference through the lens of the 4 cent per share loss. When asked in a press conference if he would comment on the upcoming layoffs he answered with, “I’m here to talk about JavaOne”. Everybody seems to think he’ll be gone in a year, I disagree. I think the MySQL acquisition and the down market provide a good cover for him to restructure without looking like a bad guy. I think he’s a developer’s CEO, and I shudder to think of a Sun run by some soulless suit. Keep the blogging long-hair, everybody likes him.
• The Maven dudes wants to hear your feedback positive or negative. Seek them out - twitter BrianEFox. Seek out Jason van Zyl, he wants to talk to you about Maven, Nexus, all that stuff.
• Met Raible for the first time in person, everyone was enjoying themselves at Zebulon last night. It is scary to be in the same room as all these open source people. From what I see, everybody gets along well. Everyone was making fun of my Mr. Maven sweatshirt (I wouldn’t be surprised if it shows up on someone’s blog.)
• Bruce Snyder and I talked about writing, he’s writing his current book (Manning) in DocBook, says I helped him make the decision. I’ll have to pre-emptively apologize, DocBook is a PITA, but, at the same time, I love it. Bruce is really committed to writing, we need more people like Bruce. We need more people to write.
• I found myself in a small group briefing with Neil Young yesterday, he’s an impressive (legendary) dude. A real geek, I kid you not. And, he’s focused on stuff like the environment and peace. Good choice for the keynote. I spoke to him and he spoke back to me, that’s when I realize I was speaking directly to Neil Young in a small group. Crazy, that dude’s famous.
• Geertjan is everywhere. Turn a corner, Geertjan! Open up a door, Geertjan! Netbeans is impressing some skeptics. Schwartz singled out Tor and Geertjan as great bloggers in response to a question (from me).
• Sun employees, business is pretty good out there. Every business owner I talk to at JavaOne thinks they’ll have a job for you. That’s the sense I get.
• I skipped the scripting stuff, not because I didn’t want to go, but because I have to go talk to some OpenLazslo dude. Ooops, I’m late. I’m always late, I’m a jerk.

So, the big kickoff for JavaOne. I guess there was news. Solaris on EC2, which is fine. More JavaFX demos. Expected that. Other than that, what?

So one thing that really struck me: Project Hydrazine. Can someone tell me what the hell that is? Listening to people talk it sounds like yet-another JINI style initiative, but nobody seems able to give me a straight answer. “Service discovery and auditing on the cloud” is no nebulous it might as well be a cloud.

Of course, getting a decent codec in the JRE is something that you would have though was obvious sometime around when, oh, YouTube fetched billions of Google dollars. At the end of the day, getting the On2 codec stack is the same as using Ogg anyway, no?

If there was one thing that really made me pay attention today, it was the tools demo at the end of the TechNote. Thank God someone at Sun found a clue on this one. Basically, the story is this: Sun has plugins for Photoshop and Illustrator that let you (read: your graphic designer) export to a JavaFX file with assets and appropriate names. This is a huge one. Whether it is GWT or Flex, the process story between design and code has been a rough one. Microsoft has Expression, which I think is a really amazing tool, but they are never going to be able to sell it to designers. The artsy side of this business is definitely filled with creatures of habit. They don’t change tools nearly as easily as the nerdier side. Adobe Thermo is promising, and they at least have a brand in that arty space. This is the first clearly smart thing I have seen do in a long time.

As for sessions, if you missed the Fortress session with Christine Flood, you missed something great. Fortress really excites me as a technology and she was a really great presenter. Will Pugh can certainly pack a room. The big session hall was standing room only for his Defective Java session. The multi-touch interface session was cool, but disappointing. Given that we are talking about Java on the iPhone, and multi-touch seems to be becoming more popular, I was hoping we would see something more like a new JSR for working with it. It was really DIY session on stuff I have seen a number of times now.

I also just have to mention I went to a Q&A with Schwartz and Green. Honestly, I hear stuff about Sun poking at people they want to work with — Apple, Google, etc — but Rich Green couldn’t seem to utter three sentences without making some seriously passive aggressive aside. Speaking on Android he noted, “They call it an open platform, I don’t know how many people have seen the code.” Well hell Rich. Sun calls JavaFX a product, I don’t know how many people have actually gotten their hands on it. Say what you want about Google source release strategy, they have an emulator, IDE support and first class docs available. And JavaFX has…

Seriously, though. What the hell kind of leader even makes that kind of comment. In the grand scheme of things, working with Google and Apple is in Sun’s interest. Why they would poke a badger with a pencil is beyond me.

Last year JavaOne got the UN guy and was trying to eradicate poverty; this year they got Neil Young and were showing off the cool stuff. CNET blogger Dan Farber has a good write-up and the video that tells you all about Neil Young’s appearance at JavaOne. Read it from the source. I will avoid repeating it.

The good part of this year’s showoff is that Blu Ray and BD-J are cool in reality and they do what they promise. It’s not poverty eradication, its higher resolution and better interactivity and better digital archiving so I guess its more achieveable ! If you know nothing about Blu Ray or are confused on the value it adds then maybe you will benefit from seeing Sun’s Webcast on Blu Ray and browsing hdcookbook.

With the web continuously morphing into the read-write digital media network, applications becoming increasing interactive and the dividing line between business applications and entertainment getting twisted if not necessairly blurred, its not far when quite a few Java developers may use technologies like BD-J to write their applications. To some of the so called — “enterprise developers” — this may seem alien and surely we are not talking about universal applicability of this technology, but don’t be surprised if such stuff starts creeping into your realm too.

The moral of the story (for Java developers) — “Start becoming cool, if you aren’t already !”
The question (for Sun) — “Is coolness directly proportional to increase in revenue?”
A request (to Google and Steve Jobs) — “Please stop driving everybody up the wall.”
A word (to the users) — “You are loving it :)”
A word (to speakers and event organizers) — “Start making friends with rock stars”

JavaFX.com is up and running! The problem is that it doesn’t work well on most browsers. The small fonts are unreadable when viewed in FireFox or Safari. The site takes a long time to load up. The only thing notable is the transition from one window/panel to the other. Considering almost everybody else can do this as well, I am a little confused what to look at and be impressed about :)

Maybe, I should be happy there is finally something there and not just vapourware, like we saw at last JavaOne.

For a second, lets take a look at what competition’s got :

Flex Showcase
Silverlight Showcase

Now you tell me, if Sun should have waited to get this all trim and proper or am I missing something out here?

CommunityOne was huge. Having been to various what-use-to-be NetBeans Day at what-used-to-be the Argent, seeing the Moscone filled with people for C1 was actually quite strange. In real terms, the experience didn’t seem that different, however.

CommunityOne works the big room

Again this year, another “panel” discussion about things that I really found mostly uninteresting. The chat centered around community and businesses relationships with the open source world. Given the people on the stage, I would have expected a much more interesting discussion. At least Tim wasn’t there being marginally on topic this year. (Sorry Tim :P)

Charlie preaches to the converted

The list of sessions for C1 was really overwhelming. It was impossible to get to everything you would have wanted to see. I opted to open the day with Charlie Nutter’s presentation on JVM languages. While obviously discussing JRuby, the presentation was a much more general discussion of how the non-Java Java languages can coordinate efforts: MOPs and invoker infrastructure, code generation, etc. I found it interesting, but the room was filled with serious language geeks (I was sitting with Jim and Tobias from the Jython team) and I suspect there wasn’t a whole lot there that these guys needed to be in a room to hear.

Big hats are in this year.

The Java Posse were the lunch entertainment again this year. They were, again, great. It is really a tough balance doing a gig like that. Last year they had prepared slides and a pretty firm script, but it felt a little artificial, where the best stuff from the Posse is usually relaxed. This year they were less formal and it was much more like a regular episode of the podcast, but it seemed they were having a discussion with each other and not engaging the audience fully. Like I said, that’s a tough problem.

The Atlassian guys ran a session of lightening talks, in which I represented my GWT spew. It felt very much like a re-run of the JPR evening session, given that all but one or two of the talks were given at the Roundup this year.

In the afternoon I went to the Redmonk Unconf in the hall. Wow, that was a spectacularly bad place to have the side events. It was incredibly noisy and traffic heavy — people basically had to walk through the Redmonk stuff and the Startup Camp peeps to get their free turkey sandwich. Even worse at the end of the day the crew started tearing up the whole facility to prep for the evening party. The content seems OK, but it isn’t on the list of great unconfs I have participated in.

At dinner a number of Java bloggers had a passing discussion of what we expected from the keynote. Mostly, nobody had any ideas aside from “Get Sun’s business house in order.” Well, let’s just say the actual discussion was much more colorful, but that was the gist.

At any rate, to summarize: C1 huge. So big I feel like I barely got to see any of it

Although JavaOne 2008 officially starts tomorrow, it commenced today with CommunityOne. Carrying on the trend that started a couple of years back JavaOne is continuing to emerge as an event for things more than just Java. For statistics sake at least 10% of the 391 sessions that make up the content catalog are about Groovy, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript or Python. Also like Java the conference itself it becoming a “platform” , with many mini events within it. There is the Groovy Meetup and the Agile Event and the Adobe presentations to name a few. Not to forget the numerous gatherings sponsored by Eclipse, JBoss, Adobe, Oracle and QCon are becoming events in their own right. Then there is the excitement around social networking at the event. So hope all of you at the event have fun mingling, learning, discussing and catching-up.

If you are following JavaOne on Twitter, you should “track javaone”. If you haven’t already signed up, you should read Bob Lee’s Going to JavaOne? Sign up for Twitter blog entry from two days ago. People were using Twitter last year a bit, but this year is the year Twitter is going to change the JavaOne experience for attendees that are using it. In fact, it looks like Charles Nutter has already changed the name of JavaOne on twitter:

Not only is that easier to type and write, but it’s the new name we’ve all been looking for. He goes on to write a piece about how Groovy and JRuby attained massive performance improvements…

Nutter On How the JVM was made for Dynamic Languages, and how it only gets better in the future…

Charles’ post from yesterday is getting loads of attention, it was #5 on Reddit homepage this morning… The Power of the JVM.

… JRuby’s performance regularly exceeded Groovy’s, even though several Ruby features require us, for example, to allocate a synthetic call frame for *every* Ruby method invocation and most block invocations. And JRuby had only received serious work for about 1.5 years. The problem was not that Groovy was an inherently slow language…the problem was the huge amount of code that calls had to pass through to reach their target…

He talks of the recent 2x to 5x speed improvement in Groovy in the context of call path optimization in JRuby. He references Guillaume Laforge’s Groovy 1.6-beta-1 release announcement.

Nutter goes on to talk about how the JVM is best suited for Dynamic languages because it has a JIT and a VM that is always watching for optimizations (he points out that the most important part is that it can deoptimize). Another quote from Nutter:

…The JVM’s ability to deoptimize and return to interpretation gives it room to be optimistic…room to make ambitious guesses and gracefully fall back to a safe state, to try again later.

He continues to paint a picture of a bright future thanks to John Rose’s work on JSR-292 “invokedynamic”. In a related note, if you are interested in Nutter’s post, you’ll be interested in John Rose’s blog post n Method Handles, here’s a great ending that relates to Nutter’s post:

But the point is not calling or using these things from Java; the point is using them, down near the metal, to assemble the next 700 witty and winsome programming languages.

Groovy’s Been on a Bytecode Diet

This is the weekend before J1, so everyone tends to make releases. Groovy, releases 1.6-beta-1. Looks like they focused on performance over features. Read Laforge’s announcement he talks of the performance improvements, multiple assignments, and AST transformations.

Beyond delivering stable and quality releases, our main focus over the past 10 months has clearly been on performance.
Between Groovy 1.0 and 1.5.1, on these same tests, we had already gained up to 80% speed improvements, and even between “dot releases” (1.5.1 and 1.5.6) we gained again up to 40% more. However, it’s really in the development branch that we’ve integrated advanced call site caching techniques and bytecode diets in the runtime to get the 150-460% speed improvements mentioned above.

Assaf Arkin (of Buildr) writes a very long, very informative piece about Git in Git Forking for Fun and Profit.

Apache built a great infrastructure around SVN, lots of sweat and tears went into making it happen, and at first I felt like we’re circumventing all of that. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized that Git is just more social than SVN, and that’s exactly what Apache is about.

Read more at Assaf’s Labnotes blog… Assaf discusses how Git specifically changes the dynamics of open source development, how it makes it easier for non-committers to contribute. He continues:

Come to think of it, just giving all that power to contribute to developers who are not yet committers is a killer feature, and why I’m writing this piece to begin with.

Subversion Remains Relevant

Don’t think this means that Subversion is going anywhere soon. B. C. Sussman comments on Subversion’s Future? in iBanjo. He writes:

I have to say, after using Mercurial for a bit, I think distributed version control is pretty neat stuff. As Subversion tests a final release candidate for 1.5 (which features limited merge-tracking abilities), there’s a bit of angst going on in the Subversion developer community about what exactly the future of Subversion is. Mercurial and Git are everywhere, getting more popular all the time (certainly among the 20% trailblazers). What role does Subversion — a “best of breed” centralized version control system — have in a world where everyone is slowly moving to decentralized systems?…. (Read more)

Hint: It plays a pretty big role.

Adobe Preemptive Announcement? (Or, When am I going to be able to play an $%#$ing FLV from an Applet?)

Open Screen Project is important. We’ll see how it hits people… long story short, you couldn’t read the swf and flv specs before this project unless you agreed not to build a player. This likely doesn’t address Sun’s objections to the video format, but it could free up others to build (legal) support for FLV into JMF. Better yet, maybe someone would implement a Flash player in Java….. (OK. That’s insane. But, think about it. No really, think about it. Now stop thinking about it.)

Methinks, that Adobe is sensing some announcement at JavaOne. I’m going to guess it has something to do with the JDK on a mobile device, probably Google Android. From what I hear people are busily trying to get some cool applications to run on an Android phone. We’ll see what happens. The idea is that Sun + Google might be the only combination innovative enough to take on Apple’s iPhone. If Adobe frees up the SWF and FLV spec then what’s stopping people from implementing players on both the iPhone and the Android. (Again, I know, crazy idea.) In other words, Adobe might actually be able to get to the elusive “Write Once, Run Everywhere” by way of the Open Screen Project. We’ll see. It certainly moves the bar just a little higher right as the Sun people are banging away at JavaFx.

