ctpjava

Java People Spotlight: Sylvain Berthouzoz

Balz — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:33:00 -0800

The "People Spotlight" series is catching up after a rather long break...
Sylvain has joined Cambridge Technology Partners in January 2006 and is an important know-how carrier in the Java Competence Group since then.
So let's check out the answers by Sylvain then!

Java Competence Role:
Developer [aka Java Debugger or Mr. jBPM]
My Master Kung-Fu Skills:
I can hit everyone with a single process in jBPM
I'd be excited to get my hands dirty on:
JPA2: see how they included the Criteria query...
...and to see what Ezio Audirore da Firenze will do.

Q&A
Q: Hi Sylvain, how would your message look like if you would have to tell it via Twitter what you are currently doing?
A: Sitting in the train in hoping that the locomotive don’t break this time.

Q: What was the greatest piece of code you have ever written so far?
A: Testing if all the elements in a list are different from each other:

List< Long > list = Arrays.asList(longs);
Set< Long > set = new HashSet< Long >(list);
return (longs.length == set.size());

Q: What is the best quote you have ever heard about programming?
A: “koffienodig”

Q: What is the best quote you have heard from our managers?
A: "There is not enough boxes here."

Q: What is the most cutting-edge technology or framework you actually used on projects?
A: JBoss Seam

Q: What is your favorite podcast?
A: The gameblog podcast every week. And the Java Posse from time to time.

Q: Which Java book can you recommend and for what reason?
A: Seam in Action, because it is a great book to start with seam and you’ll also learn how to play golf.

Devoxx Day 3: Conference Day 2

geertjan — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:20:44 -0800

DEVOXX Day 3 - JUG BOF with James Gosling - MP3 recording

sunahouston — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:41:30 -0800

Closures doch in Java 7?

Autor: cf — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:30:00 -0800

Devoxx Day 3: Conference Day 1

geertjan — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:25:29 -0800

Google Earth for iPhone version 2.0

Scott Knaster — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:12:00 -0800

By Scott Knaster, Google Mac Team

There's a nice update to Google Earth for iPhone and iPod touch available now. You can read all about it in the Google Mobile Blog and you can grab the update in the App Store.

Devoxx 09: JDK 7, Java EE 6, JavaFX, Java Store and more

dannycoward — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:41:08 -0800

The Janitor is here at Devoxx, just down the road from Neelie Kroes !

Her influence was on show at the Oracle keynote, which began with a legal disclaimer saying something about forward looking statements about products not being indicative of anything. One has to be sympathetic as the commission's wheels grind on, but it was a bit like hearing that the tenor has a sore throat before the opera starts. Happily, Roberto and Ludo were more melodious, announcing the imminent December 10th release date for Java EE 6 and Glassfish v3 and a demo of deploy-on-save in Eclipse (it could equally have been in NetBeans), re-deploying deployment descriptor-free servlets and EJBs to Glassfish v3 in about a second. Adobe gave an engaging keynote, and although the Janitor didn't love the smell of all the multistep automagical conversion to massage an app developed in the flash tool into something allowed to run on the iPhone (pretty sure Apple doesn't either), the image-to-widget tool in Adobe Catalyst demoed very well. Something to think about for the JavaFX Production Suite.

Next up the Janitor sat in on Mark Reinhold's session on JDK 7. There was a progress update on the projects you already know about, some of the Project Coin code snippets provoking murmurs of appreciation and the odd ripple of applause, as did Mark's proposal to add simplified closures proposal to JDK 7. Less good news on the schedule, but as Roberto is finding for Java EE 6, sometimes the wait can be satisfying.

After lunch, the voices became hushed and the big room where James was about to speak suddenly filled up. James talked about the JavaStore, which is in live beta, as well as a new set of cash registers. While you can still only purchase apps from the store in the US (until the legal team works through the retailing laws of every other country), you can submit apps today if you are in US, UK, Australia, India, China, Sweden, Brazil or Russia, with Belgium, Canada, Israel, Germany, Italy, France, Spain coming soon.

Richard and Jasper and Tor's session on JavaFX focused on the upcoming features in JavaFX 1.3 and on the authoring tool. Covering tasks, the new UI controls (like tree, menus, popups, tooltips, scrollviews etc), new region architecture for expanded CSS styling and super fast rendering, it looks like a tasty package in the works, and the authoring tool (last seen at JavaOne) was looking better than ever. Can't wait to get it out the door.

And for a while today #devoxx was trending on Twitter. Right now beer and frites are trending high. More tomorrow.

Devoxx Day 3

Erik-Jan de Wit — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:36:00 -0800

The network at devoxx is letting me down a bit, so this post is a little bit late. This day is the first conference day, the university days are over. That means that there are a lot more people here than yesterday. Oracle (Steven Harris) had a long keynote talk in which interesting upcoming details have been presented with what is coming with future WebLogic releases. What they demo-ed was kinda cool. A modular WebLogic based on OSGi (often referred as mSA aka Micro Service Architecture) that you can assemble using a GUI tool. That you can also run in a virtual machine without adding an OS.

Next keynote was presented by Roberto Chinnici from SUN, he is the spec lead for JavaEE6 and gave a quick overview what is new in EE6. As I already had a 2 hours talk about that topic during the university days there was nothing new to me but all in all it well covered all aspects for people hearing about it for the first time. One of the cool things in Java EE 6 I like most is the modularity of the web.xml being part of the Servlet 3.0 spec. Using 3rd party frameworks only requires to add a library, instead of also adding a servlet or servlet filter in your web.xml.

Also announced in the keynote is that everything presented at Devoxx is going to be released on parleys.com (currently upgraded to version 3!! ). That is great as all the presentations I've visited can be watched again including comments by other visitors etc.

During the break I ran into a lot of people I know from previous companies I worked for. It is always nice to hear what they are doing now and what other sessions they have seen and to tell them if they ever want to work for a nice company in Switzerland, I would know a good one :D

Now an update on where JDK7 is right now by Mark Reinhold. Great talk about what is important and where the focus for making Java move forward is going to lay. Talking about Project Jigsaw this is the first time ever I have seen some implementation how this could/would work. The shame is that there is no JSR for Java SE 7 so all development will not progress as long as this is the case. What was very surprising is that Mark wants Closures in, but in a very simple form, but that is great news for a lot of things Closures will make my code look nice.

In the keynote Apple gets a lot of criticism about being slow accepting apps in the store and the kind of feedback Apple provides when apps are disallowed.

Lunch break: Bumping into a lot of people again that I know; Talking to someone from JBoss about their community, now I have a nice CD to give away.

James Gosling is talking about the Java Store and I hope he is going to tell us that we here in Europe can use it now. So he is talking that we should provide him with feedback on the stuff they made, but as of now the Java Store is still not accessible for us. That makes his whole talk a bit pointless. Yes, I would love to have a platform I can sell my hobby projects with, but no need to tell me about how great it is when I still can't use it. There are a couple of countries being added in the near future, but Switzerland is not one of them.

Cameron Purdy tells us how we should change our programming paradigms if we want to use multi core, multi node programs. So the answer to all our problems is to use partitioning? I'm a bit puzzled how I could use this. I think this presentation could have been a bit more concrete. He presents all theoretical ways to do parallel distributed computing. At the very end I know why everything was so vague, if you want an implementation of all of what he talked about than you'll need to buy Coherence a bit of an anticlimax.

Doug Tidwell will now tell us a little about how to extract a way from implementations of cloud computing. He is from IBM an I hope this is not another product plug and it turns out that it's not, he is funny and a good speaker. What he is trying to tell us is that we need a standard for doing cloud computing, an API to talk to different clouds. The problem is that the services that clouds provide now are so diverse that one API to rule them all makes no sense. That is a bit what I miss, nobody is talking about how using a cloud will impact my design.

Then one of the creators of the Android platform Romain Guy will talk about animation. Romain Guy is really famous in the Java world so his presentation will be good. It's about animating GUI using the cartoon rules. There are some basic cartoon rules for doing animation he shows us how they apply to GUI animation.

Q&A with Gavin King on the Impact of JSR-299 and Weld 1.0 on Java EE and JBoss

Charles Humble — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:00:00 -0800

Comic for November 18, 2009

(author unknown) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Oracle Releases New Version of JDeveloper

shay shmeltzer@nospam.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:41:22 -0800

Devoxx Day 3

Erik-Jan de Wit — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:36:00 -0800

The Dark Ages

Oliver Widder — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:40:15 -0800

Devoxx Day 2: University Day 2

geertjan — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:38:48 -0800

Explore images with Google Image Swirl, now in Labs

A Googler — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:17:00 -0800

Back in 2001, to give people a new, quicker way to find images, we launched Image Search. When you do a search for [eiffel tower] you'll find an array of images of the tower in the daytime, in black and white, at sunset and more. With Similar Images, which recently graduated from Google Labs, you can click "Find similar images" to narrow your search to, say, pictures of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night. Today, we've launched an experimental feature in Labs called Google Image Swirl, which builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface.

For example, if you search on Image Swirl for [washington], you'll see 12 image thumbnails including President Washington, the Washington Monument, a map of Washington D.C. and the Capitol Building:

Once you find the group of images you're interested in, you can click on the thumbnail and a cluster of images will "swirl" into view. For example, here's what you'll see if you click the image of the Washington Monument:

You can then further explore additional sub-groups within any cluster. The interface may look familiar to those of you who have tried Google's Wonder Wheel available in the Search Options panel, which enables you to explore related search queries.

Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren't just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of images.

Image Swirl currently works for more than 200,000 queries and we plan to include more queries in the future. Available queries will auto-complete as you start to type in the search box, similar to Google Suggest.

You can try out Google Image Swirl in Google Labs today. The feature is experimental and the underlying technology is a work in progress, so please share your feedback and let us know how we can make it more useful.

