Download NetBeans IDE 5.0 Beta, the release that introduces comprehensive support for developing IDE modules and rich client applications based on the NetBeans Platform, the new intuitive GUI builder Matisse, new and redesigned CVS support, Weblogic9 and JBoss 4 support, and a lot of editor enhancements.
Read the full article here
Palm Has Designs on Microsoft Mobile
In a major shift in the PDA industry, Palm (Quote, Chart) is expected to announce today that its Treo 700 smartphone will be powered by the Microsoft (Quote, Chart) mobile operating system.
Palm President and CEO Ed Colligan, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates and Verizon Wireless CEO Denny Strigl are expected to make it official during a noon news conference at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
Read the full article here
JDocs.com is a very nice collection of (at the moment of writing) 132 searchable API’s. The javadocs of the most popular opensource projects have been indexed and to provide a bit of added value users can leave notes at every javadoc entry (a class, a method etc) found in the JDocs database. Very handy when you’re looking for documentation but haven’t downloaded the javadocs and added them to your favourite IDE’s javadoc viewer. A bit of a pitty nobody seems to leave notes, at least I could not find a note at all, so the community aspect of this site is a bit low. But, the search is handy and even very powerful (read their faq to find out how to query for a specific api or how to narrow a search to methods only).
Another great site is JExamples.com. This site does not provide javadocs but example code. In other words the JDocs notes can be found on this site. Simply search for a class or a method name and you get a list of example code. Works very neat and no community is needed to update the examples because JExamples uses the brilliant mechanism of code scanning: They simply scan and index the source code of several popular open source projects to fill their example database. And a very nice side effect of this is you get some insight in the quality of open source projects while doing your own stuff.
If only the two sites could merge! Won’t happen in the short-time but just play around with the two to find out how to leverage your javadoc browsing techniques.
By the way, I’ve added both sites to the ‘Links’ section of this weblog.
A few days ago JbBoss announced the beta release of a new EJB3 and JSF based application framework: SEAM. Yet another framework? Should I invest some time or just ignore it like all the others that came along the last one and a half year?
An interesting post on the groupblog of Hibernate opened my eyes and answered my question. Gavin King is behind this framework (One of the smartest moves of JBoss founder Marc Fleury was to contract the hibernate guy) and when Gavin is behind something, at least you’ll be able to find some interesting writings of his hand.
So I deceided to give it a try, followed the tutorial and found myself in regular JBoss stacktraces within minutes. Failure after failure. Somehow JBoss and I do go hand in hand conceptually but as soon as we’re getting pragmatic I’m lost in evergrowing error logs. Meanwhile I was reading all available documents I found about SEAM and fortunate, Gavin found himself some time to write some decent material (Especially chapter 2 of the reference guide is worth some investigation). Although my first experiments failed completely, Gavin convinced me SEAM might bring back EJB to the development floor.
Why? Simply simplicity! Old style EJB is both overwhelming complex and not realy developer friendly in usage. Well the new EJB3 spec is still overwhelming complex but most of this complexity is well hidden for the regular developer. And SEAM brings just that extra facade on top to hide it completely. Another reason: Seamless integration with JSF. With SEAM, using JSF feels like a breeze.
So will SEAM replace Spring like Spring replaced the usage of old dirty EJB’s?? No idea but I’m sure someone is going to write a book ‘Look mam, J2EE *with* EJB’s’ and what will follow is whatever follows the hype. Untill then I’ll try to get something useful out of SEAM and come back to this blog later on.
P.S. Complete offtopic but the only reason I started investigating this framework is because SEAM is just one of my favorite alternative indiestyle pop bands of the ’90s.
To close the day, one more blog (no content without writing). Today, Magnolia Organization LLC announced a beta version of their JSR-170 (Content Repository for JavaTM technology API) compliant content management system that has been extended by Apple’s Quick time technology in order to provide tooling around the publishing of Digital Media: MagnoliaQT. Read the press announcement for more buzz.
After downloading and installing their tomcat bundled server I started playing with the thing. Nice but not very special. Yep, you can edit movies through a webinterface and yep, haven’t seen that before so yep, it might be useful for non-professional video-editors to tweak movies that are published on a webpage managed by magnolia. But what really attracted me were the installation instructions! I had to install Quicktime 7 and after that, copy a zip file to the jre’s extension directory. Hey! Quicktime is coming with a Java API. And indeed, Apple does provide an API to manipulate quicktime movies (altough through JNI so only available for MAC and Windows 
).
So forget Magnolia (unless you’re into content management and want just another tool to do your stuff), grep the QuickTime API, read all about it on the quicktime for java site and start having fun!
Eric v/d Laan, responsible for the JCC, has asked to come up with some topics for the upcoming NLJUD. Why not post a blog with some ideas? So here are my five cents:
- AJAX, not the football club from Amsterdam, but the technology to create rich internet applications using javascript, XML and DHTML, seems to have a lot of momentum these days. Frameworks around this technology are popping up all over the blog-o-sphere.
- OpenLaszlo seems to be a very nice alternative for creating rich internet applications. This technolgy combines regular java development with a flash front-end. In other words, a lot of Bling we regularly do not see in the world of Java.
- JBoss, known for its opensource application server, has been transferred from a small scale project to a full enterprise stack that is capable of beating the *#%$ out of the well known vendors who ask to much money for value. It’s more than just a Tomcat or Jetty bundled EJB container. It has BPM, it has Portal and even, just like its commercial counterparts, a world conference.
- Java is, besides a language, also a platform. And the java platform does not restrict you to its original language. As long as you talk the same bytecode, you can enjoy the fruits of the java virtual machine. There are a lot of languages, some very popular (groovy) and some very obscure (aardappel) that can be compiled into java bytecode. As a java developer/technical designer/architect you always ask questions about patterns, mechanisms and frameworks. But why not add the java language itself to list of questions to answer? I can probably come up with a couple of more topics, but I’ll leave that for a next blog.
The never ending religious war about frameworks, which to use for what purpose in combination with yet another framework, will probably really never end. Nothing wrong with that, good discussion about the technical fundamentals of your next j2ee project can better be fought out before you start coding. But instead of fighting, it might be wise to look around and see what others have been done. Matt Raible, author of Spring Live, has spend his time writing a kind of uberframework which leaves questions like ‘to Struts or not to struts?’ and ‘to Hibernate or not to hibernate’ up to you. Using Appfuse you’re up and running within minutes while you still can fight your lovely war. And when you think Appfuse is a bit to heavy for your duties, take a look at its little brother Equinox.