Hank Williams has some analysis on his blog Adobe Takes Gloves Off in Mobile World:

This is a direct shot across the bow of both Apple with the iPhone and Google with Android. Adobe has far more 3rd party developers than Apple does with Mac OS/iPhone or Google does with Android, and if they can make it totally seamless to develop for desktop or mobile, it will radically change the dynamics of the business. Presumably Adobe will be able to port this next version of Flash to the iPhone as well, though the politics of that will be interesting given Steve Jobs’ antipathy for Flash.

From a business perspective, Adobe seems to have everyone onboard that matters including Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Qualcomm, Samsung, Intel, and lots of others. Now that Flash is free and presumably easy to embed, it instantly becomes the mobile and embedded software platform to beat.

By way of Geertjan’s Blog, apparently Netbeans supports Wicket development.

Also, from Geertjan is an interview with Jonathon Locke, Eelco Hillenius, and Igor Vaynberg. Read this if you are interested in learning about how Wicket does Ajax.

In other news, Martjin Dashorst’s Wicket in Action (Manning) is available. Should be printed in June.

It’s been a long time since “Hibernate: A Developer’s Notebook” came out. In terms of Hibernate’s evolution, it’s been an era or two. Things were changing so fast back then that the code examples ran into trouble very quickly. I wanted to put together an update, but other issues in life and work kept intervening, and the best I was able to do for a while was an online PDF that made the introductory chapters work better with Hibernate 3.

Well, I’m happy to be able to say that the wait is over! Thanks to help from Tim O’Brien and Ryan Fowler, “Harnessing Hibernate” is now a reality, meaning you can actually get your hands on it.

We’ve updated all the content from the Notebook that was still relevant, and added a bunch more. Tim contributed great information about working with Apache Maven and the Spring framework, and Ryan added interesting ways to integrate with Stripes. The Hibernate Tools for Eclipse have their own chapter now too. It’s grown some heft, while remaining a great way to come up to speed quickly.

And despite the increased page count, I don’t dread being quickly overtaken by a flurry of incompatible changes this time. Hibernate is at a much more mature stage in its own development, which will help a lot. But we’ve also leveraged the Ant Tasks for Maven to do most of the work of downloading and organizing the many libraries needed to work with Hibernate in our examples. This means not only that there is less busy-work for readers who want to play with Hibernate and the example programs, but also that the examples will continue to work even if Hibernate changes, because they’ll always be able to find the version of Hibernate they expect.

So we hope that people coming to Hibernate today can benefit from an even smoother learning experience.

For all the hot air that is thrown around by the self-appointed luminaries of dynamic languages and enterprisey platforms comparing everyone’s favorite language and engaging in an endless back and forth. Nothing beats a press release like this. Listen people, Java is going to run a 143 foot tall, 1250 ton radar array that puts out 32 MW and is used to track objects in space. That’s cool. Here’s a quote from the Sun press release:

The Eglin Space Surveillance Radar (FPS-85), which schedules and tracks catalogued space objects, is currently undergoing a complex modernization process to replace legacy mission-critical components built from one-of-a-kind equipment and custom software. The Sun Java Real-Time System, a high-level development platform for creating applications that require unprecedented execution predictability, will enable ITT to run the new solution using Java technology on Solaris 10 OS and standard hardware.

Right, right….. ok, I hate to parrot the Sun Press Release, but it gave me an excuse to quote the Global Security page on the AN/FPS-85 Space Track Radar. This thing sounds like it is from the Deathstar. Here’s a quote form that page, I added the emphasized text to provide some clarity.

The AN/FPS-85 can detect, track and identify up to 200 satellites simultaneously. The maximum beam deflection is 60 degrees on either side of the antenna center line which provides 120 degrees azimuth of azimuth coverage. The antenna is inclined +45 degrees for scan coverage of +3 to +105 degrees elevation.

Generating a combined output of 32 megawatts, the AN/FPS-85 is the only phased array radar capable of tracking satellites in deep space orbit. A study was conducted in 1976 by the Air Force Rome Air Development Center to determine the feasibility of extending the AN/FPS-85 radar performance to synchronous ranges. Several modifications involving mixed integration, coherent integration, and transmit power increases were examined considering the target effects of six typical objects and considering the Faraday rotation propagation effects. It was concluded that the AN/FPS-85 radar can achieve synchronous capability at a relatively modest cost and with varying levels of radar time penalty depending upon the modification and target of interest. The radar can track an object the size of a basketball at a distance of more than 22,000 nautical miles [in Java].

The transition is happening faster than I had expected.

The transition from hiring a team of Java developers and Linux sysadmins to sit down for a few months and develop an application to a world where you can just provision a platform on a compute cloud just became more of a reality. And, from this desk, it seems to be happening faster than one could have predicted.

Here’s the announcement, Salesforce for Google Apps. This isn’t related to the Django-based Google app engine idea introduced two weeks ago, rather this is the Google apps that you can use today GMail, Google Docs, Gtalk, Google Calendar. Today’s integration isn’t the real news to me, the real news is that both companies are working on generic hosted application development platforms. Continue reading after the video for the real impact on developers.

googleApps.add( salesforce )

Wait, I’m a developer, who cares…

Both Salesforce and Google are working on general development platforms for hosted applications, add a year or two to the system and you’ve got more fodder for the idea that application development is right on the cusp of a rapid evolution. When you can fire up Eclipse and deploy a custom application to Salesforce to have it show up for your users in the context of Google Apps (Gmail, GTalk, Google Calendar, Google Docs), your own in-house applications may start to look a little pale. Five minutes later when the damn thing shows up on your boss’ iPhone and the CEO’s blackberry, you are going to sound crazy when you tell them that it is going to take your development team a few more months to integrate your legacy applications with mobile devices. They are both going to look at you and say, “well can’t you just get the data into Google Apps?” Hopefully, when this happens to you in about a month or two, you won’t be surprised and you’ll have an answer ready.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this…. you are going to find it very difficult to compete with continued integration between salesforce, google, ec2, and the twenty or thirty other companies that are going to join the industry. If you are working for a company that is paying you to develop some custom reporting and customer management application in a framework like Struts, Rails, Wicket, .NET, etc., you are going to have to confront this growing pressure to integrate with offerings like this or compete with them directly. I’m convinced that in two year’s time, the entire discussion of development is going to be fundamentally affected by Platform-as-a-Service. We’re not going to be talking as much about the 30+ web frameworks in the Java stack as much as we are going to be talking about which cloud provider we are using.

If you’ve been following efforts like Shindig over at a Apache, you might just think that Opensocial Widgets are for silly little social network applications like “What German Philospher are You?” or (the now in legal trouble) “Scrabulous”. These applications are just the testbed for a new paradigm of development. When projects like Shindig, Caja, and OAuth mature, we’re going to see real business applications developed in such a way that they can be executed with similar “gadget engines”. The future seems to be one of hosted, multi-tenant applications that run within one of several application execution platforms being mashed-up and combined in ways unpredictable to the original application developer.

EC2 Adds Persistent Storage

EC2 is adding persistent disks. If you’ve considered using EC2 in the past, you’ve known that the fleeting nature of a disk on EC2 is probably the biggest sticking point. It is tough to get your mind around the idea of using a machine with a disk that doesn’t survive a reboot. The solution up until this point has been to use S3 to store persistent data or use Amazon’s new SimpleDB service to store data.

Here’s the quote from the Amazon Web Services blog that matters. Note my emphasis:

These volumes can be thought of as raw, unformatted disk drives which can be formatted and then used as desired (or even used as raw storage if you’d like). Volumes can range in size from 1 GB on up to 1 TB; you can create and attach several of them to each EC2 instance. They are designed for low latency, high throughput access from Amazon EC2. Needless to say, you can use these volumes to host a relational database.

Right, there it is. Very soon, you’ll be running your application on EC2. For me, the game changer is the ability to just run a database on a machine within EC2. I understand that I could’ve changed my application to work with SimpleDB or run a series of clustered MySQL instances on multiple EC2 machines with a frequent snapshot to S3….. No. I, like most of you I’d guess, just want to be able to run a database.

EC2 just became obvious with this announcement.

If you want to tie the EC2 announcement back to the Salesforce and Google Apps announcement, you should note that the blog post before the EC2 announcement discusses a company named Appirio using S3 as a storage mechanism from a Salesforce application.

If you haven’t read anything really silly in a long time, then here it comes!

The caption of a picture in the Wired magazine reads –
“Jason Fried (left) and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals helped develop much of the software that has enabled Web 2.0. Photo credit: Jessica Wynne.”

Here is the link to the original article and the photo — http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_signals

I am wondering if Wired has created a new definition of web2.0! Folks at zillions of companies including Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Adobe, Sun, Microsoft and ….developers programming in tons of technologies including JavaScript,PHP, Python, ActionScript, Java and ….you are all out of luck :)

What do you think?

In the last few years India has emerged from being a small outsourcing destination to a large computing powerhouse (especially as far as programming resources and their critical skill sets go). Its one place that boasts of millions (not just thousands anymore!) of Java programmers. One reason for this growth has been the love for Java among enterprise customers up here in the United States, who outsource work down to India, and another has been the continued support from Sun and its affiliates (many of who train around its well recognized certification programs) in providing ample training and mentoring infrastructure in India. Yet, one more important reason has been the use of Java (over its traditional counterparts — i.e. C & C++) as the language of choice for instructional purposes in teaching programming languages at educational institutions. Finally last but not least, Java is easy to learn and there is too much out there on the web to help you get started :)

In the last couple of years Java has seen strong competition from two directions. The growth of Rich Internet Applications (Ajax and Flash platform based) got many Java programmers to use non-Java UI technologies with there Java servers and the advantages of dynamic languages (like Python and Ruby) lured the Java programmers away from the language towards efficiency and “more-with-less”. This phenomenon is global but local impact (in the United States) has so far been the greatest. However, it got me curious to see how these changes were impacting the millions in India. I started out by finding out the “State of Flash based RIA Adoption” by engaging in a conversation with an active developer and community leader to get a feel of what’s its like out there in the field. I plan to cover Ajax and the dynamic languages related discussion in subsequent posts.

I’m back in the Dirty South from my trip to Crested Butte for the second annual Java Posse Roundup. As you can see in the photo above, there was 6 to 10 feet of snow over the whole area. Far and away the most snow I have ever seen in my life.

Once again, JPR was a great experience. Unfortunately, it seemed harder this year to make it to all the sessions I really wanted to attend, because I wanted to attend most of them. While the theme of “Don’t Repeat Yourself” was honor to some extent, the session topics ran the gamut from examining the Java EE roadmap to Networking for Geeks, and from Agile development to “Why open source people are weirdos.”

Interestingly, a good bit of the discussion this year was not directly about Java-the-language. Jim and Tobias from the Jython project were there and providing a lot of perspective on JVM language implementations. There were hack sessions with Scala, organized by Joel Neely and Dianne Marsh. Chet Haase flew his new Adobe flag and gave a “Filthy Rich Flex” boot camp. On the “off-Java the platform” tip, the week opened early Monday afternoon with Dick Wall holding court at Bruce’s house with a great Q and A on the Android platform and philosophy.

The evening lightening talk this year, once again, stand out as a highlight of the week. 5 minute blitzes on topics like Django on Jython, the history of the lowercase “a”, Yahoo! Pipes 2.0, Marketing for Javapolis, and the operation of the four-stroke internal combustion engine. Video of these session was taken this year using Joe’s camera, so expect some (perhaps not so professional) video of this to wind up on a *Tube near you soon.

Flex is gaining adoption among Java programmers and I must confess it’s a fantastic match in my experience. With Java, you get the robust server side that integrates and works with pretty much every useful technology in the enterprise and with Adobe Flex you have a super nice highly interactive rich interface for your application.

For those of you, who have similar opinion or those of you, who are wondering why I am saying such a marriage is excellent, a full day of sessions on the topic is something you want to participate in. Its another Flex Camp and this time it’s in New York City. Not to forget it has an excellent lineup of speakers. (Your truly is speaking at the event as well)

Scheduled for April 18, 2008 Flex Camp Wall Street — http://www.flexcampwallstreet.com – is a unique event that will provide practical tips, techniques and actionable advise for adoption of Flex and AIR based RIA within banks, brokerages, fund management companies, insurance firms and other financial services institutions. Sessions have plenty of emphasis on real-time updates, portal integration, hibernate integration, advanced data visualization and offline applications, so most of you may find the event extremely useful. Please read the session descriptions — http://www.flexcampwallstreet.com/session_descriptions.html — for details.

Lastly, for those who are tracking the world of Flex, the famous evangelist bloggers — Christophe Coenraets (http://coenraets.org/) and James Ward (http://www.jamesward.org/) — are going to be at the event.

Its a day long event. The cost of the event is $99 per attendee.

All other relevant information is online at http://www.flexcampwallstreet.com

Everyone using Maven should pay attention to what Don Brown is doing. He’s reached a level of frustration with Maven, and he’s decided to start working on his own branch. Luckily some people on the core Maven team have noticed and have started porting some of his performance changes back into Maven proper.

Branching, forking, whatever you want to call it… should be much more common in open source Java. Even though we use tools that support it (or do we? see my previous post about SVN vs GIT), you rarely see the discussion on a developer list that mentions someone’s branch. Hopefully people like Don will inspire more people to start forking the projects they use.

Open source isn’t about convincing a centralized “project committee” that your changes have merit, it is about decentralized innovation. Over the last few years, I’ve come to the realization that open source communities can be detrimental to innovation, real innovation comes from ad-hoc, decentralized code revolutions like Don’s. Too often, open source Java dev lists are full of noisy arguments about what to do and how to do it while building consensus. We’d all be better off if people forked first and discussed later.