Posted by Aparna Chennapragada, Product Manager, and Yushi Jing, Google Research

Devoxx day 2

Erik-Jan de Wit — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:28:00 -0800

Today it is day two at Devoxx. What I didn't put in my last post is the BOF I went to last night. BOFs here are great - there are only a couple of people in the room, it is really different than at JavaOne where there are a lot more people. So yesterday I had a BOF with the JSF spec leads (well the 3 key persons: Dan Allen, Peter Muir and Andy Schwartz) and we could in a very relaxed setting ask them some questions about the JSF 2 spec. So we could find out how and why they made some decisions. The question I asked them: "Why is JSF 2 not more focused on components so that I can mix and match components of 3rd party providers?". The answer was that they are looking into that and that a lot of problems one has with that right now is how resources are loaded: all 3rd parties made something on their own. So now all the AJAX stuff needs to be gathered and then they will look into that. Good answer, I'm glad that they are aware of what lives in the community.

My first session of today is a session about JEE6. They are talking about and demo-ing everything that is new in the spec. Antonio Goncalves a French Java Rockstar has a lot of humor and a nice presenting style. JSF 2.0 is kind of confusing, because it could run on servlet 2.5 but also on 3.0 but then less needs to be configured. Yesterday the expert group also talked about this that they communicate better what is now the "preferred" way of doing things. This is difficult when you make a spec. You can't remove things, because it needs to be backwards compatible. This is also the case for EJB3 - there is now a EJB3.1 lite edition where all old stuff is removed. According to them there are some containers being built that only support this spec.

JavaFX is what my next talk is about. This is hyped a lot by Sun and now with the takeover by Oracle also Oracle will continue with JavaFX. The last changes around JavaFX involved a lot of tooling at this year's JavaOne. Tor Norbye presented a tool for designers that they can layout an application for mobile and desktop. Stephen Chin also a Java Champion starts with a nice little JavaFX Puzzle. For his demo he is using twitter but that was a bit of a poor choice, because with the Devoxx network, reaching twitter proves a bit of a challenge. So most of the time we are waiting for some internet resource to load. So I'm changing again, I already know the basics about JavaFX and I was hoping this would be a little bit more deep dive. Emmanuel Bernard is also a guru of the Hibernate team and here at Devoxx he is talking about integrating Lucene into Hibernate as an alternative query API. So the bridge they have built for Hibernate is really cool. In the past we did this on ourselves, have a Lucene index to search on and then load entities when needed. But with the Hibernate search query API we can do it "automatically".

During the lunch I talked to Ceki Gülcü who is also from Switzerland and giving a talk about logback, the continuation of the dead log4j project, tomorrow. He would make a nice speaker on the JUGS.

Now it's time for tools in action again, first up is Gradle. Hans Dockter is the project lead and he gives an introduction about Gradle. Gradle is a build tool that uses CoC and has a DSL to configure your build. Yet another build tool, but this time is using groovy DSL to make a build file. I also blogged that Maven3 is also going to provide this. I don't know what Hans is trying to explain to me or how this is better than Maven3, but he is a bit chaotic. After a while there is a new speaker that is even worse. I think there are some good options in Gradle, but these are not the guys to explain it to me. One thing I did get from the presentation that you could fork your test over more threads, which is cool.

Next up is Scala Actors that will be a good one. You all know of course that Scala is a language on top of the JVM and developed in Switzerland. Because computers are getting more and more processors, functional languages like Scala could be very useful for this, because they are stateless and you don't need to think about how to distribute the work. After a little history lesson, Frank Sommers gave us a concrete example of how Actors can be used in Scala. It's great, a lot of stuff you get for free. Of course the concept of Actors is not bound to Scala, but there are things that Scala offers that make Scala a good language to use with Actors. For instance types in Scala are immutable by default. Great talk and when I'm going to type synchronized in code again I must remember this talk.

That is it for day number 2, it was a fun packed day and I look forward to tomorrow. One more thing I noticed today if you want to present on Devoxx you'll need a Mac and IntelliJ IDEA.

Devoxx day 2

Erik-Jan de Wit — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:28:00 -0800

An update to Google Earth for the iPhone

effie — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:18:00 -0800

Cross-posted from the Google Lat Long blog

Just over one year ago, we unveiled Google Earth for the iPhone and iPod touch. Google Earth quickly became one of the most popular applications in the App Store, and after only six months, was the second most-downloaded free application overall. A big thank-you to the over 220,000 users have taken the time to write a review!

Today, we're proud to announce version 2.0 of Google Earth for iPhone. We've added some exciting new features, including the ability to view maps that you create on your desktop computer right from your iPhone, explore the app in new languages, and improved icon selection and performance.

View your maps wherever you go
Have you ever wanted to view a custom map with Google Earth on your iPhone? Well, now you can. By logging in directly to your Google Maps account, you can view the same maps that you or others have created, using the My Maps interface. Maybe you're on a trip and want to see where Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet, most likes to travel. Or perhaps you're walking around looking for a restaurant and you want to see where world-famous chef Ferran Adrià likes to eat. All you have to do is click "Save to My Maps", open Earth on the iPhone, log in with the same account information, and voilà, you have your same collection of My Maps right in your pocket.

It's fun to create and view your own maps as well. Here's an example of a map that I created that shows the two attempts my friends and I made to summit Mount Ritter in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. As you can see, we didn't quite make it (the red line is the intended route, and the blue and green lines are our 2008 and 2009 attempts, respectively). Next year we'll get it for sure! I created this map by using the desktop version of Google Earth to read the tracks directly out of my GPS device, saving the resulting tracks as a KML file, and then importing into My Maps in Google Maps. You can learn more about My Maps here.

Browse businesses, photos, and places more easily

Browsing the world from the palm of your hand can be a thrilling experience, and viewing photos, Wikipedia articles, and place information is a great way to discover new parts of the globe. With the latest version of Google Earth for iPhone, we've made this even easier. Now, when you touch an icon, a small glow appears under your finger to let you know which icon you have picked. If your finger touches more than one icon, you'll be taken to a list of all icons, so you can select the one you are interested in.

New languages

We've also included new languages in this release, bringing the total to 31 languages from the original 18. The complete list of languages is: English (U.S), English (UK), French (France), German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Thai, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Malaysian, Romanian, Slovak, and Croatian.

We hope you enjoy our latest release. Please note that the app will be rolling out around the world over the next twenty-four hours - if you don't see it immediately, be sure to check back soon. You can download Google Earth for iPhone here.

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager, Google Earth

How to start learning Java EE 6

Gavin King — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:45:39 -0800

Devoxx day 1

Erik-Jan de Wit — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:38:00 -0800

Devoxx is probably the largest European Java Conference. As it always takes place at the end of the year and approximately half a year later than big brother JavaOne, it's a good time to get the stuff again that has been announced at JavaOne and to see how the news and forecasts have been adopted in the meanwhile.

When I think of Belgium I think of beer, bars, chocolate, hospitality and cosiness. But when I arrived and saw my hotel all these feelings went away. The location of my hotel and the conference is in an industrial part of Antwerp. There is nothing here but harbours and sea containers. So there is absolutely nothing distracting me from attending the sessions :D

So my first session of the day was about jBpm 4 and that was very impressive, I've used jBpm in the past together with Seam. I wish that I could use it with my last project. They changed a lot the API making deployment and testing easier. The console is now rewritten in GWT, and there is a web app that business people can use to create and modify processes. Also creating screens for tasks now works!

So with the new version they really focused on working together and fixing the issues with regards to configuration. So I'm definitely trying that out.

Strange thing about this fist day that I haven't seen any companies yet. Maybe they will only setup their stuff when The conference days are starting. OK update on this: they are building up their stuff now.

Another important note... I already have my 2 t-shirts and one of them is a limited edition!

Next up is Architecting Robust Applications for Amazon EC2 , let's see what they have there.

This one was not interesting at all, if I want to know how the webservices of amazon work I'll look it up myself. So I switched to a talk from a SUN guy who is clicking stuff together in Netbeans. What he is talking about is interesting. But his demos don't go further than the wizard screens of Netbeans and he is looking all the time to his webpage.

So after the break it was "Tools in Action" time, these sessions are shorter and focused on tools, hence the name. The first one I saw was about Introducing Scimpi a framework rather than an actual tool, build on Naked Objects, but the concept is a bit old and Scimpi is sort of redefining it. I've used metawidget for similar things but I think this gives me more control over the output than Scimpi and also has more powerful components that I can use.

So now the last one of day one NoSQL with Cassandra and Hadoop. That was a nice introduction and they presented a nice usecase when to throw out the relational database. But I want to know more about it. Let's see if I can find some more talks.

All in all it was a very interesting day and let's see what tomorrow brings.

Devoxx day 1

Erik-Jan de Wit — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:38:00 -0800

So with the new version they really focused on working together and fixing the issues with regards to configuration. So I'm definitely trying that out.

Another important note... I already have my 2 t-shirts and one of them is a limited edition!

Andy Schwartz's JSF2 summary

Gavin King — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:04:15 -0800

Alpha von Maven 3 erschienen

Autor: cf — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:00:00 -0800

Maven 3.0-alpha-3 Released!

jason — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:40:21 -0800

For those you following along with our story on improving Maven, you’ll happy to know that we have made a significant step today with the release of Maven 3.0-alpha-3. Though we are marking this as an alpha release, we are largely feature complete for Maven 3.0 and consider this to be the best version of Maven that has ever existed.

Our primary goals with Maven 3.0 are:

1) Provide a drop-in replacement for Maven 2.x. You should not have to change your POMs, or rewrite plugins. Your projects should just work.

