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.