Bruce Eckel says Java is at an “Evolutionary Dead End”. His perspective is that retrofitting newer features into Java is making it absurdly complex. He states the choice is between no more evolution or breaking away from the past. In any other scenario he suspects things are only going to get worse. As a passing by remark, he proposes moving on to Scala as an exit strategy, if Java continues to evolve while honoring backward compatibility.

Technically his point is valid, realistically what are the millions of Java developers who build Java applications at thousands of enterprises going to do if they can’t incrementally take advantage of some of the newer features? It may be possible for Ruby or even Python to radically break away from its earlier versions and start on a fresh slate because not only do they have lesser number of deployments but on an average they have programmers smarter than the average corporate journeyman.

Java has evolved from being a replacement for C++ to an all pervasive cross domain programming language. One of the primary reasons for this growth has been the abundance of features, availability of commercial and open source implementations of these features and wrapping up of these features in all sorts of APIs, with the assurance of stability.

If we drop everything and restart, won’t Java be a completely new language? How would we guarantee we get everything right this time around? Which portions of Java will benefit from reinvention the most? What will we do while we are busy reinventing, knowing what we are doing is soon to be rendered obsolete — it won’t get done in a jiffy in any case?

In a recent interview Dr. Gosling said -
“If you look at something like Flash, when you get to the much more advanced stuff — with richer interfaces, more complex network protocols, more complex APIs — it really falls short.”
Source : Redmond Developer News

While, I would agree with Dr. Gosling, that the Flash VM, the ActionScript library and the Flex framework is not a be-all and end-all RIA solution (remember that its incarnation as a application developer’s tool — as opposed to a designer’s easel — is fairly recent and it is continuously and rapidly evolving as we speak!), I have a feeling Dr. Gosling is actually saying that the grapes are sour ! (For those who may not be familiar with the fable of the The Fox and the Grapes read on and you will quickly see the connection.).

At this time in its current form and shape Flex is a great option. Further, far from being competitive, at Saven Technologies, we have experienced that Java and Flex are complementary and can help build rich interfaces fairly effectively. Let me explain some more of this, but before that let me dissect Dr. Gosling’s comments and set the context.

Dr. Gosling has specifically pointed out that the shortcomings are related to support for networking protocols and complex APIs. My reply — TCP and UDP are two popular transport level protocols. Flash supports TCP. It does not support UDP. At the application level Flash supports HTTP and HTTPS. It supports AMF, which is a SOAP like but more efficient message format, and RTMP, which helps stream audio, video and data across the Internet. It does not support many application level protocols including SMTP, POP3, RTCP and many more. With the protocols in Flash repertoire one can build most consumer applications that utilize HTTP, Web Services and RESTful constructs.

One of our financial services clients was not satisfied with this. Not only did they want remote procedure calls, they desired real time data push and secure connectivity. With the help of LifeCycle Data Services, a server side integration technology that runs without a fuss in any Java application server, and the protocols mentioned above (AMF and RTMP), we could easily achieve what our clients desired. LifeCycle Data Services has open source cousins — BlazeDS, GraniteDS and more.

So while Dr. Gosling is right that Flash does not support as many protocols as Java does and he is also right that it does not have direct support for complex APIs, let’s say for messaging systems or database connectivity, the question is that does flash (with its Flex framework) really fall short because of the lack of these. Not really, on the contrary it piggyback on Java and PHP and others for such extensions. We are primarily Java experts who graduated to using Flex as the RIA and we see no trouble in leveraging the Java infrastructure that is so rich and robust. In the application that I was talking about earlier, that required real time updates, we used JMS for subscribing to the market data feed publications. Flex messaging and JMS worked well together and it was just fine.

Finally, Java Applets has support for many networking protocols and complex APIs, then why is it falling short of expectations? Weren’t there other things, including the well known JRE version mismatches that brought it down? Why is Sun creating JavaFX if the most critical ingredients — at least the way its worded it makes me believe that these are so — are already brewed in?

I feel very disappointed when a person I deeply respect and revere needs to make such comments. Java as a language and platform is very comprehensive, user friendly and productive (despite all the noise from the Rubyists) and works in harmony with many other technologies, including Flex. If JavaFX and the Consumer JRE deliver the promise I am happy to adopt it, as I have adopted Applets, Swing and the Java web application technologies so far.

Just a quick note, and excusing my pun, I think we all would like to wish Knuth a (belated) 70th Birthday

Gosling dragged the crew into the Dirty Dirty for the second (annual?) Sun Tech Days Atlanta. Last years STD I was pretty down on. It is 100% recycled JavaOne content from 9 months earlier. This years had a better mix with a good bit of new content. One comment from the other Manheim people that were there is they had a general feeling that it was better organized and orchestrated this year. I think that is fair, but I didn’t notice a huge difference. The event was also expanded to include tracks for Solaris development and administration, which was good too. There was some good stuff there even if that wasn’t your field directly.

One thing, though. I want to say to Sun…again.

TAKE POWERSTRIPS WITH YOU.

Jeez. JavaOne, STD, doesn’t matter. There seems to be a critical shortage of places you can plug in your laptop at all of these events.

Anyway, the one big complaint I had was the feeling of Bait and Switch I got from the whole EE program. Last years was bad because it was all intro to stuff that was so old everyone in the room had already seen it. This years was the exact same thing, the difference is they titled the affairs like they were going to be legitimately interesting. One session about “Everyday webservices: Metro and Rest,” where you expect to see the new JAX-RS stuff from metro was… wait for it… all SOAP and WS-* and the same demos I have seen 3 years running with a brief bit on RESTat the end. I didn’t even see the REST bit because I didn’t want to sit through 40 minutes of old content for 10 minutes of new. The “SOA Grid Computing” Oracle session (hey, doesn’t that sound great?) Literally started with and intro to WSDL. “Are you frakking kidding me?” was the general response from my compatriots.

One the flip side, the Glassfish session was really good, and my group seemed to get a lot of good information out of it. The features list for GF3 is so long that just getting a handle on what is there is going to be an issue for a lot of people. I kind of wish there had been a little more tech content there, but it was generally good. The SE6uN session was good, and Rags was once again in good form as a speaker. All of the evangelists seems at least a little more comfortable with what they were doing over last year. There were also session on JRuby on Rails, which I wanted to go to but had to duck out for to get back into midtown for…

Sort of heels of Sun Tech Days, the GWT team had a meetup with the team and a few external developers to discuss the road map for GWT in the future. We are all waiting for GWT 1.5 to drop, promising another round of big compiler optimizations such as expansion/in lining of methods and the much anticipated support for SE5 language constructs. All in all it was a good chat.

The Google meeting was a good idea, especially since STD now seems to be becoming a regional event. I can’t help but wonder if next year we will see more things orbiting around STD as a mini-JavaOne.

If you are interested in learning more about Adobe Flex or understanding how it could be integrated with other technologies, including Java, then please come to Flex Camp Chicago. Its a day long event at the Illinois Technology Association in downtown Chicago on January 18, 2008.

Hope to see you there!

Obie Fernandez has a great write up on the Future of Java panel at QCon with Chet Haase, Charles Nutter, Rod Johnson, Josh Bloch, and Erik Meijer.

On one point:

An audience member suggests that splitting up the JDK platform by defining core-subsets of functionality would be desirable. Chet disagrees, suggesting that it would break things. Guice Bob says Java Kernel will help, which is a small downloadable bootstrapper that downloads needed JDK components on demand instead of all in the up-front download.

The predominant topic of conversation continues to revolve around adding or removing to the Java platform — new features, language or otherwise. Rod seems in favor of adding, while Charles hints that he’s been tempted to use the Open SDK project to create a stripped-down version of the Java JDK.

Erik states matter-of-factly that it is impossible to take things out of a mature platform. “You can never take anything out!”

Josh speaks about JSR 277 and its infrastructure for addressing versioning issues.

Now Josh Block is saying we should create a new Java platform. Everyone agrees that there are real dangers in choosing that road.

One of the things I hope is that OpenJDK will make possible big changes. Once there is an open source Java 7 that still runs Java 1.0 code, it can be there and be maintained for people who want that forever. Java itself can then move forward, perhaps even to Java 2 (:P) with real generics, adding some bloody keywords (@interface still makes me hate people), and other things that we haven’t been able to do because of this legacy requirement.

…on the ADC web site.

There’s a good chance that someone out there is using Slide, it used to be distributed as a WebDAV library with Tomcat 4. If this is you, or your organization, you should know that it is no longer “a project”. Here’s the announcement from Roland Weber of the Jakarta PMC:

The Apache Jakarta PMC is sorry to announce the retirement
of the Jakarta Slide subproject. After it’s last release in
December 2004, development activity was significantly reduced
and came to a total standstill this year. Without a minimum
developer community that can release security fixes, we have
no choice but to retire Slide. We’ll keep at least one of
the mailing lists open for a transition period, so users can
discuss alternatives and migration away from Slide. Further
use of the Slide codebase is discouraged.

One alternative to Slide is provided by the Apache Jackrabbit
project. Jackrabbit has a healthy, active developer community
and provides, among others things:
- a server-side content repository
- a WebDAV server component for access to the repository
- a WebDAV client component
Please visit http://jackrabbit.apache.org/ for more information.

We apologize for the inconveniences.

Nick Sieger announces the availability of a new release of ActiveRecord-JDBC on his blog in ActiveRecord-JDBC 0.6 Released! You might just let this piece of news go by unnoticed, but if you read Nick’s blog entry, you’ll see that it is a turning point for people who want to get a Rails application running under JRuby, Nick writes (emphasis mine):

..to make your application run under JRuby, no longer will you need to a) find and download appropriate JDBC drivers, b) wonder where they should be placed so that JRuby will find them, or c) make custom changes to config/environment.rb. All that’s taken care of you if you use one of the following adapters:

* activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter (MySQL)
* activerecord-jdbcpostgresql-adapter (PostgreSQL)
* activerecord-jdbcderby-adapter (Derby)
* activerecord-jdbchsqldb-adapter (HSQLDB)

One thing that’s great about RoR is the convenience of it all. I spend about half of my time dealing with J2EE and a quarter with RoR, and the amount of setup that is involved in the J2EE world defies belief. Nick has made a point to emphasize the ease with which you can dive into the JDBC-backed ActiveRecord:

We can leverage this convention to make it easier than ever to get started using JRuby with your Rails application. So, the first thing new in the 0.6 release is the name. You now install activerecord-jdbc-adapter:

jruby -s gem install activerecord-jdbc-adapter

But wait, there’s more! We also have adapters for four open-source databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and two embedded Java databases, Derby and HSQLDB. And, for your convenience, we’ve bundled the JDBC drivers in dependent gems, so you don’t have to go hunting them down if you don’t have them handy.

…

$ jruby -S gem install activerecord-jdbcderby-adapter --include-dependencies
Successfully installed activerecord-jdbcderby-adapter-0.6
Successfully installed activerecord-jdbc-adapter-0.6
Successfully installed jdbc-derby-10.2.2.0

Mark Reinhold, Chief Engineer for the Java(TM) platform, outlines a roadmap for the OpenJDK project infrastructure on his blog:

The publication last week of our experimental Mercurial repositories heralds the first of many infrastructure projects that we hope to initiate, and in most cases complete, over the next year or so. Here’s the entire list:

2007/Q4 Code-review publication, Core community database, Public Mercurial forests
2008/Q1 Mercurial forest management, OpenGrok
2008/Q2 Improved content publishing, Process tools
2008/Q? Bug database, Distributed build system

All dates are—naturally—somewhat approximate.

The surprising part is the Bug Database, why should it take that long to figure out a solution? As an unnamed Sun engineer told me at JavaOne, the internal bug tracking system can’t move very quickly and is something of a disaster. It is unclear whether he was saying that what we see in BugParade is an extension of this system or something else entirely, but he made it sound like there were a lot of secret bits in the bug tracking system that couldn’t be exposed easily. I remember mentioning JIRA and he responded about how they had considered something like that but that the blocker was the lack of a mechanism to have a fix target multiple releases. What’s clear is that the Java project is big enough to demand some custom infrastructure (like a web review tool). It’ll be interesting to see what brews from this project.

Everyone calm down about Java 1.6 on Leopard. Calm down and get busy like Landon Fuller did this weekend. He blogged about it here FreeBSD’s 1.6 JDK on Mac OS X. And then he posted to the OpenJDK discussion list ten minutes ago. Clearly, it isn’t a satisfying answer, he reports “partial success” with some serious issues (stack alignment). If more people took initiative and didn’t sit around, blogging about whether Steve Jobs likes or dislikes Java we would probably already have something workable.

There has been a lot of discussion of creating a porting project on the OpenJDK mailing lists lately, if this is something you think is important, you can keep track of the discussions on the OpenJDK General Discussion List and there is an ongoing discussion about porting OpenJDK to other platforms

More about this over at Simon Phipp’s blog Red Hat Joins OpenJDK. If you are not already familiar with the IcedTea effort, take a look at the IcedTea Project Page. IceaTea takes the code from OpenJDK and replaces the encumbered code (binary plugs) with some code from Classpath. I’m assuming that this agreement will make it easier to incorporate some of this code back into OpenJDK project as a replacement for the encumbered code.

(Even though I’ve needled Sun about the continuing Apache dispute, this is, IMO, good news for the OpenJDK effort and for the availability of certified Java on the Linux platform.)

Jason Hunter wrote the popular Java Servlets book from O’Reilly. He just announced the availability of an interesting product named MarkMail which is based on a commercial product named MarkLogic Server. Here’s an excerpt from an email announcing the service:

For the last few months I’ve been working on a new project: a web
site for interacting with email archives. We’re using, as the
site’s initial content set, the public Apache mailing list archives
– because Apache is the community I know best and I think people
here will find the site useful. We’ve loaded a bit over 4,000,000
emails across 500 lists.

http://apache.markmail.org

For some screenshots, read the rest of the entry.

From Sun Microsystems: Netbeans out under GPLv2 with the option to use it under CDDL. For those of you who don’t know what that means, I’ll quote from the Sun Microsystem’s FAQ:

2. Why does Sun want to dual license NetBeans software under CDDL and GPLv2 with Classpath Exception?

The GPL v2 license will provide an additional option to vendors that are unable to work with NetBeans software under the CDDL license.