2) Provide a more reliable, stable and performant Maven. We have tried to make Maven 3.x faster and we’ve succeeded for any of the projects that we’ve tested. We have a performance framework in place to make sure we don’t regress. We are measuring network I/O, disk I/O, CPU utilization and memory usage. We also have a massive number of integration tests to make sure the behaviour remains consistent and compatible as we progress. We simply aren’t going to go backward at this point.

3) Synchronize the M2Eclipse releases with Maven 3.x so that we can immediately push fixes from Maven 3.x into M2Eclipse. For a long time M2Eclipse was out of sync with Maven trunk and created a great number of problems. We are now completely in sync and within hours of making changes in Maven 3.x they make it into the CI builds of M2Eclipse.

4) Provide an easy way to embed Maven as a library. I think we’ve really proven this with M2Eclipse but Sonatype has two other efforts taking place. The first is to embed Maven 3.0 into Hudson and the second is to embed Maven 3.0 into Nexus. The APIs that we are creating not being final is largely why we are still releasing alphas. From a CLI perspective we’re pretty much done, from an embedding perspective we still have some work to do.

4) Provide a solid base for extensions and reuse. There are three efforts going on here which are pushing the boundaries of Maven 3.x:

Tycho: Which is Sonatype’s toolchain for building OSGi bundles and Eclipse plugins & RCP applications. The changes that we made in Maven 3.x to accommodate the embedding of an OSGi runtime (in our case Equinox) was non-trivial. We’ve been working on this for over a year and we have what we believe to be the best hybridization of Maven and OSGi technologies. Maven was stretched, and pushed and pulled to get all of this to work. I believe the current adoption of Tycho by the Tigerstripe at Eclipse.org is a sign of things to come. Users want to build OSGi bundles and Eclipse plugins using real OSGi technologies with Maven and we have delivered.
Polyglot Maven: This is our attempt to create a great degree of flexibility in the core of Maven 3.x. We provide the ability to easily pull POM information from any data source and allow DSLs access to core functionality in Maven to create new tools using Maven 3.x. The development of Polyglot Maven has sparked a lot of interest and we hope to make public release in the next month.
Maven Shell: An attempt to provide an embedded form of Maven for typical CLI users. We are planning to
- Provide more intelligent caching implementation to make builds faster. Already we are seeing 100-200% speed increases over using the standard CLI (which itself is already faster then Maven 2.x).
- Integrate a powerful form of the Make-like reactor that is built into Maven 3.x to make working in the shell extremely efficient.
- Integrate an advanced form of Archetype so that we can provide a power scaffolding framework for general application development.

We are not forgetting about documentation either. All the work that has been done in Maven 3.x is currently being documented in Maven: The Definitive Guide and we will be complete when Maven 3.0 goes GA. We also have some pretty cool site generation tools that I am using to create a new Maven 3.0 site which is also be ready in time for the final release.

For now, Benjamin and I are preparing for any feedback from users who want to try the alpha-3 release and we’ll be standing by to apply patches and make fixes for anything that users find — just like we have for the last year. This is part of Sonatype’s ongoing committment to help sustain the Maven ecosystem to provide the support, tooling, and documentation to help get new users and developers involved.

You can download the Maven 3.0-alpha-3 here:

Enjoy!

Google Works on a Protocol Intended to Replace HTTP

Abel Avram — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:41:00 -0800

Weld 1.0.0 :-)

Pete Muir — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:52:24 -0800

Weld 1.0.0 :-)

Pete Muir — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:52:24 -0800

Google Go: eine eigene Programmiersprache muss es sein

Autor: fs — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:55:00 -0800

Geeks In The Cloud

Oliver Widder — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:30:37 -0800

Java Posse #286 - Newscast for Nov 5th 2009

javaposse@gmail.com (Tor Norbye, Carl Quinn, Joe Nuxoll, Dick Wall) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:32:00 -0800

Updated IDE Connector for Eclipse - Faster JIRA operations, Crucible pre-commit reviews and more!

(author unknown) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:32:15 -0800

Making external resources configurable without lots of XML

Gavin King — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:04:24 -0800

Hibernate 3.5.0-Beta-2 release

Steve Ebersole — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:41:29 -0800

ICEfaces 2.0 Alpha now available

Ted Goddard — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:41:41 -0700

Portal Update November 2009 and Java Buzz

Balz — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:33:00 -0700

After a busy summer I think it is absolutely necessary to summarize the latest updates in the Java Portal space.

From the commercial side, major players are:

Oracle WebLogic Portal:
The current release is still WLP 10g3 but soon we expect the first 11g release with codename "Sunshine".
Major improvements are
- JSR-286 compliance (Portlet 2.0)
- WSRP 2.0 support (Event based coordination, IPC for remote portlets, resource serving)
- Full interoperability with WebCenter in both directions
- Improved Ajax support
- VCR Direct SPI Support for UCM
- Even more REST APIs to access portal informations
- New REST API to access Unified User Profile data
- First support of the new Content Management Standard driven by Oasis: CMIS
- Apache Beehive still supported but not enhanced
- Replacement of Autonomy Search Engine by SES

The REST API Architecture in WLP 11g:
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g R1:
WebCenter Suite includes the formerly known product AquaLogic Interaction by BEA, now called WCI, WebCenter Interaction. Download it here.
Adobe: Adobe? Yes... Since the new release of Adobe ColdFusion 9, there is a new portal player to be considered when it comes to interoperability based on JSR-168/286 portlets. ColdFusion 9 is now fully compliant with the Portlet Containers from the Java world.
IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1: no updates.

Open Source portals that have the most promising potential at the moment are:

JBoss Portal and eXo Portal have been merged!

This latest interesting announcement has been made official on Sep 3rd at the JBoss World in Chicago. eXo has fully committed its entire open source portal stack to Red Hat’s newly introduced GateIn portal project extending it with cutting-edge collaboration features as well as document and content management features.
Liferay Portal 5.2: no major updates since last post.
SUN continues to offer the Web Space Server based on the Liferay Portal source code. No major updates besides a brand new white paper.

JBoss Portal 2.7.2:
- Since June 2009, JBoss fully focused on the new project GateIn
eXo Portal 2.5.1: no updates besides GateIn announcements
Jetspeed 2.2.0: After quite a long time without updates a new version has been released (summer 2009) that is fully JSR-286 compliant! The new version comes along with quite a bunch of updated documentation pages... So it would be worth to have a look at it again. Download it here.

Besides the Portal related activities, let's have a look on Java related quick news:

Java EE 6: The JSR-316 has reached Proposed Final Draft. The hot discussions between JSR-299 vs JSR-330 have finally found a common resolution and both will be part of EE6 where JSR-299 will be based on the dependency injection specification defined by JSR-330.
Oracle has still not acquired SUN : The OK from EMEA is still pending.
JSF 2.0 : Mojarra 2.0, the production-quality, reference implementation for JSF 2.0 is out! This will of course be part of GlassFish v3 (final release planned for Dec-12th 2009) but you can grab the bits right now for your first dirty hands-on experience!
IntelliJ IDEA is now available in two editions. The Community Edition (JavaSE-focused) is now Available under OpenSource at JetBrains.org
Geek Food: I discovered mainly two new things that I found diserve a Geek award:
- Prezi ! Forget PPT and Google Presentations... Old school!
- Play ! Clean alternative to develop JavaEE apps based on RESTful architectures.
Google Wave: I finally got an account (thanks a lot J. !!) but up to now I'm rather disappointed... nonetheless, the full features are not released yet, so I'm ready to get blown away. If you are interested, I still have some invitations left :-) Start your wave!
JavaOne 2010 : ... no, still no signs whether there will be a next JavaOne :-(

Unit Testing EJBs and JPA with Embeddable GlassFish

Thomas — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:04:00 -0700

Java EE 6 has been a topic here at CTP for quite a while now. During summer I had the pleasure of conducting an internship which was targeted to explore the possibilities of the upcoming standard, namely EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, JAX-RS, JSF 2.0 and JCDI on top of GlassFish v3 - and it turned out surprisingly productive, although all implementations were far from being in a release state!

Only one thing we failed to run in a stable way: The new EJB 3.1 container API refused to run our unit tests. The main problem was JPA support - persistence units got not recognized and EJBs usually failed with a NullPointerException calling the EntityManager.

Alexis and Adam recently blogged about this specific feature, and of course I had to get back and try it out myself! Indeed, starting up a container and looking up EJBs works fine. But to test your Entities there are still a few tweaks you might want to apply.

Start with creating a Maven project and add the embeddable GlassFish dependency. I'm also using TestNG instead of JUnit, as it has a nice @BeforeSuite annotation which allows starting the container only once before running your tests.


<dependency>
 <groupId>org.glassfish.extras</groupId>
 <artifactId>glassfish-embedded-all</artifactId>
 <version>3.0-b69</version>
 <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

<dependency>
 <groupId>org.testng</groupId>
 <artifactId>testng</artifactId>
 <version>5.9</version>
 <scope>test</scope>
 <classifier>jdk15</classifier>
</dependency>

As described in Alexis' blog, you can start your EJBContainer with a reference to your GlassFish domain. This will allow you to start up data sources you most probably need to properly test your JPA code.

The disadvantage here is that you either depend on a hardcoded location or a system property which each of your team members have to set. Or, in case of your continuous integration system, you might not want to have a GlassFish installation at all.