Adding GPLv2 as a license option will make NetBeans software even more Linux friendly.

Adding GPLv2 with Classpath exception to NetBeans software will keep product portfolios and bundles consistent. Sun open sourced its JDK implementation under GPLv2 and the GlassFish project is dual-licensed under CDDL and GPLv2 with Classpath exception.

This is a big deal, the NetBeans codebase is massive, and opening it up with GPLv2 means that the open source “ecosystem” just got that much larger. Most of the programming audience isn’t going to jump at licensing news, but releasing NetBeans under GPLv2 might just have a bigger immediate effect than GPL’ing the JDK. Sun’s moving in the right direction.

If you’re around Dublin on the 7th / 8th / 9th November you’re more than welcome to drop into the Irish Java Technologies Conference (IJTC).This post is preview of some of the people who are speaking. If you can’t make it, it’s an invitation to check out speaker’s websites and see if any of the technologies they are promoting could be of use to your project.

Here are the top 10 projects that I’m looking forward to hearing about out.

10) Java and Microsoft SQL Server : It’s still a brave Microsoft person that comes to a Java conference. Shows MS recognition a substantial amount of Java deployments persist their Data to a SQL- Server database.

9) Eclipse STP (and SOA) - Service Orientated Architecture is the buzzword of the year. If anybody can put substance behind the hype , it’s the guys From Iona.

8) Eclipse JPA and Dali. Hibernate pushed Object Relational Mapping (ORM) to be the standard approach to database access. The manager of the ‘other’ ORM Project (Oracle Toplink) should give a interesting coverage of the tooling developments.

7) Apache Geronimo - by Jeff Genender from Apache Foundation. So long the ‘other’ Open source application server, this is now becoming credible in commercial deployments.

6) Java Update - Simon has been working as a lead Java consultant for Sun Microsystems. He’ll be talking about Java Standard Edition 6 and Java Mobile Edition. But what I’m really interested in is Java Enterprise Edition 5, Scripting, Java Realtime and Java FX.

5) If scripting is your thing fellow Onjava Blogger Dejan Bosanac is also speaking on this subject. He’s talking about Scripting within the JVM, which will be one of the hot topics for 2008.

4) iPhone v JMME - I don’t get the buzz around Mobile (give it another 18 months , we’ll all be running Java Application Servers on the mobile). But many people are interested in it - this talk is how to make you Mobile Java apps as slick as those in the iPhone.

3) JBoss Drools - I’ve blogged (a little bit) about Drools before. I’ve also been fortunate enough to hear Mark Proctor speak and you will come out an convinced that the natural home for Business Logic is in the Rule engine.

2) JPA and Hibernate - There is a very strong possibility that Emmanuel Bernard will be returning to Dublin to talk about the Hibernate project that he leads. Having seen his recent talk, and given the level of interest in Hibernate, I expect a strong turnout for this one.

1) Spring 2.5 - Spring has been around for more than 5 years and is making serious inroads in the the Enterprise Java community. Sam Brannen (from Interface21) will give details on the latest on the major update to Spring (2.5) as well as what is planned for the future.

Disclaimer: I’ll be talking about Java Workflow (based on on JBoss jBPM). But compared to these guys, I’m way down on the Z-List of presenters. Must run that presentation past Robert Cooper and see if he still hates BPM products.

OpenJDK community has a new project, Multi-Language VM (or just mlvm). It is announced by John Rose, from Sun, on the announcement list. The focus of the project will be to prototype JVM features beneficial for dynamic languages and remove “pain points” that current dynamic language developers have with standard JVM.

Here’s the snippet from the announcement:

This project will be open for prototyping
JVM features aimed at efficiently supporting
languages other than Java.

The emphasis will be on completing the existing
bytecode and execution architecture with general
purpose extensions, as opposed to a new feature
for just one language, or adjoining an unrelated
new execution model.

The emphasis will also be on work which removes
“pain points” already observed by implementors
of successful or influential languages, as opposed
to more speculative work on unproven features or
niche languages.

It is definitely a step in the right direction for making Java a true multi-language development platform.

Google turns 9 today. The official chronological history is online at the corporate history page.

Their most important contribution is the effective search engine they provide. Today, the word searching on the web pretty much implies “googling” ! However, there is another extremely important contribution from their side and that is sharing the code that makes them succeed. Most of you already know and use some of the Google APIs.

So Google now influences not only how you use the web but also how you continue to build the web. This can imply either of the two outcomes - (1) Google the savior - in which case it accelerates liberation of most closed software and compels others to follow and (2) Google the tyrant - in which case it monopolizes not only your business but your mind. What do you think may be the probable outcome? Do you think it makes you uncomfortable that a 9 year old rules your life?

Scott let everyone know about GWT 1.4.59 today. This is mostly a bugfix release on GWT 1.4, and there are a TON of fixes, as wells as some real improvements to the Benchmarking application.

We have been hard and heavy in GWT work in my day job, and a good number of these fixes are welcome — the super call to native method was one that freaked me out for a while. GWT 1.5 is going to track the Java 1.5 language constructs, which is really exciting.

I am going to go ahead and leak some information here on some work that is coming out of Manheim to the open source world to go along with this release: Gwittir. The intent is for this to become a Rails like framework/generator for GWT. There is a lot of code on hold for it, but the exciting thing for GWT users is our “Reflection Light” introspection API. This, of course, gives rise to all kinds of cool stuff, including our Data Binding system. We are using this for several internal projects, and the whole thing is a moving target. The Introspector and the Binding stuff is stable, though, and very usable. Watch this space for more on the Gwittir MVC patterns and Widget patterns later.

restlet v1.0.4 was released last week with improved Spring integration. Check out the change log or download the zip archive.

The public restlet maven repository will be updated on the 1st August.

Well done Jerome, Thierry et al!

If you are using Commons Lang, Commons Collections, Commons BeanUtils, or anything else from the project formerly known as Jakarta Commons, you should know that the Jakarta Commons project has moved to a new web site: Apache Commons Project.

The new Java EE 6 specification was approved on July 16th. It passed with an overwhelming majority: 14 yes votes, 1 no vote (Apache), and 1 abstention (Borland). The story here isn’t that the JSR passed with flying colors, it is that this is the first major JSR approved since the open letter from the Apache Software Foundation and the problems caused by the Field of Use restrictions on the TCK. This JSR passed but with a statement about licensing from IBM, and two statements of future expectations from Red Hat and Intel.

IBM voted yes with a comment:

IBM’s vote is based on the technical merits of this JSR and is not a vote on the licensing terms. IBM supports licensing models that create an open and level playing field by allowing third parties to create independent implementations of Java Specifications and that do not allow individuals or companies to exercise unnecessary control for proprietary advantage. We support open source as a licensing model for contributions in the JCP, and would hope others will support this direction. This comment is not necessarily directed at the current business or license terms for this JSR, however, it is a statement of IBM’s preferred licensing model.

Intel also made a similar statement:

The Spec Lead has told us there are no “field of use restrictions” on implementations for this particular JSR. The Apache open letter about Java SE (http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html) claimed that a confidential license for a required JCP test suite restricts how Independent Implementations of that JCP spec can be used. Licenses to test for JCP compatibility must not be used to limit or restrict competing, compatible implementations; licenses containing such limitations do not meet the requirements of the JSPA, the agreement under which the JCP operates. For every JCP ballot, we will ask the Spec Lead whether such restrictions exist in their license.

Red Hat filed a similar comment along with a YES vote. Note the emphasis:

The spec lead of the EE6 specification has confirmed that the EE6 TCK would contain no “field of use restrictions”, as originally raised by Apache with regard to another JSR (i.e. the SE TCK licensing). That is a good thing.

However, in the absence of an explicit JSPA rule that would forbid such field-of-use restrictions, we will remain worried that a similar issue might resurface anytime, for any JSR.

Consequently, in the future, for any submitted JSR (by SUNW or not), we will specifically expect the spec lead to provide clear information on that aspect and take the answer in account when casting our vote.

And Apache voted NO with the following comment:

The Apache Software Foundation’s vote is based on the point of view that this spec lead - Sun - is in violation of the JSPA

http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html

and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to start another JSR until the above matter is resolved.

This vote is not a comment on the technical merits of the JSR. If not for the issue of the spec lead, the ASF would have otherwise voted “yes”.

From the jcp-open list at the ASF, Geir Magnusson’s from the 15th:

I’d like to vote “no” simply on the grounds that from our point of
view, this spec lead - Sun - is in violation of the JSPA, and
therefore we don’t think they should be allowed to start another JSR
until the matter is cleared up

On 29 June, Eclipse community will be richer for the new Europa release. It is a coordinate release of 21 Eclipse Foundation projects. The main component of this release is certainly new 3.3 version of the Eclipse Platform. Others include prominent projects from domains of administration, modeling, development and tools, such as Eclipse Communications Framework (ECF), Eclipse Modeling Framework Project (EMF), Dynamic Languages Tool Kit (DLTK) and Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT).
This is definitely an important Eclipse release and a good news for all Eclipse users.

JSR 314 - JavaServerFaces 2.0 is in the JSR review ballot phase. Check out the details at http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=314. However, the news is not really that new as conversation about JSF 2.0 was initiated by Ed Burns quite a few months back. For those of you who read his blog, you would be familiar with the JSF 2.0 requirements scratchpad. More recently he summarized the discussions at the JSF EG kick off meeting during JavaOne. Its available online again at Ed’s blog.

All in all, the start looks very promising. By next year when the specification is ready for release we would see a lot of goodies in JSF, some of them being -
- better view decription technology - somewhat like facelets or maybe better.
- application modification and deployment at runtime
- tighter integration with Ajax. perhaps support for a small JavaScript library contract specification.
- better and maybe centralized error handling
- minimization of “xml hell”, use of annotations instead
- possibility of RESTful urls and use of GETs
- skinning and themeing
- reduction of effort required for creating custom components

More details can be obtained from the sources mentioned above.

So all this good. However, I thought it was perhaps also time when one needs to look at the following -
1. unification of the client-centric and server-centric UI models, especially when they pertain to the same programming language. There is no stopping somebody mashing up the JSF lifecycle with a Swing Client but it is ugly and non-standard. How about creating standard hooks?
2. merging managed beans jsr with this one. Somebody in the JCP needs to start merging the JSRs. Of late there is a proliferation of these and at the rate it is going I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody started a JSR to reduce JSRs
3. portal is passe, if not it surely will die sooner rather than later. The client centric webos/webdesktop is gathering momentum. How about jsf taking the lead to include portlets within the realm of components and containers.
4. jsf, like everything web development java on the server side is based on the servlet API, which itself needs some rehaul, considering that it is purely server centric and quite inadequate in a newly evolving peer-to-peer world. Shouldn’t servlets and jsf evolve concurrently so that we could avoid some retrofitting.
5. Last but not the least, what about applications without servers - which go under the name of mashups often. which java web technology is good for it?

First WYSIWYG JavaFX Tool

Think we have to wait a few years for good tool support in JavaFX? Think again, there’s a pretty capable tool from Reportmill Software. Reportmill released JFX Builder at the end of last week.

This week we started a new branch of our source, did some reading of the JavaFX materials, and started implementing a few customizations and extensions to support JavaFX. Posted here is our page layout application modified to generate a preview of basic illustrations with an integrated version of JavaFXPad.

I’ve taken it for a quick test drive and it is an impressive offering given that they’ve only had a few weeks to play around with the technology.

Nandini Ramani (Sun) clears up any confusion on the JavaFX user list

I would like to reiterate that it is perfectly fine to distribute your JavaFX applications, in fact we encourage it. I was just pointing out that it is not yet ready for commercial use. [Developers] are welcome to distribute their applications.

Unlike other proprietary companies, we at Sun really do believe in open source and community involvement. I am sorry we do not have a licensing model in place yet, but I assure you that we are working on it and I will keep you all posted as soon as we have one in place.

And, on the important question of what in JavaFX is going to be open sourced:

Q: Is the JavaFX Runtime the same thing as the JavaFX Script which is to be “open sourced” as per the FAQ?

Nandini R: Yes, it is and the runtime will be open sourced.

Alright, good to read the clarification that the runtime will be open sourced.

XStream 1.2.2 is released with JettisonMappedXmlDriver used for serialization and deserialization from JSON. It is the driver first presented in Java and JSON post. All modifications are submitted to Jettison and XStream projects respectfully and documented in an appropriate tutorial (http://xstream.codehaus.org/json-tutorial.html). From now on, XStream has a full support for JSON serialization. Enjoy.

UPDATE (Memorial Day (US)): Nandini Ramani sent an update to the JavaFX Users group to clarify the licensing position. In this replyshe clears the air and states that Sun is actively encouraging distribution, read mroe on the update here.

Original Article Follows…

Wait a minute. There’s something wrong here, Sun isn’t even sure about the license for the JavaFX jars. This is definitely more fuel for the “JavaFX isn’t real” crowd. And, the only thing I’m taking away from this discussion is that it is illegal to do anything with JavaFX at the moment. That’s certainly what I take away from the user discussion. (Read the update this is no longer the case.)

Here is a message to users@openjfx.dev.java.net from Guillaume Pothier from May 22nd. The emphasis is mine, and it’s a question I’ve had myself…

Hi, I would like to know what is the current legal status of JavaFX.
In particular:
- Can I redistribute javafxrt.jar, Filters.jar and swing-layout.jar
with a GPL application? With a commercial application?
- Can I redistribute JavaFXPad?
- Can I distribute a modified version of JavaFXPad? Under which license?

Regards,
g

And the response from Nandini Ramani on users@openjfx.dev.java.net:

Guillaume,
The licensing terms for JavaFX are still under discussion. So, you
cannot redistribute JavaFXPad or any of the jars. I will keep you posted
once we have something in place.

-Nandini

…you don’t introduce The Big Product at The Java Conference without figuring out what license the thing is going to be under. I’m trying to give this technology a chance, but this is insane. They’ve created this “open source community” which isn’t really open or transparent in the least sense of the word. The fact that Sun can’t just tell us what the licensing and redistribution terms for JavaFX are right off the bat should give us some pause.

Add to this the fact that all of the source code has the following header:

/*
* $Id$
*
* Copyright 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
* SUN PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL. Use is subject to license terms.
*/

Great, so what are those “license terms” again? I’m thinking GPLv2 + Classpath extension. Anyone else have any suggestions for Sun?

Sun’s Bug Parade hasn’t changed in years. Just as Sun has moved away from Subversion to Mercurial for the JDK, it should be noted that Sun is not considering moving the BugParade to the existing customized Bugzilla that is a part of the java.net offering.

Read more, discussion from the openjdk mailing lists and a recommendation…

The first Ignite Boston will be on Thursday, May 31, from 6 to 10pm at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. From 6-7pm, mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. Join a MAKE challenge team and participate in building bridges (how much weight can your bridge–made from less than 1K popsicle sticks–support?) After that, we’ll have a special keynote address from author Scott Berkun (The Myths of Innovation; The Art of Project Management) kicking off our Ignite night. Then, onto guest speakers who’ll catch you up on the cool, new, innovative stuff going on in technology today. Don’t blink or you’ll miss their lightning-fast, five-minute presentations. During intermissions, get a cold beer and chat with speakers, sponsors, and O’Reilly’s own editors. Join us Thursday, May 31, for a fun, energetic evening of talking, learning, making, collaborating (and drinking!).

Check out the events and activities of our Ignite events on the West Coast.

Presentation Guidelines

Ignite is a user-generated event. If you’re interested in speaking, then
submit a proposal for consideration.

Presentations must:

• Be between 5 and 10 minutes
• Be on an innovative topic (no sales pitches, please!)
• Be viewable on a PC [a MacBook Pro with Powerpoint and Keynote, and PDF] with standard AV equipment

Technorati Tags: Boston, Cambridge, Ignite

JavaOne 2007 was covered by bloggers (unofficial and official) on a day to day basis as the event was unfolding. Thus most readers already know of the event highlights and the key new new things to look out for. Also, some of you were present there (that’s how the numbers of 15,000+ participants was achieved) and had most of the information ahead of all the reporting. So what am I going to talk about here? Well ! as the topic suggests I am going to discuss about something I am choosing to call the “4Ps”. Without delay then let me introduce these 4Ps. Its Presentations, People, Participants and Paraphernalia.

So here we go….

Presentations

The big ideas - oops! I mean announcements :) were made in the general sessions. Of course! thats what general sessions are for! The first day started with Java technology saving the world and the keynotes (or general sessions) ended with the theme - “anything is possible with Java” (I don’t think Sun used this slogan but I guess that is what was implied). Doesn’t this sound familiar? I could almost feel the presence of the power and the faith.

Anyway, let us look at some of the technical presentations and the BOFs. Surely, we cannot discuss all of them. There were far too many of them - perhaps over a 100. (If anybody calculated the exact number of sessions then please do leave a comment behind on the same.)

1. F3 (Form Follows Function) reincarnated as JavaFX and was presented as the next savior of the mere mortal user interface arena. The camp was divided quickly, as with all things new and catchy, into two - the believers and the skeptics. The believers who turned into early evangelists quickly pronounced the alternative’s doom. The skeptics starting cursing Sun and its lame efforts. We have started seeing some viewpoints on this on our own site as well. In fact Tim took the effort to hack some code and put it up online. Thanks Tim.

Personally I think it is an interesting proposition and holds promise. What needs to be seen is how mature does it become quickly and how well is it adopted. I also think that the open sourcing of Java and the openjfx project in particular should add value in this area.

2. Java goes open source. Presentations on why and how and the future of this open sourcing did catch a lot of attention. It was old news but certainly still new enough for people to discuss and debate. The current issue of the LinuxJournal - free copies of which were being doled out at JavaOne - includes an interview with Simon Phipps and has an editorial analysis titled - “Is GPL Java Too Little, Too Late?”. The best thing about that editorial analysis is that the editor has decided not to miss the chance to proclaim that his predictions rarely go wrong and mentions that $5 Java hosting (like PHP) would be possible once Java is open source. Wondering who edits the editor’s work :)

3. Scripting and Java. Scripting is the flavor of the season and Java certainly wants to make friends with anything scripting. There is scripting on the server side - look up project phobos, support for dynamic languages (especially the talk of town Ruby and Groovy) - jsr 292, integration with PHP - Andy Gutmans of Zend had a good session this, inclusion of JavaScript for ajax and how can I forgot - scripting for UIs - JavaFX.

4. Talking about making friends, Java technologies have taken a step further with Microsoft - they have actually started dancing together. One of the sessions on Java and .Net interoparability was about taking the two to tango. Check out the project tango (WSIT).

5. Ajax is never enough. Ben Galbraith (and Dion Almaer) could well have asked for a $5 fee to attend the session and made enough money to buy themselves drinks for the rest of the year. The lines to the session twisted and turned a few times and then spilled over to the staircases. The interesting demos around inclusion of sound and typography were impressive.

6. JSF and JBoss Seam (in particular) created a lot of buzz in a show, that had a lot of client side eye-candy, and I thought that was commendable. Almost all JSF and Seam session were well attended and there were quite a few of those. The inclusion of ajax with jsf was certainly one of the areas developers were very attracted too. Not to forget the top selling book at the JavaOne bookstore was “Core Java Server Faces” by David Geary and Cay Horstmann. (Manning books on Groovy and GWT were in the second and third position as per the list through day 3.) The JBoss Seam book also featured in the top sellers list. (I think they had 15 in the list)

7. Java 3D and JOGL (Java Binding for Open GL) is growing up to become a serious choice for building really rich applications. Some of the demos were truly outstanding. Google for the “rotating globe with java 3d” and I can assure you that you will not be disappointed.

8. The grammarians. Joshua Bloch, Brian Goetz, Neal Gafter and Bill Pugh had some excellent sessions, as in the past, on the details of the language constructs. Most of the session were well attended and well received. However, I thought the session on testing concurrent applications did not have too many new ideas apart from the ones that many already know.

There were more presentation , especially the ones of NIO and the project grizzly, that may be worth talking about but I am going to stop here and pick the next topic - i.e. people.

People

Before I start talking about individuals let me mention that I am only going to say good things here and include those people who I thought were interesting in the context of JavaOne.

1. Romain Guy and Chet Hasse did not disappoint the participants when talking about - “filthy rich clients”. I understand the book by the same title is coming out later this year. I will surely like to get a copy of that one.

2. Joshua Bloch is by far my favorite Java grammarian. As always his Puzzlers were difficult, entertaining and educational.

3. Joshua Marinacci and Robert Cooper of the Glossitope team had a very nice BOF about their project. Yahoo widgets and Google Gadgets have created excitement in the adoption of widgets on the desktop. This project provides the infrastructure to build such desklets with java.

4. Andi Gutmens of Zend showed a lot of patience while presenting. There was for some reason blaring music in the background (from one of the adjacent rooms) that was overwhelming and his co-presenter from BEA (who later mentioned he was sick) was barely audible even with the microphone.

5. Mathew Bohm (who was a co-presenter with Craig McClanahan) at some time during his demo actually started dancing and jiving to the music, that played with the demo. It was quite something :) I havn’t seen presenters do this in conferences. The best part was that it didn’t seem that odd either.

Ok time to move on to the next topic - i.e. Participants

Participants

1. A lot of people from outside the United States showed up. Nothing unusual but always reassuring that JavaOne is indeed a big event that the world of Java cares for.

2. I think the free t-shirts at the booths were by far the biggest favorites. The Eclipse folks had a little treasure hunt to get a certain number of stamps from the Eclipse Foundation members to get a free t-shirt or a hat. You could suddenly see a lot of java developers of all types lining up at the otherwise fairly sparse SAP booth. I guess it pays to be an Eclipse Foundation member :)

3. IBM stands a chance against Starbucks. In its commitment to Java they took another great step at JavaOne - doled out free coffee to participants who could wait in lines to get it. A lot of participants did show interest.

4. Lines, lines and more lines. Thats what happens when you have so many turn up. The participants waited in lines to get into the sessions, get lunch, get drinks or the free t-shirts. However, the conference was very well organized and kudos to the patience of all the participants.

we finally come to the last of the four topics - Paraphernalia

Paraphernalia

1. The day 2 evening was the party day. There were parties organized by Adobe, JBoss, Google, IBM and some others. Plenty of drinks and good time to catch up with friends and folks. The lasting effect was the sparse attendance in the day 3 morning general session.

2. The after dark on the 3rd day was a random bag of entertainment programs. It included the grinder as a performer as well. The event just reconfirmed that technology in general and application development with Java technology in particular is a man’s world. Not to forget the battle bots champion was a bot named “subzero”.

Guess that may be all, as a quick summary of JavaOne 2007. Folks chime in if I missed something.

From Simon Phipps’ Liberating Java Talk:

“Apache Software Foundation has told me that they have looked back in the ten year industry and they haven’t seen any example of someone forking an Apache codebase and keeping going with it as a fork of the apache codebase without contributing code back in the end. Everyone either gives up or gives back, there isn’t a third way.”

Phipps has perfected the pitch for open source. You can tell he’s had to explain open source to a zillion executive types who have no idea what he is talking about. Here are some good quotes:

“…with more and more people deploying the software, improving it,developing it, fixing bugs in it, and ultmi contributing to the comm. Not because they want to give way stuff but because contributing back reduces your cost and allows you to benefit from the network effects of the community.”

More on the true cost savings of open source:

“It’s not about getting free stuff, it’s about getting control over what you pay for. That is what is really key for end-users about open source software. And, if you hear a CIO talking about thinking about how they are going to reduce their cost by not having to pay for software licenses anymore they are thinking wrong. Open source is about getting control over what you do pay for, what you hire for, and what you don’t pay for. And, that is a sustainable way of keeping costs under control as you are deploying software.”

On open source and the rapidly growing Asian markets…

“In China, four years ago, the Chinese economy was using 95 plus percent foreign source software. Last year the Chinese government was using 70% open source software. There is a profound transition happening in Asia in the rapidly developing economies that is using open source as a power house. And if we want to do business in those new markets…open source is just a basic hygenie factor, and you better have an answer ready when they ask. …In 2007, we’re in a world where open source style licensing in now a prerequisite for your presence in an environment. And that means that the time is now right for the Java platform to become free software. ”

On selecting the GPL…

“Using the GPLv2 was a controversial choice when we made that decision. The reason we used GPLv2 was primarily because that meant we could distribute on GNU/linux. That was the number one reason for using GPLv2. There were some other reasons for using GPLv2. One of the reasons for using GPLv2 is that it discourages people from creating proprietary forks. It does that by forcing forking behavior to be done in public. By bringing transparency and daylight into attempts to create a fork of the platform.”

Date / Time API - JSR-310 - JODA

Stephen Colbourne and Michael Nascimento Santos’ Date Time API BOF was interesting for a few reasons. The number of people attending was impressive given the late 9:30 PM start… even more surprising was the intense discussion and level of interest. Stephen had to stay 45 minutes past the 10:45 PM session close to answer questions and listen to feedback about JODA - he showed some proposed Date Time APIs.

I hope JSR-310 is heavily influenced by JODA. JODA has a richer set of Date/Time concepts which are noticeably absent from the core Java platform. (Translation: I hope that JODA emerges from the JCP process relatively unmolested by the expert group.)

Struts 2

Ran into a number of people yesterday, Don Brown recently moved to Australia to work for Atlassian, and Ian Roughley. Discussed the Struts 2 / WebWork merger. (Just in case you missed it, Don wrote a History of Struts 2 last October.) Was checking out the Struts 2 site this morning, noticed the Plugin Registry.

Let’s hope the plugin registry takes off and is managed well….to me, the big draw of Ruby on Rails is the fact that I can talk to Michael Kovacs one day, learn about his sortable table plugin, and then rip it into my Rails application in two minutes. I don’t see any Java framework out there that leverages decentralized innovation in the way Rails has. (Did I really just type the word “leverage”? Did I just string together the words “leverages decentralized innovation”? I’m terribly sorry.)

Rife

I was able to meet a sizable portion of my RSS feeds at the ThirstyBear. Spoke to Geert Bevin about RIFE. Feels like everybody I speak to is interested in RIFE, but they’ve never taken the time to learn it. I feel like RIFE has been on my list for about two years, time to bump it up to the top of my queue and actually use it.

Person: “Wow! That is a really great toy!”

Vendor: “It isn’t a toy. It is completely programmable.”

Person: “It is a completely programmable toy.”

Just got out of the JavaFX presentation by Chris Oliver. I entered the room somewhat skeptical of JavaFX as a viable product. IMO, Adobe Flex has the momentum, Microsoft has entered the market with Silverlight, and here’s Sun coming along in lagging the market with no tool support. I can’t say I’m entirely bought over, but JavaFX as a technology is incredibly compelling.

First, some personal observations about Chris Oliver - he’s soft spoken, not the best presenter in the world compared to some of the seasoned media veterans you see in the general sessions, but this is all very refreshing. At a conference like this, you get tired of the song and dance, the slick haired tech executive who hasn’t seen an IDE in a few years talking about ROI and TCO. Chris Oliver is close to the code, extremely opinionated, and impatient. He’s a developer. He looks the part.

Second, he had a Neo moment - “This is the matrix.” So he starts showing us some slides, he gets to slide four - an example of a bad Java swing application - a PDF reader. He explains that Swing applications all look bad because they are Swing, etc. etc. We’re all expecting the next slide to be an example of a slick looking JavaFX application, and he blew everyone’s mind by saying, “Now for the Flex application……you are looking at it” So, he proceeded to show us this slick looking JavaFX application, zoom animations, a fancy animated view of pages ala itunes albums. I mean it was impressive, and I’m a skeptic.

Another great thing about Oliver, he’s opinionated, that’s a good thing. He refused to answer questions that weren’t up to his standards. I like that.