Fortunately you can create a mini GlassFish domain with only a few files. The image below shows the files you need and how I placed them in my Maven module:

You can take your existing domain.xml containing your data sources and place it in here - you can reference it now relatively to your module location. Your unit tests then start with:


private static Context ctx;
private static EJBContainer container;

@BeforeSuite
public static void createContainer() {
 Map<String, Object> properties = new HashMap<String, Object>();
 properties.put(EJBContainer.MODULES, new File("target/classes");
 properties.put("org.glassfish.ejb.embedded.glassfish.installation.root", 
 "./src/test/glassfish");
 container = EJBContainer.createEJBContainer(properties);
 ctx = container.getContext();
}

This will run your unit tests against your development database. In case you want to run them in a local database, you can simple replace the connection pool config in your domain.xml, e.g. with a local Derby installation:


<jdbc-connection-pool datasource-classname="org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDataSource" 
 res-type="javax.sql.DataSource" name="[your DS name]" ping="true">
 <property name="ConnectionAttributes" value="create=true" />
 <property name="DatabaseName" value="./target/unit-test" />
 <property name="Password" value="" />
 <property name="User" value="" />
</jdbc-connection-pool>

This creates the database in your target folder and requires adding Derby to your Maven POM:


<dependency>
 <groupId>org.apache.derby</groupId>
 <artifactId>derby</artifactId>
 <version>10.5.3.0_1</version>
 <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Unfortunately this setup might not match with the configuration in your persistence.xml and generate invalid SQL for your test database. You can either solve this with Maven filters in different profiles, or alternatively create a staging directory for your EJBContainer. I'm using the Apache Commons IO tools here for convenience:


...
private static final String MODULE_NAME = "embedded";
private static final String TARGET_DIR = "target/" + MODULE_NAME;

@BeforeSuite
public static void createContainer() throws Exception {
 File target = prepareModuleDirectory();
 Map<String, Object> properties = new HashMap<String, Object>();
 properties.put(EJBContainer.MODULES, target);
 properties.put("org.glassfish.ejb.embedded.glassfish.installation.root", 
 "./src/test/glassfish");
 ...
}

private static File prepareModuleDirectory() throws IOException {
 File result = new File(TARGET_DIR);
 FileUtils.copyDirectory(new File("target/classes"), result);
 FileUtils.copyFile(new File("target/test-classes/META-INF/persistence.xml"), 
 new File(TARGET_DIR + "/META-INF/persistence.xml"));
 return result;
}

You can use the @AfterSuite annotation to clean up the temporary folder. Note that with this setup, the EJB lookups change:


protected <T> T lookupBy(Class<T> type) throws NamingException {
 return (T) ctx.lookup("java:global/" + MODULE_NAME + "/"
 + type.getSimpleName());
}

JSF 2.0 with ICEfaces 2.0 Alpha

Ted Goddard — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:12:40 -0700

VMWare Fusion 3 Fuses Snow Leopard and Windows 7 With Full 64-Bit Power [Snow Leopard]

matt buchanan — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:40:00 -0700

JBoss Portlet Bridge 2.0 Beta and GateIn

noreply@blogger.com (Wesley Hales) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:39:00 -0700

Java Posse #284 - Newscast for Oct 23rd 2009

javaposse@gmail.com (Tor Norbye, Carl Quinn, Joe Nuxoll, Dick Wall) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:25:00 -0700

Adobe Announces Lightroom 3 Beta!

jgilbert@photoshopuser.com (Matt Kloskowski) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:56:41 -0700

Hey everyone! Big day today... I'm heading up to New York to PhotoPlus East early this morning but that's not the big news. Adobe has once again released a public beta of the new version of Lightroom. Lightroom 3 Beta was announced and is now available as a free download for anyone (not just existing Lightroom users). I'll give you the main points here but, honestly, Scott Kelby, RC Concepcion and I have each created various videos and articles over at NAPP's Lightroom 3 Beta Learning Center. So rather than just repeat everything (that I've been up all day and night for the last 3 days creating for the learning center), I'll just point you there instead :)

The Main Stuff:
• The Beta is for everyone
• Big changes in the Import dialog
• Noise removal has changed quite a bit
• Slideshows can now be exported as videos (with music)
• Custom print templates in the Print module
• Houston, we have watermarking!

So here's your marching orders:
1) Don't complain about the beta. Remember, its not finished yet. Its a beta.
2) Head over to NAPP's Lightroom 3 Beta Learning Center
3) Download the Lightroom 3 Beta from the Adobe Labs website
4) If you're a Kelby Training subscriber I've created an entire online training course, The Lightroom 3 Beta Power Session, that dives a little deeper into the new LR3 Beta features.
5) Keep an eye out at Tom Hogarty's (Lightroom Product Manager) blog
6) Don't forget to stop by Scott's blog as well
7) Stay tuned here at Lightroom Killer Tips. As I find and create new things you can bet I'll be showing them here first.

Thanks for stopping by. If you see me wandering around (with red bleary-looking eyes) at PhotoPlus East in New York today or tomorrow be sure to stop by and say hi.

Bookmark It

Oracle WebLogic Server Versions

Balz — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:40:00 -0700

I recently got confused with the version numbers of the Oracle WebLogic Application Server, some people use the internal (BEA) version number, some refer to the Oracle release number.

So the following list should clarify the mapping between these two versioning schemes:

WLS 10g3 (10.3.0) : recent version but used by latest WebLogic Portal 10g3
WLS 11g R1 (10.3.1) : current version
WLS 11g R1 PS1 (10.3.2) : upcoming patchset version planned for Nov/Dec 2009
WLS 11g R1 PS2 (10.3.3) : another patchset anticipated March / April 2010
WLS 11g R2 : Planned for 2010. I haven't found any relation to a 10.x version at this moment.
Oracle OpenWorld 2009 Updates: WebLogic Server 11g R2 in 2010 will get Oracle RAC and Coherence integrated to make them native in the application server. WebLogic Server will get RAC event awareness, providing fast connection and fail over, while Coherence will be managed as part of WebLogic - currently it's an external application.
WLS 12g : Planned for 2011. I assume this will be the Java EE 6 compliant release along with the release of all other Fusion Middleware 12g products.

Comments are welcome!

Mojarra 2.0.0 is available!

rlubke — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:25:38 -0700

Mojarra 2.0.0 is now available!

There are several ways to obtain the release.

GlassFish V3 promoted build 69 (out later this week)
Download directly from https://javaserverfaces.dev.java.net
Download using Maven2 using information provided here

Please review the release notes as there are important details there pertaining to differences between the implementation and the specification as well as a basic migration guide from 1.2 to 2.0 (note that this is a live document, so we'll be making additions - check back regularly).

The JSF 2.0 tutorial from our Sun documentation team should be available in the coming weeks. As soon as it is, we'll send out a notification. Until then, here are some nice resources for JSF 2.0:

Andy Schwartz' blog entry - What's New in JSF 2
Ed Burns' blog - http://www.java.net/blogs/edburns/
Jim Driscoll's blog - http://www.java.net/blogs/driscoll
JSF 2.0 EG blog - http://blogs.jsfcentral.com/jsf2group/

On the tools+JSF 2.0 front, NetBeans is well underway with the JSF 2.0 support. I'd recommend grabbing the NetBeans development build and try it out! Ed noted the other day that you could highlight a section of markup in a Facelet template and extract it into a composite component. Slick! The JetBrains guys have been busy as well. Check out their blog on JSF 2.0 support within Maia.

I'd like to personally thank all of our external contributors who have been committing code to the repository directly or submitting patches to help improve our quality (these are in no particular order - my apologies if I've missed anyone):

Guy Veraghtert
Imre Oßwald
Ted Goddard
Mark Collette
Dan Allen
Alexandr Smirnov
Martin Marinschek
Michael Kurz
Andy Schwartz

I'd also like to thank our top three issue reporters for taking the time to log issues (again, in no particular order)

Frank Hofmann
Guy Veraghtert
Juergen Zimmerman

Also, thanks to Ed Burns, Roger Kitain, Jim Driscoll, and Doug Donahue for putting up with me for the past two years while we worked on this project :)

Finally, if you'd like to discuss JSF 2.0 with other users, I'd recommend the following:

GlassFish Webtier Forums
##jsf IRC channel on freenode.net

The GlassFish Webtier forums are monitored by the Mojarra developers. The IRC channel, also, is frequented by the Mojarra developers, as well as folks from Exadel, MyFaces, and consumers of JSF as a technology. It's a great way to interact with the community.

I'm excited that we've reached this stage and am looking forward to hearing/reading about people's experiences with JSF 2.0!

JetBrains Introduces Open Source Edition of IntelliJ IDEA

editor — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:30:58 -0700

LambdaJ new trends in Java

Erik-Jan de Wit — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:35:00 -0700

I must say I really enjoy the presentations from the JUGS. Couple of days ago there was another one about lambdaj, presented by its author Mario Fusco. He is a big fan of Scala and that's why he wanted to bring this functional way of doing things to Java.

I think this is a trend and we are going to see this more and more. It all started with the dynamic languages built on the JVM and now more and more people want functional things. I guess it has to do with the fact that Java the language did not see much change over the last 8 years, and people see solutions that are nice for specific problems in other languages. For instance Rails, it's very good in solving one particular problem and the Java community did notice that. Not only did it get ported to run on the JVM it also brought us Groovy/Grails.

So the latest thing in Java land is functional programming. There are some things one could solve more "elegantly" by using a language that is functional in nature. An example of this is filtering collections, this is what lambdaj tries to do, making standard Java behave in a more function manner.

To give a couple of examples. To filter a list of beans in lambdaj you could write something like this:

 
int totalAge = sum(meAndMyFriends, on(Person.class).getAge());

This will work because you would do a static import of the Lambda class that has the sum and on methods. So to explain what happens, the sum method will iterate over the collection of Person objects and invoke the getAge() method and sum all the results. Actually it's very readable what will happen. Because the on method uses generics you'll even get code completion and you'll be able to use refactoring.

Even better is the sumFrom method, it will return a bean of the same type of your list and you can then call any method to get the sum from all the properties. Of course this will only work if your collection contains object instances, because java generics are not reified.