Interesting Rails Applications::Sortable Table Plugin

Side note, tried to spend as little time in the press area as possible, the action is out in the sessions and the Pavillions. This evening, I decided to write this blog entry from the press room, ran into Michael Kovacs who showed me a demo of Pitchwire.com. Pitchwire, implemented in Ruby on Rails, is an interesting application targeted publicists and influencers and journalists. He showed me some of the code and a interesting Rails plugin Sortable Table Plug-in. Who would have thought that I’d find a relevant Ruby on Rails plug-in in the press room of JavaOne.

JUG Summit

I’m sitting in the Java.net booth just trying to assemble some quotes from yesterday’s events. As I’m writing this, there is a summit of JUG leaders:Kevin Nilson, Michael Van Riper with the Silicon Valley JUG, Thibaut Regnier Club-Java (French JUG), Roman Strobl leader of the Czech JUG. Manfred Riem and Chris Maki from the Utah JUG. These people all seem really passionate and focused on cultivating user communities. I’m also struck by how global the JUG community is.

Michael wanted me to let Bay Area Java programmers know of the “JavaOne Retrospective by the Java Posse” on Tuesday, May 15th in Mountain View. Java Posse is going to record their weekly podcast before a live audience, primary topic will be JavaOne. Find out more @ Bay Area JUG

J2ME Cell Phone Benchmarks

Thibaut Regnier took some time to show me TastePhone - a midlet which acts as a benchmark for different mobile platforms. If you are interested in comparing the speeds of various handsets, this is the place to look. Currently the reigning champion is the Orange SPV2000, if you are interested in the full list, take a look at the leaderboard. The leaderboard was implemented in JSF version 1.0.

Interesting Quotes from Yesterday’s Press Briefing: Schwartz

In response to a question about Apache Harmony:

Schwartz: “There is nothing at all right now stopping Apache from shipping Harmony. Nothing, they are free to do so, the code is available they can distribute it wherever and whenever they want…We’re very, very, very focused right now on the GPL community. And, for a very good reason, across the world we’ve seen an overwhelming endorsement and an embrace from the governments, academic institutions, the developer community, the Linux community. And, we’re, in time, going to do whatever we can to embrace the broadest community possible. But, frankly, you know our objectives right now are to make sure that the code is available everyone can do with it what they see fit. We can get back to pursuing the objectives we defined which to make it the broadest and more affordable and accessible platform out there. And frankly with what we announced today I feel pretty good that we’re making a lot of progress.”

In response to a question about JavaFX and JavaFX Tools. Whether Sun was planning on charging for FX tools.

Schwartz: “The world is divided into two camps, those who can and will pay for technology because its expense is less than the inconvenience of not having a support contract and those who cannot and will not pay for software for whatever reason, economically, culturally or the business just doesn’t need it. Our economic motives are to go after the former camp, our technology objectives are to go after the latter camp. Because almost by definition given what Dr. Diallo(sp?) just said, they out number the former camp 50,000 to 1. So volume defines market opportunities for everybody, you need only look at the internet to have that proven to you. It’s up to us to figure out how to monetize those volume opportunities in and among the communities that are capable and interested in doing so.”

“Internetnews is reporting on Sun’s introduction of JavaFX at JavaOne today. Looks like a combination Applet, Flash, Javascript, and AJAX with a friendly programming interface. Does this really spell the end of AJAX? I sincerely hope so. Nothing built on Javascript will ever achieve the security, cross-platform reliability, and programmatic friendliness that Web 2.0 needs. Proprietary solutions and vendor lock-in are also dead ends. JavaFX has the potential to satisfy this opportunity even better than did Java over a decade ago. Along with AJAX, let’s hope JavaFX also puts paid to Microsoft’s viral Active-X and JScript, and, more importantly, that it really is a web scripting language that developers can grok.”
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3676226
EJB 3.0 Articles
Integrating Struts With Spring

Marc Hadley, Paul Sandoz, and Roderico Cruz gave a presentation on Sun’s JSR 311 initiative (JAX-RS). Despite my habit of ignoring every technology that has an acronym starting with JAX, I attended to see if this was anything to pay attention to. First off, I thought that Paul and Marc gave a great presentation, the API is interesting, but it does look like it needs to polishing - the Expert Committee was formed only six weeks ago. Quick summary is that the API drops reliance on an API in favor of using annotations to define the URI patterns and parameter bindings for a REST service.

The demo was painful. First it was all focused on NetBeans and, second, it was a dreadfully conceived application. All I can remember are the phrases “right-click in NetBeans” and “have NetBeans generate a Google Map Resource”. It didn’t help that before the demo either Marc or Paul set it up as a demo that would rival the initial setup and ease of Ruby on Rails (it didn’t). Instead it was a lot of GUI clicking to produce something that was more of a distraction to the REST API being discussed.

Strange questions about whether or not the REST API would support attachments or if there was a way to have a transaction span multiple requests. More people need to read Roy Fielding’s thesis. Even after sitting through the presentation, I think that people still didn’t get the whole REST != SOAP idea.

Sat through Simon Phipp’s presentation on “Liberating Java”, it is very interesting to see Sun trying to market Open Source to conference attendees. Some observations, while the world has started to embrace open source, they might not really understand the motivations and benefits of Open Source. Phipps makes a very good case for open source in general and makes sure to emphasize that the key aspect of open source isn’t “free software” it is participation - the “virtuous cycle”. I’ll try to transcribe some of that recording later on…

He also makes the point that the embrace of open source is essential if Sun is going to compete in the Asian markets. I forget the exact statistic he referenced, but China in particular has embraced open source. Other interesting quotes, in Brazil using open source software is a matter of sovereignty.

Ray (?) stood up at the end of the session to answer a question about getting rid of the encumbered code in JSE. HIs answer was, essentially, well why don’t you help us?

The Crowds

Listen, the lines, the crowds. They are ridiculous. when I’m standing in some of these crowds, I’m half expecting a riot. After the Phipps presentation the waiting area for the Esplanade was a claustrophic nightmare. I guess this is a good sign - listen, despite the protest of sheik 26 yr old danes who’ve created ruby scripting frameworks….

Java is huge and here to stay.

Where’s JRuby? Where’s lunch? Ooops. I missed it.

I’m twittering the conference (that’s ridiculous!): http://www.twitter.com/tobrien - but, be warned, I still think twitter is a little silly.

Just got out of the press briefing, sat next to two other contributors to O’Reilly Network. David Bock of O’Reilly and Steve Anglin of APress. Fun stuff, you know, sitting there watching two executives and the guest from the UN discuss Java it was interesting, but the questions were pointed. Two key facts about FX that I picked up on:

• FX Script is a rebranding of Chris Oliver’s F3
• Sun is trying to target graphic designers
• As for the mobile product, they have no OEMs or Carriers
• They are going to license a binary to carriers to avoid compatibility issues

My initial impression: this seems a little rushed. Oliver’s stuff looks very interesting, but to say this competes with Flex, Apollo, and Silverlight is jumping the gun. What makes Adobe so successful here is the presence of great tools - both Flash for graphic designers and Flex for programmers. Advantage Adobe. I wanted to ask when they were going to start marketing to graphics designers, but I didn’t get a chance.

It is about people

Several times Schwartz corrected himself - we are not developers and users we are PEOPLE.

Taking the temperature….Problems printing….

They have all of these kiosks set up for people to print out schedules, but people keep on having problems printing. And, laughably, there are Ricoh engineers manning each printer making sure that the printers print. I’m standing next to one know who appears to be helping someone remotely debug some servlet that is responsible for printing……..at the same time, there is a huge queue and someone is yelling at people about perforated lunch tickets.

So we all know that both Ajax and Adobe’s Flash/Appolo have been getting lots of attention in the web development space. The following trend line shows how many developers are buying books on Rich Web Interface programming topics. As you can see the trend is growing steadily upward, so the attention is well deserved. The timeframe is October 2005 through April 2007. Now SilverLight has burst on to the scene from Microsoft. Seems like everyone wants in the RIA space.

Another familiar player is just about the jump into the space with a highly promising new approach to RIA development. You have probably heard rumors about Sun Microsystems’s releasing Java FX. Java FX is a new extension to the Java platform that gives developers a consistent experience for building rich web/desktop apps all the way down to to handheld device applications. Interactivity, animation and ease of use that rivals Ajax, Flash and Silverlight, are the features that Java FX deploys on the Java runtimes already installed on you local client. On the surface, it sounds more elegant and efficient.

But what is Java FX. It’s going to be a product family with Java FX Script being the tool for creating content for Web and Web 2.0-oriented applications.

FX Script is designed for content authoring of Web and network-facing applications. You will be able to access and use all your Java SE/ME applications and libraries. No need to kludge some bridge to your libraries, Java FX will handle that for you. There are features that make it more safe as well. Not having to rely on a constant connection, like Javascript in the Ajax model, Java FX will need only one new library to be installed along with the standard SE or ME runtime. Should be safe, should be slick. By having locally installed SE/ME files working with Java FX you could take your nifty Google apps offline and work on them. How nice would it be to see your Google Calendar offline?

So Sun’s Write Once, Run Anywhere could actually start to happen. We know that Java runs in both IE and Firefox, and that with ME you can get Java onto hardware devices like phones and PDAs.

Java FX’s promise: Create highly interactive and animated content running on computers, digital TVs, regular TVs and mobile devices, and have your content look the same across all platforms and behave the same way.

What do you think? Same old promise from Sun? Will Sun Legal cramp another promising technology with some arcane license or requirement on how you should document and write about it? Or, is this the real deal?

The Spring Web Flow 1.0.3 has been released. This is a bugfix release addressing four issues in the Java Server Faces (JSF) and Portlet integration reported against the 1.0.2 release. Work on Spring Web Flow 1.1 has begun with the first milestone release scheduled for JavaOne. Spring Web Flow is a next generation Java web application controller framework. The framework provides a powerful system for implementing navigation logic and managing application state consistently across a variety of environments.
http://static.springframework.org/spring-webflow/docs/1.0.3/reference/index.html

Spring Web Flow(SWF)
Integrating Struts With Spring

Restlet is a lightweight REST framework for Java. It helps you build Web applications that blur the lines between Web sites and Web services by embracing REST, the architectural style of the Web. As every major REST concept has a corresponding Java class, the mental mapping between your RESTful Web design and your code is straightforward.
http://www.restlet.org/

EJB 3.0 Articles
Integrating Struts With Spring

Xfire vs. Axis2, Hibernate vs. iBatis, Spring vs. Plexus, Ant vs. Maven….. as James Turner blogs in The Virtues of Monoculture, this abundance of choice is both our strong point and our achilles heel. He writes:

We celebrate the diversity of choices available to solve a problem and call it freedom. IT managers and CIOs look at it and call it chaos, confusion and uncertainty.

Part of the problem is that we look at a collection of projects like Sourceforge, ASF, Codehaus, Tigris, JBoss, Java.net, and about a million other open source communities, and there is no central directory to compare project adoption or rate these components. To the uninitiated middle manager, open source is “chaos, confusion and uncertainty”. If you are not familiar with the personalities and the communities, how do you sift through the noise without joining a million development mailing lists?

Ohloh.net: Bringing Order to this Free-for-all

I’ve been using this service for a few days, and IMO it is part of the solution to this problem. If we all agreed to start using it right now, and to vote for the software that is currently in our stack, we’re going to provide adoption numbers. If we encourage ongoing ohloh usage, we’ll be able to see emerging trends and shifts. I encourage you to sign up….

http://www.ohloh.net

Not everyone has enough time to figure out the difference between Hibernate and iBatis. Not everyone has the time to sift through the marketing, hype, blogs that surround every corporate sponsored open source project in Javaland. Not everyone adopting open source wants to “participate”, or ever wants to be told to “look at the source” on a mailing list. Not every adopting open source is a “developer” capable of understanding the source code. So, we need some tool for people interested in comparing relative adoption and reading reviews. We need a tool that a working developer can use to distill the rocket science into real community data. I think that ohloh.net can provide this insight, but only if we start to use it.

Now, Stack These:

• XFire or Axis2
• Spring or HiveMind
• Tomcat or Jetty
• JBoss or Glassfish or Geronimo
• FreeMarker or Velocity
• CVS or Subversion

ACEGI Now Has OpenID Support

On the ACEGI developer list this morning, Ray Krueger announces OpenID support in ACEGI thanks to the efforts of Robin Bramley. If you don’t know what OpenID is yet, learn more about it over at http://openid.net. Also, some analysis of OpenID from Tim Bray (from Feb).

Wicket Status and Roadmap

Martijn Dashorst just created a Wicket Roadmap that shows the plans for the release of Wicket 1.3.0 and beyond. In case you haven’t been following the development of Wicket, it appears that Wicket 2.0’s constructor change has been voted down. It appears that Wicket team decided to take less of revolutionary approach and more of an evolutionary approach to the next release. For more explanation of the now abandoned constructor change, read this blog entry.

Sun’s initial response to the Open Letter from Apache. Here is an excerpt:

• Sun is working with as many communities as possible to create an open source implementation of the Java platform under GPL v2 that mainstream open source communities can work with - this includes TCKs.
• Java technology has many stakeholders, and we recognize that we will not be able to please everyone as we move through this process. In some cases, we’ll have to agree to disagree on some points.
• Our current priority is to make the Java platform accessible to the GNU/Linux community as quickly as possible.
• As you’ll note from Apache’s letter, this is a dispute over specific terms, not over Sun providing a TCK.
• We know that the open source process is a journey and we will continue to work with the open source communities and the licensees to determine how Java technology evolves.

A few quick observations that jump out. First, GNU/Linux and GPLv2 are mentioned twice, (possibly) Sun has determined that it doesn’t want to see a JDK under a BSD-style license? This just happens to be the lever that will prevent that?

Second, No one @ Sun has told me this, but from the response it appears that they are digging in “we’ll have to agree to disagree on some points”. We’ll see what the next few weeks bring, but I’m not holding my breath for a response (positive or negative) before JavaOne.

Spring Framework v2.0.4 was released earlier this week with bug fixes few enhancements and some performance improvements. Take a look at the change log for more details or just go ahead and download it.

Give up some love for the spring framework team.