Person totalsPerson = sumFrom(meAndMyFriends);
int totalAge = totalsPerson.getAge();
int totalLength = totalsPerson.getLength();

This works because sumFrom gives back a Proxy object that is the same as the elements in the list. When you invoke a method on it, it still has a reference to the list so it will iterate over the list and sum the properties.

Another example:

 
List<Person> oldFriends = filter(having(on(Person.class).getAge(), greaterThan(30)), meAndMyFriends);

There are of course more frameworks that can do similar things. When I first saw this I thought of jxpath but the disadvantage of this framework is that when doing refactoring, you'll have to manually change the xpath queries. Another powerful framework that also takes advantage of functional paradigm is google collections.

But as Mario Fusco also pointed out at the end of his presentation.... If you can, you should really give Scala a spin. Then you will not need lambdaj, you will have something more powerful.

JSR 330 Approved - Dependency Injection for Java

pelegri — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:36:03 -0700

Weld 1.0.0.CR1 available!

Pete Muir — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:49:11 -0700

Hibernate Validator 4 unleashed

Emmanuel Bernard — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:49:25 -0700

Maven 3 early access

Erik-Jan de Wit — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:43:00 -0700

After the talk from Jason van Zyl, I thought it was time to give Maven 3 a try. So I checked out the sources from svn and tried to build. That was the first challenge because even though Jason told us they switched from Plexus to Guice there is still a dependency on plexus 1.2.1-SNAPSHOT. I could not find any binaries for this so I checked that one out and built that too.

So now I can build and run Maven 3. In the presentation from Jason he told us that they didn't want to change too much because they didn't want to break backwards compatibility. They did a lot of tests to fulfil that promise by checking out Maven 2 open source projects and testing them with maven 3. They even have a Hudson grid running multiple builds to ensure backwards compatibility. So I thought that my project will work without any problem. I never do anything exotic in my builds, but how wrong could I have been, because it does not build with Maven 3. It gives the following error that was very clear:

[ERROR] Some problems were encountered while processing the POMs: [ERROR] 'dependencies.dependency.(groupId:artifactId:type:classifier)' must be unique: xml-resolver:xml-resolver:jar -> null vs null @ ch.admin.smclient:smclient:1.0.1-SNAPSHOT, /home/edewit/workspace/smclient/smclient/pom.xml

So what I never noticed before is that I had the xml-resolver twice in my dependency list. Once with a version number and one without. Maven 2 never warned me about this. This shows that the dependency management resolving has improved a lot. Also the way the errors are presented is improved I think.

Also Jason mentioned that the speed of Maven 3 has improved, so I tested this as well and it turns out that on my project the speed increase was about 11%. That is not great but it's not bad as well.

Jason said that everything they are working on (Maven 3, m2eclipse and Nexus) is going to be finalized at the end of this year. So I'll be looking forward to that even though I think this version of maven is already a step forward. After more projects successfully built with Maven 3 I'm sure that they intend to add more new features.

Thoughts on Jason van Zyl talking about Maven 3

Erik-Jan de Wit — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:50:00 -0700

Today I've been to the talk from Jason van Zyl hosted by the JUGS (Java User Group Switzerland, yes I know it's a ridiculous name). He is one of the authors of Maven 1 and 2, he talked about Maven 3 and what it's going to bring us. And I must say it's quite impressive. Being an open source contributor myself I know that good software is written in 3 times. This was also the main point of his talk. He first made the joke that he never expected us to use Maven 1 but that Maven 2 was useable, and now they are fixing everything in Maven 3. I now use Netbeans because I love the Maven support that it's got. But with Maven 3 they are also developing the m2eclipse plugin. And what Jason told us during his presentation is that also here they are fixing a lot of things there. For instance Maven will have a query-able life cycle, with this eclipse can use only a part of Maven for instance to do a compile. So no longer adding a resource will kickoff an entire maven build and 5 minutes later we are ready to code again. I still think that the editor of Eclipse is better than the one Netbeans provides and Jason also says that the Maven integration was better in Netbeans. In fact they've used a lot of the Netbeans plugin features in the new m2eclipse plugin. Knowing all this I must really give Eclipse another try. What the new maven 3 also will have is a way to describe your maven model how you would like it, so for instance you could use ruby or groovy to create you're maven object model, instead of a xml, we could do something with this just don't know what. One thing I'm really excited about is they are making the maven integration also communicate with other plugins. For instance when you make changes in the WTP plugin about your war, this will also be put in you're pom. The same holds true for PMD plugin, the settings that are in your pom will also be set in the PMD plugin and changes made will reflect back.

Jason is quite a talker, his slides were full with text and he only briefly stopped talking to take a zip of water. His company also makes Nexus a proxy for maven repositories. Other products that do something similar are Artifactory or Archiva. The cool things they've build into Nexus is the ability to also be a proxy for Eclipse plugins. But all the cool things about Nexus are in the commercial version of Nexus like for instance LDAP authentication and lots of features around provisioning repositories.

Talking about their commercial products, they also sell this concept where one can have everything setup for a developer in one go. The m2eclipse plugin will discover where Nexus is, install the necessary plugins, show the projects a developer can work on and even download wiki documentation from confluence or twiki. This can all be configured by the technical lead of the project. I really like this concept, to many times I've seen it take days for a new developer to be up to speed. Not only taking time on his one, but also needing intensive support. With this in place some of that time can be saved.

So all in all I'm very positive about this presentation, JUGS keep up the good work. And I'll be trying the dev build of maven 3 and m2eclipse right away tomorrow. I'll let you know how it works out.

JBoss Seam Archetype - now with ICEfaces

Thomas — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:34:00 -0700

Last week I visited Jazoon - and had a great opportunity to see several impressive demos of ICEfaces! Of course I had to immediately get my hands on it, and started to integrate ICEfaces in the JBoss Seam Maven archetype (as described in my previous post).

You can give it a spin by starting a shell and running Maven with the Archetype plugin:

>mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=http://tinyurl.com/jbsarch -DajaxLibrary=icefaces
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'archetype'.
...
Choose archetype:
1: http://tinyurl.com/jbsarch -> jboss-seam-archetype (Archetype for JBoss Seam Projects)
Choose a number: (1): 1
Define value for serverDir: : [your JBoss 5 server location]
Define value for groupId: : [your groupId]
Define value for artifactId: : [your artifactId]
Define value for version: 1.0-SNAPSHOT: : [your version]
Define value for package: : [your package]
Confirm properties configuration:
serverType: jboss5
ajaxLibrary: icefaces
...
Y: : y
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
...

Make sure you don't misspell "icefaces", this will otherwise screw up the application. No input validation in Maven Archetype yet, but I started looking into it ;-)

Again, change to the project directory and build the project:

>mvn package

Now this also executes a sample unit test (fingers crossed it works this time ;-) - thanks to Oscar for the feedback!

Have fun with it! Anybody mind contributing a decent layout template?

Creating a JBoss Seam Maven Archetype

Thomas — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:30:00 -0700

In case you're a regular reader of this blog, I guess you're aware that I'm a frequent user of both Maven and JBoss Seam - and that I'm regularly trying to combine working with both! My usual approach for setting up a new project was either to start with an empty Maven web application project and copying the missing files over, or to start with a seam-gen project and move it into a Maven structure. Both less than ideal...

Maven provides so called archetypes for a quick project setup. As there is not (yet?) an official archetype for Seam projects, I've been working on my own - and here's how you can use it as well!

All you need is

a recent version of Maven downloaded (I used 2.0.10)
and the Maven executable referenced in your path so you can use it on the console.

Open up a console, cd to your projects directory and type:


mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=http://tinyurl.com/jbsarch

This will start Maven and show the following command line output:


[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'archetype'.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Maven Default Project
[INFO] task-segment: [archetype:generate] (aggregator-style)
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Preparing archetype:generate
[INFO] No goals needed for project - skipping
[INFO] Setting property: classpath.resource.loader.class => 'org.codehaus.plexus.velocity.ContextClassLoaderResourceLoader'.
[INFO] Setting property: velocimacro.messages.on => 'false'.
[INFO] Setting property: resource.loader => 'classpath'.
[INFO] Setting property: resource.manager.logwhenfound => 'false'.
[INFO] [archetype:generate]
[INFO] Generating project in Interactive mode
[INFO] No archetype defined. Using maven-archetype-quickstart (org.apache.maven.archetypes:maven-archetype-quickstart:1.0)
Choose archetype:
1: http://tinyurl.com/jbsarch -> jboss-seam-archetype (Archetype for JBoss Seam Projects)
Choose a number: (1):

The remote archetype catalog contains so far only one archetype (BTW: the jbsarch in tinyurl.com/jbsarch stands for JBoss Seam ARCHetype - hope you can remember this better than the full URL :-) Select the archetype by typing 1 and enter your Maven project properties as well as your JBoss Server directory:

[INFO] snapshot com.ctp.archetype:jboss-seam-archetype:1.0.0-SNAPSHOT: checking for updates from jboss-seam-archetype-repo
Define value for serverDir: : /Developer/Servers/JBoss/jboss-5.1.0.GA
Define value for groupId: : com.ctp
Define value for artifactId: : fluxcapacitor
Define value for version: 1.0-SNAPSHOT: :
Define value for package: com.ctp: : com.ctp.fluxcapacitor
Confirm properties configuration:
serverType: jboss5
serverDir: /Developer/Servers/JBoss/jboss-5.1.0.GA
groupId: com.ctp
artifactId: fluxcapacitor
version: 1.0-SNAPSHOT
package: com.ctp.fluxcapacitor
Y: : y
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 4 minutes 57 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Fri Jun 19 19:12:19 CEST 2009
[INFO] Final Memory: 12M/79M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note that the serverType property defaults to jboss5. If you have a JBoss 4.2.x installation, quit with n and retype everything (hmm...) and use jboss4 instead.

In case anything fails here, make sure your archetype plugin is at least version 2.0-alpha-4 (I had to delete the local repo info file in the local repository once). Now with your project created, lets build and deploy it!

Aragorn:sandbox thug$ cd fluxcapacitor/
Aragorn:fluxcapacitor thug$ mvn package
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Reactor build order:
[INFO] [fluxcapacitor]
[INFO] [fluxcapacitor :: JBoss Configuration]
[INFO] [fluxcapacitor :: Web Application]

The project currently features two modules: One with the actual web application, and the other one containing JBoss Server configuration files. With the basic archetype you only get a datasource there, but you can also use it to change server ports, define security realms, queues etc.

Environment specific properties are referenced in filter property files. You can find the development filter file in ${artifactId}/environment/filters/${artifactId}-development.properties. The filter file selection happens in the parent POM. It defines a development profile which sets the environment property. Setting this property to test will look for a ${artifactId}/environment/filters/${artifactId}-test.properties filter file.

Note that the parent POM contains your JBoss installation directory hard coded. You might want to factor this out into a developer specific profile when working in a team. Fire up your JBoss instance. Everything should start up well (fingers crossed...) and you can point your browser to the base URL of your application.

Done! Import the project in your favorite IDE and start prototyping!

Unfortunately this is still far away of what seam-gen provides up to now. Maven archetypes have improved over time but are currently still not as flexible to be useful in complex setups:

Entering project properties is not even close to be user friendly. At least a description, input validation (enumerations) and reasonable handling of default values might help.
Conditional installation of files. If you know how this works - let me know :-) This would be required to distinguish between WAR and EAR projects, and for targeting different applications servers (yeah, like GlassFish!).

In case I find some time to contribute something here, I'll report back. If you have feedback / contributions to the archetype, this is as usual very welcome (the code is available at our Google Code repository)!

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Friday (Day 4)

Balz — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:33:00 -0700

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Thursday (Day 3)

Balz — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:05:00 -0700

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Wednesday (Day 2)

Balz — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:15:00 -0700

Back again... well I'm sorry to write this but I could not make it yesterday to publish the summary of Wednesday. It was 2:15am and I was very exhausted after having been up since 7am. So, I still hope you enjoy this summary as I try to include as much infos as a can within the given time from different sources in the net and myself.

Related Posts so far:

Day 0: CommunityOne
Day 1: JavaOne, Key Note

JavaOne Day 2 Summary

=== Mobility General Session ===

Christopher David, Head of Development and Partner Engagement at Sony Ericsson, was the main speaker for the talk. During his presentation, Erik Hullman (a Senior Java Developer with Sony Ericsson) was given the task to develop a JavaFX Twitter client from scratch that at the end of the presentation should be deployed to three different devices!
As if the task would not have been complex enough: People in the audience could send questions or comments to his Twitter accound that he answered in parallel to his programming efforts... and at the end, the same deployable artefact worked fine on all three devices. Sounds promising!!

Rikko Sakaguchi, Corporate VP of Creation and Development

=== Technical Sessions Highlights ===

Hudson: Continuous Integration in the Cloud with Hudson
(by Kohsuke Kawaguchi --> Blog)
- I very much like the automated distribution approach: You start the Master Instance with Hudson installed as well as with the Hudson PXE Plugin (Prebuilt Execution Environment). After that you start the Slave Instance (on another machine) and boot from the network. That's it!
- The defined target machines can be flagged with so called "labels" and can be used to ensure that Test Units aimed for Windows machines are executed on Windows boxes (and same for Unix boxes).
- The Hudson Master instance can run on Windows or Unix.
- Cloud: The demo was about the creation of a CI environment in Amazon EC2. It was very impressive how quickly the setup was done and executed successfully.
- Hadoop: Kohsuke also mentioned the rather new plugin for Hadoop which makes Hudson run on Hadoop.
- Slides: PPT
"Effective Java": Still effective after all these years
(by Joshua Bloch)
As in his other presentations, Joshua presented his content in a very nice way accompanied by his typical kind of humour... As of the end of the day, his book was again "Number 1" in the Bookstore's Top Seller List.
JPA 2.0 (by Linda DeMichiel)
The new Criteria API as well as the introduction of the pessimistic locking modes were interesting to follow. Overall, the session was a little bit too much on the theoretical side.
WebBeans! Sorry: JCDI, Java Contexts and Dependency Injection: JSR-299
(by Gavin King)
I just like the way Gavin presents, he has his unique style, very straight forward and nice to follow. JCDI targets to support stateful objects, builds the glue between JSF and EJB, allows loose coupling with strong typing and introduces very nice concepts like BindingTypes and DeploymentTypes.

After the speech we asked Gavin about the other "DI" related JSR submitted by Bob Lee (Google) and Rod Johnson (SpringSource): JSR-330. It states "This JSR targets Java SE, and it will lay a foundation for dependency injection in Java EE." So it seems that this is a big discussion at the moment as the JSR-299 has started 3 years ago and is nearly finalized now and could make it easily into the final release of Java EE 6 by end of this year whereas the newly submitted JSR would take at least 1 year until its finalization and would eventually postpone the release of Java EE 6 as 299 would directly depend on 330. I'm very curious how this gets resolved. My personal hope is that they agree on a common dependency injection foundation for SE and EE and include that one with potential EE specifics in the nearly finalized 299 (During the Java EE 6 Panel Discussion BOF, William Shannon meant that the EG would never accept two different DI specs on the Java Platform, so a common sense must be found, and quickly).
Links around this discusssion:
--> Bob Lee's initial post (from May 5th, 2009)
--> Gavin King's statement (from May 7th, 2009)
--> Bob's comment on Gavin's statement

=== BOFs ===

JSF Platform and Ajax: State of the Union
with Ted Goddard (Lead Architect of ICEfaces), Andy Schwartz (Oracle ADF Faces) and Alexandr Smirnov (RichFaces)
This kind of panel discussion was very interesting as each of the presenters talked about the current status and the progress towards JSF 2.0. RichFaces and ICEfaces convinced most (RichFaces because of its seemless integration with Seam and ICEfaces because of its architecture and the unique feature of automatic Ajax Push based on server-side DOM-diffing (more here)).
Woodstock was not represented. As of the presenters there are no plans for further releases. On ICEfaces there is a migration plan described from Woodstock to ICEfaces.

Ted Goddard
Java EE 6 Experts Discussion Panel
hosted by Roberto Chinnici and William Shannon
Good discussions, questions and comments... I was surprised that JSR-299 was not mentioned at all in the presentation about Java EE 6. After having asked the question why it is missing, a big *sigh* from Roberto Chinnici :-) (as expected), then responding that they were not yet sure about the inclusion of JSR-299 in Java EE 6. I reformulated my question what the current trend would be, rather "in" or "out". After eye-contacting with William Shannon, William meant "give him the full story"... Then the story around "JSR-299 vs JSR-330" has been described (see WebBeans above for more details).

William Shannon and Roberto Chinnici

=== Pavilion ===

At the ICEfaces booth we met Micha Kiener (also from Switzerland) who is working for Mimacom. We were introduced to the overall architecture of ICEfaces and that looked really cool (server-side DOM diffing, Ajax Push). The demo showed a very elegant way of doing Interportlet Communication (IPC) on Liferay Portal 5.2. Really nice!!
And some pictures from the Pavilion and its entrance area...

Dani at the SpringSource booth
where it says "Eliminating Enterprise Java Complexity"...

Cheers

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Tuesday (Day 1)

Balz — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:57:00 -0700

Take a deep breath... Time is really rushing away, it is actually Wednesday night now (11pm), 50% already passed, but as promised in the previous post, there will be a summary of each day. So here it is!
Before kicking off, read the summary of Monday's ConferenceOne if you haven't done so already...

JavaOne Day 1 Summary

As every year, Day 1 started with the General Session, the key note by Sun itself and hosted this year by Sun's CGO (Chief Gaming Officer) Chris Melissinos.
Guests on stage were

James Barresse, VP of Architecture, Platforms and Systems with eBay
Alan Brunner, Senior VP for the Blackberry Platform
Dan Eklund, Executive VP of Advanced Technologies at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Lowell McAdam, President and CEO of Verizon
Diane Bryant, Executive VP at Intel
Ronan McBrien, JavaFX TV Architect (nice demo, video should be available here)
Nandini Ramani, Director for JavaFX

Some pictures:

Jonathan Schwarz about BDJ and BD Live

Java FX TV Demo:

=== Key Note Highlights ===

Oracle and the Future of Java:
At the end of the key note, Scott McNealy called Oracle CEO Larry Ellison up on stage to address the $7.4 billion dollar question -- what will be the future of Java?
My key notes from his answer are:
- Oracle with a much greater R&D budget than Sun will be able to even more push Java forward. Quote: "I don't expect a lot of changes, just expanded investment and a lot of enthusiasm coming from Oracle."
- He mentioned JavaFX many times, he wants OpenOffice to use JavaFX as UI. He also mentioned that it would be interesting to see Android based phones and netbooks from Sun running Java and JavaFX. Rumors say that pushing JavaFX will secure his seat in the UI battle between Silverlight and Flex.
- "Look at the past to see the future": by this he most probably meant Oracle's dedication to Java since its birth, its commitment to support the community and to actively participate in Java's future.
- Interesting Link about Larry's talk
- Some pictures:
Scott mentioning that Larry might have more luck
to bring the JVM on the iPhone :-)

"Mr. Oracle"

- And enjoy the following video:

Java Store! presented by James Gosling: still in beta, community is asked to give feedback on how payments should be implemented.
Release of Java FX 1.2 !
"The classpath is dead": Chief Engineer of Java SE, Mark Reinhold, said this after having shown a nifty demo on how Java SE 7 manages modules.
"The web.xml is dead": CTO at Sun, Bob Brewin, said this while talking about the next enterprise release Java EE 6.
Announcement of JATAF ! The Java Application Terminal Alignment Framework is an open, collaborative community striving for a unified Java ME platform.
Project Dark Chat: Nice demo app for the JavaOne.
--> Download this JNLP file (jre6u10 required)
DJ Anna: for me as a fan of electronic music, the opening sounds mixed live by DJ Anna, a local DJ of San Francisco, are always a pleasure to listen to...
and of course: Gosling's T-Shirt Tossing!!!