Dave just released the first version of ROME Propono. This is an abstraction on top of publishing APIs not unlike how ROME itself is an abstraction on top of syndication APIs. Currently it supports Atom Publishing and MetaWeblog API and includes a server harness for APP.

I haven’t spent but a couple of hours with it, but so far I am very impressed. The APP Server harness is really quite handy.

Do you remember Microsoft’s SPOT watch which debuted at 2004 CES? Sun is also experimenting Small Programmable Object Technology with project Sun SPOT, an ongoing research project at Sun Labs from late 2003. The result of the research is Sun SPOT device.

Starting today, the first limited-production run of Sun SPOT Java Development Kits is now available for U.S customers. The kit costs $550 as some hardware involved in it. The Sun SPOT development kit includes everything needed to start developing applications for your Sun SPOT. The kit is a bundle of:
-Two complete Sun SPOT devices with demo sensor boards
-A base station Sun SPOT to connect to your development machine
-Software development tools
-USB cable

The development tools are compatible with Windows XP with Java runtime, Mac OS X 10.4 or better and most common Linux distributions. You can order SPOT kit here. In addition, the API specification for the initial release of the Sun SPOT libraries is available for preview at http://www.sunspotworld.com/javadoc/index.html.

Ok, it has been a while since I have seen a tool that made me go, “Wow, why am I not using this,” but I have a new one: Enuciate. This is a “cooker” that will take a Java service implementation as a set of POJOs, or JSR-181 annotated stuff, and spit out a WAR file with an Xfire backed SOAP service, a REST service, a JSON service and some fairly nice looking Docs scraped off the JavaDoc. The rest stuff is annotation based, and I wonder if there are plans to move it to a JSR-311 based system. The cook system is broken out into modules, and I am thinking making a GWT RPC service module would be a cool thing too.

Spring 2.0 introduces Portlet MVC Framework. For more details about the portlet framework read the sun’s documentation. The Portlet MVC framework is a mirror image of the Web MVC framework.

The main way in which portlet workflow differs from servlet workflow is that the request to the portlet can have two distinct phases: the action phase and the render phase. The action phase is executed only once and is where any ‘backend’ changes or actions occur, such as making changes in a database. The render phase then produces what is displayed to the user each time the display is refreshed. The critical point here is that for a single overall request, the action phase is executed only once, but the render phase may be executed multiple times. This provides (and requires) a clean separation between the activities that modify the persistent state of your system and the activities that generate what is displayed to the user.

http://www.springframework.org/docs/reference/portlet.html

Spring Articles

Update 3/30/2007: I am “an asshat”, I spelled Hani’s name wrong in the original post. Was spelling Suleiman as Sulemani. Maybe it is the Spring 2.0 XML that is curdling my brain?

If you haven’t already, you should read Sierra’s blog and then write her a quick note of encouragement. If you don’t know, she’s the brains behind the heads up series, and, trust me, I know you have a copy on your desk even if you are too embarrassed to admit it. Those books are both incredibly effective and dense. Everyone who has a copy should take a moment, and thank her for her contribution.

But, this entry isn’t about Ms. Sierra, it is really about another prominent member of the community who’s under some fire, in part, because of the experiences of Ms. Sierra. Hani Suleiman, most of the readers of this blog, probably know who Hani is, and if the name doesn’t ring a bell, than saying “BileBlog” probably will. You’ve read it, and if you haven’t, then Google it. I’m not going to link to it, not because I disapprove, but because it does contain some obscenities. In addition to writing the BileBlog, Hani also sits on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process.

Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps comments on some of the revisions in GPLv3. In his entry he points to the clarification re: software-as-a-service. He also writes:

I’d been expecting the final draft; this is now an extra interim draft, and we’ll not see the final version until the summer. And there are several signs that we’ll see more frequent updates to the license - there are indications that the DRM stuff might be extended to different kinds of devices, for example. All very interesting, I know there will be a lot of discussion about this inside Sun over the next few weeks.

Also, over at O’Reilly Radar Allison Randall comments on the revisions. She’s specifically addresses the updated definition of “consumer devices”.

Read the GPLv3 redline here.

The Spring IDE team has released Spring IDE 2.0 M3, which among other new features includes the highly-anticipated Spring Web Flow graphical visualizer and editor. The new support allows developers to edit XML-based flow definitions graphically, and enables greater productivity and communication with end users.
http://www.springframework.org/node/429
Spring Articles

The desktop transformed user experience through the last 20 years and has been the entry point for applications for a long time now. Come to think of it, even the browser is an application that resides in the desktops of users. The browser helps us access sites that run applications and that may be an aggregation itself, like a portal. The web applications, which traditionally were database centric and form, based data entry and reporting, email and ecommerce type applications are maturing into online office and collaboration applications (the offerings from Google), online gaming and online drawing applications (Gliffy). Interestingly enough though, the desktop has not changed fundamentally in its many years of existence and is still focused on file management, document creation and deletion, and local storage of documents type of functionality. Of course there has been the inclusion of web technologies into the desktops. More recently, Microsoft and Adobe (with its Adobe Apollo) may be examples of companies that are bringing the concepts and technologies of the web to the desktop. An important question then is, what is the future of the desktop and that of the web? Would the desktop be replaced by the web or would the web pervade throughout the desktop? These and related ideas were brought-up by David Temkin (www.davidtemkin.com), the co-founder and CTO of Laszlo Systems as a part of his presentation at the AjaxWorld in New York. David seemed very bullish about the web outperforming the desktop in being the center of user experience in the long run. Guess that is why, Laszlo is taking the desktop to the web with its Webtop offering and betting on it being a preferred solution going forward. Of course they are not the only ones doing it neither are they the first to do it. Laszlo Webtop is a solution that provides the infrastructure to build a web-desktop or a “webtop”. It leverages Java on the server side and is built to take advantage of the established server side java frameworks and mechanisms. (I tried the initial release of this product and maybe would talk about it sometime later or try and compare and contrast it with similar offerings from other vendors.)

Now we are not sure if the Laszlo Webtop is the winner in the long run and I am not trying to present David Temkin’s presentation verbatim here, but I think the questions he has raised and his opinion on the matter are indeed something for us to ponder about. Considering that java developers may still be struggling between old Apache Struts type web frameworks and the numerous hybrid choices that AJAX/RIA have presented to them, are they thinking about where the web-desktop convergence is going and the role they want to play in shaping this convergence’s destiny. Or is it that some of us are happy that such concepts could theoretically be partially or fully implemented as Applets even some 10 years back. Or is it that we are waiting for a JSR to be initiated for such a purpose :)

It is hard to miss the word in my RSS reader the last few days. The Genuitec modifications controversy continues to boil. The Sniping about what has been rechristenedRedHat Developer Studio is getting tiresome. But the trademark of Hibernate and the “some people say” seeming Bellevueian enforcement of such boils around the web.

On the more technical side, though, is Google’s Hibernate Shards distribution/balancing system and the Hibernate Search stuff rolling out. Hani notes some Hibernate JPA compliance bashing at TSSJS (marginally safe for work), something that I have run into a number of times.

The Java Posse Roundup was last week. It was pretty great. This was of the “Open Spaces” genre. Basically, everyone shows up, and scheduling of sessions is done in an impromptu and ongoing manner via stickies and blocks on the wall.

The one thing that I “got” as I walked in was that 2007 was the year the Java language and the Java platform completely bifurcated. GWT represents the Java language moving way out of the JVM. Indeed, GWT and Apollo represent some of the most exciting parts of Java the language right now. Of course, the discussions of dynamic languages and and Scala represent the JVM moving away from the language at a seeming breakneck pace.

Dick is going to filter out the session audio as he gets them prepared, but I specifically attended sessions on build systems, the “forges” (j.n, code.google, sf.net), Joe’s “Properties and Events in the Language” session, a session on Apollo, I hosted a session on GWT and help Josh present AB5k, a very interesting session on the possibilities of forked Javas, and a session about the future of desktop Java. I also got a chance to sit in on Java Posse 106.

It is really tough for me to put together a list of highlights, because the whole affair was really quite awesome. It was very much a nerd summer camp crossed with a revival meeting. Really, I highly recommend it next year for those of you who weren’t there.

I have more photos, including both the Jackalope and the Gronk.

Could the open source agile, lightweight Google Guice be the next Spring?

On Monday, news broke from EclipseCon: Red Hat JBoss announces a partnership with Exadel. Eclipse based Exadel Studio is now open source and going into JBoss.org for continued development and merging with JBoss IDE, etc. This will be called Red Hat Developer Studio IDE platform.

As reported by Inside Java earlier today, the NetBeans IDE platform announces support for Ruby/JRuby. It doesn’t come as a suprise as Sun backs both the open source NetBeans and JRuby projects.

InfoQ.com points to the general availability release of Apache Struts 2.x and what it means, has, etc.

Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 has seen an updation. Developed as a part of Dapper, it is a package which allows parsing HTML pages into a Java Document object. Wrapped around Mozilla’s HTML parser, it gives the user a browser quality HTML parser.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=186646

Java Discussion Forums

In the Java industry this week, the Apache Tapestry project announced a preview release of Tapestry 5.0.1. From their website they define Tapestry as “an open-source framework for creating dynamic, robust, highly scalable web applications in Java. Tapestry complements and builds upon the standard Java Servlet API, and so it works in any servlet container or application server.”

Java Discussion Forums

Laszlo Systems announced the beta release of its latest product (or should I say framework) to help make AJAX/RIA development easier. Its called “Laszlo Webtop” and its aim is to help do two things - (1) provide the infrastructure to create a desktop on the web(or should I call it Portal 3.0) and (2) continue the effort of providing server side infrastructure for Java developers to utilize the tools, libraries and container services that already work well for them.

This is built on OpenLaszlo, but is a commercial offering. Laszlo has what they call an early access program to testdrive this framework. So if you are interested, you would have to request for it through their website - www.laszlosystems.com.

Find the CodeMash Conference coverage on Inside Open Source.

It’s not just for Java, but blended development that includes Java, Ruby (on Rails), PHP, .NET, etc.

The CodeMash Conference is dedicated to educate developers on current practices, methodologies and technology trends in variety of platforms and development languages such as Java, .NET, Ruby and PHP. It starts Thu Jan 18, 2007 and concludes Fri Jan 19, 2007, and is being held at the Kalahari resort in Sandusky, OH.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. came out as the #1 contributor to open source in Europe. As reported by Sun’s Simon Phipps and Kevin Roebuck in their blogs, the European Commission just released their report on the Economic Impact of Open Source and the impact in ICT in the European Union.

WebLogic 10 will support Java EE 5 (although the tech preview does not), including support for the new EJB 3 / Java Persistence API (JPA) specification. I really think that Java EE 5 is going to bring EJB to the masses because, although EJB 2.1 and earlier had immense power, it was so complicated to use that many companies bypassed EJBs altogether. EJB 3 gives you this same power and is much easier to use. More details

Krishna Srinivasan
Struts Articles and Tutorials

JBoss Seam is a powerful new application framework for building next generation Web 2.0 applications by unifying and integrating technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Java Server Faces (JSF), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB3), Java Portlets and Business Process Management (BPM).

JBoss Seam

Thanks,
Krishna Srinivasan
Struts Articles and Tutorials

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) 1.3 is being release under Apache Software License 2.0 - (read more)

Ending months of speculation, Google has officially joinedGoogle Web Toolkit the Eclipse Foundation as an add-in provider, according to officials at both organizations. In an interview with ZDNet, Eclipse Director Mike Milinkovich said:We are, of course, thrilled that Google decided to join the Eclipse Foundation. It was a nice gesture of support for the Eclipse community and it is appreciated. But what I am really excited about is the way that Google is using Eclipse as the development tools platform for the Google Web Toolkit. It is yet another demonstration of how Eclipse can be used as the tools platform for so many different languages and environments.
Read Here

Krishna Srinivasan
Java Resources
Spring Resources and Articles
Struts Tutorials and Articles

Dear Java Community,

As you can see, we’re making progress with our plans to open source Sun’s implementations of the Java platform. I’m happy to see Java technology embarking on a new journey with this official open-source licensing announcement.

Java technology has been a cornerstone of software development for more than a decade now — the community is ready for the next chapter, and the timing is right. As we stated at the JavaOne conference last May, the most crucial part of this decision was that we realized developers want to preserve compatibility, interoperability, and reliability. We intend to take steps to help make sure Java technology remains compatible, interoperable, and reliable. And we know the Java community feels the same way.

We will continue to do an immense amount of testing with the Java platform. Everything we do will get checked, rechecked, and we will debug rigorously. We expect that people who care about reliability and compatibility with the Java specification will continue to use and enhance Java technology.

One reason Java technology remains so popular is that it’s remarkably successful at spanning a lot of different domains. You can write software for application servers, cell phones, scientific programming, desktop applications, games, embedded software — the list is endless. We’re intend to maintain the support of this broad span of domains.

Sun continues to embrace open source, and I invite you to join us. There are all kinds of contributions you can make. If there’s a bug that you really care about, you can go work out a fix. (That’s one area where developers have made tens of thousands of contributions over the years.) I also invite you to help us add new features. If there’s new functionality that you really want in Java technology, the process is there to help you to add that to the platform as well.

Sincerely,
James Gosling

Links:
Spring Resources and Articles
Struts Tutorials and Articles

The following is a press release from Sun on the final official release of Java SE 6:

This is completely off topic, so if the powers that be want to take it down, I understand. I would like to point readers of this space to Child’s Play. This is an annual drive to buy game systems and games for children’s hospitals around the world, and a very worthy cause this time of year.

Donations are tax deductible (see the FAQ), and 100% of contributions go to the kids (no handling or processing or administrative costs are taken out of donations).

If you are like me, and grew up with old school gaming, you understand what a motivating force it can be to move you into a career in software, and for kids in the hospital whose parents are tapped, this can be a really great thing.

Tor has posted an interesting image:

A bit off topic here, but I saw this on /. today:

“Microsoft has recently announced a new licensing program for the Office 2007 user interface. This page links to the license and an MSDN Channel9 interview about the program (featuring a lawyer). The program ‘allows virtually anyone to obtain a royalty-free license to use the new Office UI in a software product. There’s only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can’t obtain the royalty-free license.’