=== Technical Sessions Highlights ===
As it got already very late and I am still writing about yesterday!, more take aways from the technical sessions will follow (as CTP internal Knowledge Shares or in form of upcoming blog posts):
Interesting sessions were EJB 3.1, Servlet 3.0, Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3, Spring 3.0, JSF 2.0 and others...

=== BOFs ===

The most exciting BOF was of course the one of JavaPosse !
Download the mp3 and listen yourself what happened!! :
Episode 0x100 (#256)

As last year, the beer got sponsored by Atlassian and started with some polls from the audience. After that, they talked about topics and news they picked up during the first day...
After the show we joined them for some drinks at the Kate O'Briens pub near Moscone. I could finally tell Joe to accept my friend request on Xbox360 in order to see his hotlaps in Forza2 (he is actually a real race driver, watch this video if you don't believe me) and Carl told us some more details about his brand new Tesla (100% electric car)... A great moment in life indeed to finally get to know these dudes! :-) I could not talk much with Dick Wall unfortunately... One more reason to go again to JavaOne! ;-) At least one important thing I could tell him: Talk more about Enterprise stuff!
BOF about Lift: The Best Way to create RIAs with Scala
(by David Pollak, Lead of the Lift Framework)

to be honest, I can't comment on this content-wise... The way it was presented was cool (I like the humour of David Pollak), it was also interesting to see how he quickly implemented a fully functioning ajax based chat tool from scratch in less than 100 lines of code :-) but I could only take this one with me: Learn Scala first, then lift off with Lift.... ok! -> Scala book bought!!

Good night (oh no... in 5 hours the alarm kicks on :-),
Balz

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Monday (CommunityOne)

Balz — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 23:00:00 -0700

JavaOne has not officially started yet, it's Monday and not Tuesday, it's CommunityOne and not JavaOne, but the community spirit already caught us and punched us into the geeky experience of the world's biggest Java conference in the nice Moscone Center in San Francisco... main focus of today's sessions was on GlassFish stuff... In a nutshell: Niiice!!

So here is our summary of today's CommunityOne day (after having had some beers at the OpenSolaris & Sun Cloud Party in Hall A):

=== Sessions ===

Sun GlassFish Application Server Portfolio (by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart from Sun): Where Sun's Platform Is Going:
not much news for us actually... no infos regarding how Oracle want to proceed with GF
Running Seam on the GlassFish Application Server (by Dan Allen from Red Hat):
- Seam best works with Hibernate as persistence provider (and looks for it in the classpath). GlassFish v2 comes with Toplink, Glassfish v3 with EclipseLink. Dan Allen from Red Hat made a nice summary of all the tweeks you have to apply in order to make Seam work with GF's default persistence provider.
- Dan further went into differences of JBoss AS and GlassFish AS which also brought some steps to be done if Seam should run on GF.
- But: from a developer perspective, such details are not necessarily required to be known as "seam-gen" supports both application servers out of the box. We asked Dan about support of Oracle WebLogic Application Server and he pointed us to a chapter in the Seam documentation. As that is not the whole story (as of my current status), we might come up with our additions soon...
Lightning Talks!
This special type of talks runs throughout the day, split in multiple parts of 50 minutes each where every part again contains up to 8 very short speaches... I visited part 3 covering:
- The Mural Project
- Deep Dive Sneak Peek Sun Learning Services
- Atmosphere (by JF Arcand!): good to know that Atmosphere is not only useful in containers not supporting Servlet 3.0: it autodetects Servlet 3.0 and still provides a nice abstraction of the rather complex Async API of Servlet 3.0
- Adding AJAX Push (Ted Goddard from ICEsoft, focusing on ICEfaces of course)
- Alice
- BluJ
- In a summary: Cool to listen to, nice to get an impression of the topic and good as decision maker whether to go to the full sessions on certain topics not already being enrolled in your schedule...
Developing RESTful Web Services with JAX-RS and Jersey (by Marc Hadley and Paul Sandoz from Sun)
- The two spec leads of JSR-311 made a quick walkthrough from the architectural style REST to the JSR-311 (JAX-RS) and showed two demos running on the reference implementation Jersey.
- One demo showed how JCDI (JSR-299, fka WebBeans), Java Contexts and Dependency Injection works together with Jersey using Google Guice. This was interesting, and in a side remark he recommended to have a look at Guicey Fruit running on Guice 2.0. Geeks... but we like it ;-)
EclipseLink - The Road to JPA 2.0 (by Doug Clarke from Oracle and Co-Lead of the EclipseLink project):
- no much news for us at this moment

=== Pavilion ===

The Pavilion opened at 3pm. Between the sessions and after 5pm, it was interesting to walk from one booth to the other until 7pm when it closed.
GlassFish, Portals: We talked to Srikanth Konjarla (Software Architect of Web Space Server, aka WebSynergy Project having the same codebase as the Liferay Portal). He was also not allowed to talk about how Oracle will continue with the GlassFish products like WebSpace Server (Portal) and the GlassFish Application Server... we hope for more details in tomorrow's general session!
Atlassian: We had quite a deep introduction by Douglas Butler (thanks!) into the new versions of Atlassian's products:
- JIRA (4.0 beta)
- Confluence (3.0 released TODAY!!)
- Fisheye together with Crucible
- Bamboo and Clover -- Really nice what we have seen here!
- The new versions generally invested a lot into the visualization of data, hiding complexities by using more wizards but also many things happened from an integration point of view:
- Atlassian released widgets/gadgets to be deployed into any portlet container in order to create nice dashboards etc.
- They will also soon provide RESTful interfaces for all their products to freely integrate them into any other app.... This sounds very cool indeed.
- And the give-away gadgets are nice too ;-) Have a look at their new T-Shirts: If you wear one of those and have it filmed by an Atlassian camera, some things get out of the shirt!! ;-)

- And yes, they acquired GreenHopper (announced TODAY).
Livescribe: At last year's Java One, Livescribe presented their JavaME based pen and sold 150 pieces right after the general session... I also bought one. I'm happy to see that the company still exists and that they heavily extended their features (e.g. Pencasts). At their booth today I got a nice little paper blanks (which is not sold in Europe so far).
Vaadin: IT Mill has released the 6th version of their server driven RIA framework known as IT Mill Tollkit. Together with the release they rebranded it into Vaadin. It is free, open source and looks actually very much like GWT... The demo looked very nice. Certainly worth having a closer look at it!
James Gosling: Spotted early at the Pavilion entrance! ;-)
Sun Cloud: We haven't had the chance to check out the details of Sun Cloud yet but with the rather big party this evening sponsored by Sun Cloud and OpenSolaris we expect a bigger announcement by tomorrow... so stay tuned.
NUUX: We also met Ben (an Alumni CTP Consultant) at his booth in the Java Utopia corner. Check out his website!!
Anchor Steam Beer: San Francisco's local beer is really worth to be mentioned here as single item ;-) and it tasted great in the OpenSolaris branded glass!

=== Bookstore ===

Bought today:
- Java EE 6 with GlassFish 3
- The Definitive Guide to Lift
More tomorrow ;-) ...

=== Tomorrow ===
Sure, lots of interesting session are registered in our schedule, but:
tomorrow is also the long expected JavaPosse BOF from 9.30pm to 10.20pm, so don't expect a summary like this after that :-) We will most probably post a 2-day summary on Wednesday evening... ok?
So cu then! And don't forget to follow Balz @ Twitter for live updates!
- Cheers, Balz & Dani.

JBoss Seam Hot Deploy with Maven - EAR Projects

Thomas — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:23:00 -0700

As requested on some comments on my previous posts (initial post and update), the Seam Hotdeploy Maven plugin now works also with EAR projects.

Some more details on how to configure your project can be found in our Google Code Wiki. The plugin now defines a new packaging type for Seam WAR modules - the only possibility to override the war:war goal in the package phase.

If you're interested in how to override the default lifecycle Maven goal, you can check out the plugin source - something I haven't been able to google easily. Or, maybe wait for a dedicated blog post - stay tuned!

Something you should definitely checkout with the Hot Deploy plugin is the Maven CLI plugin. See the great post from Dan here, or the integration in the sample POM.

As usual, feedback and contributions are very welcome!

CTP @ JavaOne 2009

Balz — Fri, 15 May 2009 10:30:00 -0700

Only three weeks until Java One! Can't believe it's less than one month away!!
So let's have a look at what we think is hot this year. As every year, the conference has a certain umbrella topic where this year's JavaOne is certainly in the light of Java EE 6:

JavaEE6: JSF 2.0 @ TS-4640 (by Ed Burns)
JavaEE6: Servlet 3.0 @ TS-3790
JavaEE6: JPA 2.0 @ TS-5214
JavaEE6: Contexts & Dependency Injection (WebBeans) @ TS-6726 (by Gavin King)
JavaEE6: EJB3.1 @ TS-4605
JavaEE6: Developing JPA Applications with NetBeans and EclipseLink @ TS-5018
JavaEE6: JAX-RS (REST) @ BOF-4878
JavaEE6: Glassfish v3 (JavaEE6 Reference Implementation) @ TS-4923
JavaEE6: JCA 1.6 @ TS-4733
JBoss Seam: Conversations and Page Flows on the JSF Platform @ TS-5045 (by Seam in Action author Dan Allen)
Java Posse BOF @ BOF-4418 with Dick Wall (he likes the Groovy! :-), Joe Nuxoll and Carl Quinn, why is Tor Norbye not listed? Probably still digesting Snoracle!
Google App Engine @ TS-3817
Building JavaEE based Web Apps with Google Open-Source Technology @ TS-4062
Effective Java: Still effective after all these years @ TS-5127 (by Joshua Bloch!)
Defective Java Code: Mistakes that matter @ TS-5335
Metro Web Services Security @ TS-4402
Enterprise Integration Patterns in Practice @ TS-4839
SOA at Enterprise Scale @ TS-5123
Spring 3.0 @ TS-5225 (by Rod Johnson)

Of course there are much much more topics addressed like Scala, JavaFX, Java Mobile including Bluray Disc Java, lots of sessions about Cloud Computing, GWT, Groovy, OSGi and many more...