Which, was followed up with: “What does this mean for OpenOffice?”

I don’t think that matters much, frankly. OO.o isn’t going to use the Office UI APIs directly anyway, for what I would think are obvious reasons. What I am curious about is what qualifies as “compete”? Does ACT! “compete” with Outlook? Does Quicken compete with Excel? Does Grandma’s Recipe Software compete with Access? Does Dreamweaver compete with Word? The reason for the success of Office is the software included is very generic and in a lot of ways is a representative of the primary functions of a computer in general — Data Storage, Calculations, Communications, Visualization/Presentation.

The other thing, as a bit of an aside, that I find funny is Microsoft spinning wildly in the opposite direction of their arguments during the MSIE antitrust trial: Browsers and Email clients are a “fundamental” part of the operating system, but now UI API’s are part of Office and licensed separately. The FAQ’s business about “protecting their investment” is almost comical, since MIcrosoft’s biggest asset is the fact that everyone else’s software is closely coupled to their APIs anyway. The implication that still more coupling would be bad for their business is interesting.

Takai has posted a brief howto on running RoR apps in Glassfish, which Charles and half the free world is linking to. Since I seem to have been in a run of profoundly negative discussions around here lately anyway, allow me to get all Jay Sherman on this one too:

Iiiiit stinks!

Yeah, running Rails apps in JEE servers is cool, and it has the possibility to really open up a new world for Rails, but this seems to be sidestepping one of the things I most wanted to see. Let’s look at the instructions.

1. Copy follow files to /lib
…
2. Edit /domains//conf/domain.xml
…
3. create config file to /domains//conf/rails.xml
…
4. generate rails app to /domains//applications/rails

Seems to me #1 should be optional and the rest of it should be:
“ant war”
“ant sun-appserv-deploy”

WAR packaging is one of the things JEE has going for it in a big way. I know Tim has talked about PHP and Ruby vs Java at the language level, but he and everyone else on the planet will generally concede that the tooling for Java is second to none, and this seems like part of that. However, anyone who remembers what deployment of webapps was like back in the day, or people who still juggle tgz’s of their apps around between servers for PHP or RoR absolutely adore the simplicity of WAR based deployment. Having Grizzly simply redirect requests to Rails isn’t even on the list of things I would have worried about at this point in the game, and leaving me with another directory structure/non-remote based deployment doesn’t seem like progress.

This was the impression I got as a target for JRuby from the get go, and while I understand it might be slower — come on, if we cared a whole lot about slow at this point, would we really be talking about Ruby at all? :P — just having a template Servlet that can send off requests to the JRoR environment seems like a much better option here.

This concludes this Andy Rooney moment.

The GWT team has released GWT 1.2. Details at the GWT blog. This version includes enhanced performance in hosted mode, the new HTTP module which allows for full function HTTP requests, beyond the simple HTTPRequest object. Most importantly, however, is it support Mac OS X 10.4+, which has made my life a whole lot easier.

Danese Cooper (no relation) gives a timeline of Open Source Java

The next Groovy and Grails User Group meeting will be Thursday, October 26th, 2006.

It was just pointed out to me that MathEclipse is now using a GWT front end that is pretty cool.

MathEclipse is really cool, and I must say, a tribute to the quality of math and science APIs available for Java. Built with JScience, Jakarta Commons-Math, JavaView and Javolution on the server, and now with a swanky GWT front end, it really is a very useful site. It makes me think of the Webbish Mathmatica to go along with everyones Webbish Word Processing and Spreadsheets and IM clients we are all starting to adopt.

Today, Chris brings up Runescape as an example of a Java app people actually use. I have to say, RS is pretty cool, and I do know some people that play it fairly regularly — it is great for the non-hardcore-EQ-geek crowd to get their MUD on.

Another one I would like to point out, though is Puzzle Pirates. It is the MMO expression of the casual games phenomena and really quite clever. Not only is is written in Java, but Three Rings has open-sourced their game framework code and even have a pretty clever offering called Game Gardens which is rather like the Second Life of casual games — create your networkable puzzle/board game and they will host it on their servers.

Java.net: Chet Haase blogs on Java on Vista: Yes, it Works.

TheServerSide.com is reporting news that the Spring Framework 2.0 is now final.

Ruby expert and evangelist Pate was also able to interview the esteemed open source JRuby project team, found here on this blog and in this excerpt.

If you are interested in privacy issues, watch “Internet Data Brokers and Pretexting, Day 1″. It promises to be an interesting hearing, and you can watch it via CSPAN on a RealPlayer or an MS stream.

SDTimes publishes this news article: Slimming Down Java: Protocol laid out for deletion of SE features.

TheServerSide.com is highlighting the news that originally appeared on java.sun.com regarding daylight savings time changes starting next year on the second Sunday in March (Mar 11, 2007) instead of what’s been the first Sunday in April.

Update(Sunday 2:02 PM): Charles Nutter has responded and made it clear that his first priority is JRuby 1.0.

Update(1:37PM): Curt Hibbs also blogged this in the Ruby Category

Sun hired two of the JRuby developers. I think this is good news, but I also see a real potential for problems, here’s a quote from Tim Bray’s weblog entry:

“Will they work on JRuby full time? · Yes, but they also have a mandate to think about developer tools. Right now, developers who use dynamic languages like Python and Ruby are poorly served, compared to what Java developers have.”

WRONG, has he ever used RadRails, Eclipse, Komodo? Probably not, at Sun, the only IDE that exists is NetBeans, and I certainly hope tihs doesn’t mean that Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo and going to be forced to work on the NetBeans team. I fear that might be the case. The one common theme I’ve noticed from Sun over the past few years is that they spend an irrational amount of time hyping NetBeans as the answer to every problem. I hope this is good news, and I hope that they didn’t just hire the JRuby guys to be semi-junior developers on the NetBeans team.

If this means that we can look forward to a JRuby that really is efficient and ready for production use, I think this is great news. Maybe then we can continuing using Java for what it is good at (enterprise development), and start benefiting from rails as a lightwight MVC framework without having to deal with an impedance mismatch between the two systems.

It seems like growing interest in dynamic languages will finally move Java syntax toward local functions and closures. Gilad Bracha, Neal Gafter, James Gosling and Peter von der Ahé have written a specification proposal (PDF) for adding closures and local functions to the Java programming language for the Dolphin release.

The specification looks very promising. Here are the two basic examples from the specification that shows how future features could look like:

Local functions

public static void main(String[] args) {
    int plus2(int x) { return x+2; }
    int(int) plus2b = plus2;
    System.out.println(plus2b(2));
}

Closures

int(int) plus2b = (int x) {return x+2; };

As authors state, this specification is only to be used as a starter for the broader discussion, so I hope we’ll hear much more on this topic in the future.
I’m glad that proven dynamic concepts, such as closures, will finally get their place in Java. It’s a pitty that closures will not be available for developers for several more years, but better late than never.

Here are some more links for you to follow:

• Post on the Peter’s blog
• An abbreviated HTML version of the proposal from Neal
• Some thoughts from Gilad

It’s finally here. According to news and blogs, Sun announced that it will open source Java ME platform and some components of the SE platform by the end of the year. Sun plans to open source javac compiler and HotSpot virtual machine, two crucial components of the Java SE platform, by the end of the year. The rest of the SE platform should be open sourced during the next year.

They will use some of the proven OSI licenses, but the particular license and governance model is yet to be settled. You can visit the official site for this project and make your contribution to these discussions in the forum.

Finally, here are some thoughts on open source Java from Geir Magnusson Jr. one of the founders of the Apache Harmony project.

eWeek is running an artcile based on interview with Graham Hamilton, a Sun vice president and fellow in the Sun platform team. In the interview he told that Java SE 7(code-named Dolphin) is going to support Visual Basic.

Sun is not trying to clone any specific version of Visual Basic. It is attempting to support common VB.Net features on the Java platform. “If you’re familiar with VB.Net, this will be a very easy-to-learn language for you,” Hamilton said of the Basic implementation Sun is working on.

So it sounds like Java is going to have the VB kind of features, not the language itself. At this point, I don’t think Sun is attempting the compiler which complies the VB code into byte codes. Anyway this is a good news for Java developers who migrated from VB and for the people like me who never worked with VB, its just another feature(s) . What’s your opinion?

Update : Sun is working on Project Semplice Basic which lets you write code using VB syntax(VB like syntax) and compiles to Java classes that will run on the Java. In other words these features are not going to be part of the Java language, rather its a new scripting language identical to VB. The compiler is in early stages of development, which compiles Semplice Basic code into Java classes. Its not meant for porting existing VB apps over to Java, but you can convert existing VB6 applications into Semplice Basic applications with some limitations by using Netbeans tools that Sun is currently working on.

This new VB type scripting language is inspired by VB, so it may attract the VB developers. But by this time I suspect most of the VB developers are attracted by C# as both can be used in mix in .Net framework. But the core advantage of the Semplice Basic is, once you compile the code into Java classes you get the benefit of “compile once, run everywhere”.

Google seems to know how to make a splash at the trade shows, don’t they?

The big OSCON announcement is code.google.com/hosting, their foray into the SourceForge world. Given the the bubbling animus with SF.net, this might represent a very opportune moment.

The hosting service is really quite lean: Subversion and Google’s own bugtracker, as well as a tie-in with groups.google.com for mailing/discussion lists. Really, though, I think this “less is more” approach is really a good thing. TestNG is an early adopter — not surprising given Cedric’s employment. While the lack of free-form web hosting could be a small issue, it is hard not to note that with just your svn server, Google Pages and Blogger, you could put together a pretty reasonable web presence for you project, though it would certainly be less coherent than Java.net or SF.net’s project page.

InfoWorld has a discussion with Brewin about open sourcing Java in stages. While it is not a new idea, open sourcing SWING out of the gate would not be bad. I imagine that out of things in the JRE stack, there is less baggage there than in the rest JVM. Plus that would move a lot of things like GCJ and Harmony along at a much much faster clip. I did find this a bit annoying:

Some components of Java that could be open-sourced in an incremental fashion include the Java virtual machine, the runtime environment, the Web services stack and the Swing GUI components. There has been some discussion about releasing the virtual machine, Swing, and the runtime at the same time, Brewin said.

Now, pretty much the whole Web Services stack is already available with Glassfish. There are only a few components left that are not open source, and most of those are just API specs. However having a list of licenses like this is a bit offputting.

The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2006 takes place from July 24-28, in Portland, OR. As usual, it includes a Java conference session track.

What do you think of this on Windows DevCenter: The Beginning of the End for Java Starts(Date.Time.NOW());?

InfoQ.com reports: JRuby 0.9 Released; Runs WEBrick, Rails, RubyGems, and Rake.

Firestar Software claims that Hibernate infringes on US Patent 6,101,502. Read more about this case at InfoQ.com. Could this could be the start of a series of rulings that could have a chilling effect on open source? I certainly hope not…. but, it is certainly possible….

Please use the comment thread to list all the known examples of prior art that come to mind.

InfoQ.com reports: Eclipse Callisto debuts with the release of 10 Eclipse toolsets simultaneously.

From JavaWorld.com, I saw this “Sun says open-source Java possible in ‘months’: Logistics such as maintaining compatibility still being worked out.”

Stumbled upon javaref.com a really interesting use of AJAX to try to improve upon Javadoc. Thanks to Karthik Abram for pointing this out to me.

Features I’d like to see:

1. …a way for component authors to publish and update versions of Javadoc, by supplying SVN URLs.

2. …a mechanism for viewing a specific version of a component’s Javadoc.

3. …a Maven 2 plug-in that would let someone create Javadoc in the same style with lnks to the javaref.com site.

I think that like the centralized Maven repository, we need more efforts to create hosted reference content for Java. A site like Javaref.com is a good start towards an indispensible everyday tool. Keep it coming.

The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2006 takes place from July 24-28, in Portland, OR. As usual, it includes a Java conference session track.

From InfoQ.com, the first Spring 2.0 Release Candidate is out.

From InfoQ.com: The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) specification 0.8 has been announced.

Sun has just launched a new Ajax and Javascript website for Java Developers

http://developers.sun.com/ajax/

Paul

This is a recap of sessions attended at JBoss World 2006, held recently:

This is a conference report of JBoss World 2006, held in Las Vegas, NV. This one focuses on the news highlights from the show. More coverage next week.

Here is the definitive guide/reference documentation to the Spring Framework, version 2.0 M5 release.

InfoQ.com, Floyd Marinescu’s new venture, has launched. This new enterprise software development community looks to address today’s heterogeneous enterprise developer/reader who may need Agile, SOA, Java, Ruby (on Rails), and/or .NET.

In recent news as reported by the SF Chronicle:

• “Sun plans to cut nearly 5,000 jobs; Santa Clara tech giant also expects to consolidate facilities and restrict poison pills in an effort to woo shareholders”
• “Speculation about potential sale of Sun: CEO says ‘no hidden message’ in job cuts; analysts skeptical”

So, is Sun Microsystems, Inc. (SUNW) priming itself for sale?

If yes, who will acquire/merge with Sun, and what will they gain?

JBoss’ Marc Fleury and Spring’s Rod Johnson have been interviewed in the following articles below:

The SpringOne 2006 conference is soon, from June 15 to June 16 at the Metropolis in Antwerp, Belgium.

Despite the news that Red Hat has acquired JBoss, the annual JBoss World conference will still be held from June 12 - 15 at the Rio Hotel and Casino, in Las Vegas NV.

This will be my first time attending JBoss World, and am looking forward to it. There’s so much to take-in. If you are planning to attend or want to know some of what JBoss World will be offering, check out the agenda of sessions and keynotes page.

JBoss is one of the leading companies out there that has revolutionized professional open source, in my opinion. Anyway, I hope to see you there.

More news and photos from JavaOne

Photos and news from the first day of JavaOne.

If, like me, you have been under a particularly large rock of hiding as far as what is going on in the Interwebs, you might have missed the Google Blog entry announcing the Google Web Toolkit.

I just saw the presentation at Java One, and I am here to tell you, this isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is the greatest thing since CHEESE.