Interesting sessions at the CommunityOne West Conference (starting 1 day before JavaOne):

Oracle EclipseLink: S308133
SUN Glassfish Portfolio: Where is it going?: S307894
Architecting robust Applications for Amazon EC2: S304314

How to get updates:

Follow Balz live from JavaOne via his Twitter account (also see widget at the end of this post)
Follow other twitworks: Kevin Farnham or the JavaOne official twitwork
Java.net will produce again lots of Podcasts (not Pencasts!):
The Schedule has been published already.
And: Check this blog after JavaOne for a summary!

Cheers!

CTP Java Pencast #1

Balz — Fri, 08 May 2009 07:03:00 -0700

Welcome to the first pencast!
Switch on audio to fully enjoy the show!
Be aware that this has been recorded in one single shot and without any post-processing...

Shownotes:

JavaME enabled pen by Livescribe
Customer Technology Stack: JSF 1.2, JBoss Seam 2.1 (with jBPM), Hibernate 3, WebLogic Server 10.3 or JBoss Application Server 5
Java EE5 : JSF 1.2, EJB 3.0, JPA 1.0, Glassfish v2
Java EE6 : JSF 2.0, EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, Glassfish v3

So come back to visit us for checking details on the discussed web technology stacks!

Portal Update March / April 2009

Balz — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:05:00 -0700

Winter has turned into Spring, at least here in Switzerland... and in parallel to the brighter days, let's bring some light into the Java Portal area as well: What products are interesting these days and which should be followed for sure in 2009?

From the commercial side, major players are:

Oracle WebLogic Portal 10.3:
formerly known as BEA WebLogic Portal
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g TP4:
WebCenter Suite also includes the formerly known product AquaLogic Interaction by BEA, now called WCI, WebCenter Interaction. Longterm, WLP will probably fully converge with WebCenter Suite where nowadays integration happens via the WebCenter Services.
IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1

Open Source portals that have the most promising potential at the moment are:

Liferay Portal 5.2:
back in August 2008, SUN and Liferay announced their partnership to work jointly on the next portal generation and presented their roadmap, Liferay keeping their Liferay Portal and SUN continuing their WebSynergy project).
SUN's brand new Web Space Server:
Since February 2009, SUN has released Web Space Server version 10 which is including all the efforts from the internal Project WebSynergy. WebSpace Server is not only a portal product, it is a full fletched portal platform and has been integrated into the Glassfish Portfolio.
For more info, read their first documentations.

JBoss Portal 2.7.2:
- On March 12th, JBoss has released the latest version of its portal product and is available for download.
- On Apr 3rd, JBoss released the JSR-301 compliant Portlet Bridge CR1. Currently the bridge supports any combination of JSF, Seam, and RichFaces to run inside a portlet.
eXo Portal 2.5.1
Jetspeed 2: no updates since version 2.1.3 from December 2007.

From a portal technology point of view, it is interesting to see the product's maturity with regards to the following standards:

JSR-168 - Portlet Specification (final since Oct 2003)
JSR-286 - Portlet Specification 2.0 (final since June 2008)
WSRP 1.0 - The first specification of Web Services for Remote Portlets (final since August 2003)
WSRP 2.0 (final since April 2008)
JSR-301: Portlet 1.0 (JSR-168) Bridge Specification for JSF 1.x:
Current Status: proposed final draft in Jan 2009
Currently available implementations of JSR-301:
- MyFaces Portlet Bridge
- OpenPortal Portlet Bridge (used in Liferay Portal)
- JBoss Portlet Bridge (used by JBoss Portal)
JSR-329: Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286) Bridge Specification for JSF 1.2:
too early for products to support this JSR as it has been created in January 2009 and is in the status "Early Draft Review" as of March 2009.
Note that this specification is led by Oracle exclusively at the moment.
JSR-314: JSF 2.0:
The support of JSF 2.0 in a portlet container is not yet officially addressed. There is no JSR around like "Portlet 2.0 Bridge for JSF 2.0".

Besides the Portal related activities, let's have a look on Java related quick news:

SUN has announced that Glassfish v3 Milestone 2 will be ready by Java One 2009 in June.
For the complete schedule, click on this link.
Liferay 5.2 is now fully supporting WSRP 2.0 with the release of the WSRP 2.0 FCS binary.
Oracle & SUN: Oracle buys SUN as of the announcement on April 20th 2009.
It will be very interesting what will happen to SUN's products like
- The whole Glassfish Portfolio
- MySQL
- Netbeans
- OpenSolaris and
- JavaFX
Java EE 6: The JSR-316 has passed the Public Review state. See its results.

Java People Spotlight: Domenico Crescenti

Balz — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:08:00 -0700

In this edition of the "CTP People Spotlight" series we introduce Domenico, one of the CTP competences for content related topics.

Java Competence Role:
Messica (insider)
My Master Kung-Fu Skills:
They call me Mr. Bean
I'd be excited to get my hands dirty on:
JCR 2.0 (JSR-283)

Q&A

Q: Hi Domenico, how would your message look like if you would have to tell it via Twitter what you are currently doing?
A: I'm buying some insecticide to feed the bug in my code :)

Q: What was the greatest piece of code you have ever written so far?
A: That was definitely the play fair chiffre

Q: What is the best quote you have ever heard about programming?
A: "Cool!!! You didn't mess up my code"

Q: What is the best quote you have heard from our managers?
A: "........."

Q: What is the most cutting-edge technology or framework you actually used on projects?
A: Vamosa!

Q: What is your favorite podcast?
A: Discovery Channel Video Podcast – the US original of course – and the Java Posse Podcast

Q: Which Java book can you recommend and for what reason?
A: Java (Taschenbuch) by far the best Java book I’ve ever read.

JBoss Seam on Google App Engine - First Steps

Thomas — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:33:00 -0700

[UPDATE] The latest Morjarra release 1.2_13 as well as the latest Appengine SDK 1.2.2 seem to fix a couple of problems described below. My task backlog is actually growing :-) but I hope I find some time to look again how things work with these new versions.

I spent the last three weeks in a repetition course of the Swiss army - far away from any Java code. Naturally my fingers started to itch while reading the announcement of Google that their App Engine now supports Java! So I grabbed my MacBook to enjoy the sun, Java coding and Eastern holidays.

As I usually write web applications with JBoss Seam, I decided to give the framework a try in the Google cloud - preparing for a bumpy road as Seam founds on standards which are mostly listed as either not or not known to be working. The following article describes the (bad) tweaks I had to do to get something basic running - I guess if you start doing serious development, you might hit more walls.

First, install the Eclipse Plugin for App Engine and create a new project. I'll base my descriptions on this initial setup. Switch on sessions in appengine-web.xml:

<sessions-enabled>true</sessions-enabled>

Setting up JSF 1.2

Download the latest Mojarra 1.2 release [1.2_12] and put it in the WEB-INF/lib directory. You can configure the Faces servlet in web.xml as usual

<servlet>
 <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
 <servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
 <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
 <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
 <url-pattern>*.seam</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Starting Jetty with only this will fail due to some incompatibilities of Jetty and Mojarra. As with Seam we will need JBoss EL anyway, we can configure Mojarra to use the JBoss EL ExpressionFactory. Add the JBoss EL JAR to WEB-INF/lib and the following XML to your web.xml:

<context-param>
 <param-name>com.sun.faces.expressionFactory</param-name>
 <param-value>org.jboss.el.ExpressionFactoryImpl</param-value>
</context-param>

Now it's already patch time. Jetty in the Google environment seems to have a bug in its Servlet API implementation, missing the ServletContext.getContextPath() method (new in version 2.5). Also, Mojarra tries to be clever about initialization work and uses Threads in the ConfigManager - the App Engine SecurityManager will let the whole thing blow up. Something similar happens in the JBoss ReferenceCache class. All patched classes can be found here. Drop the Java code in your source folder, Jettys classloader will pick it up.

This will at least make the whole thing start up. I also added facelets (JAR file, view handler in faces-config.xml and view suffix in web.xml).

Unfortunately, using RichFaces components is an absolute no go on App Engine. RichFaces is full of references to AWT or JAI classes, which Google blocks completely. If anybody wants to try ICEFaces - good luck!

Adding Seam

Now it's time to add all the Seam stuff. Quite a couple of JARs to put into the application. I basically used Seam 2.1.1.GA and libraries from JBoss 4.2.3.GA. The complete list of what should go into WEB-INF/lib is shown in the screenshot below.

JTA is not even on the list of APIs Google gives a recommendation, so let's fall back on Java SE behavior. Configure components.xml with:

<transaction:entity-transaction entity-manager="#{entityManager}"/>

Although we cannot use Hibernate as persistence provider, Seam has a couple of dependencies to it (e.g. when using Hibernate Validators). As soon as we have it in the classpath, Seam activates its HibernatePersistenceProvider component. This will behave pretty bad, and for simplicity we just override this component:

@Name("org.jboss.seam.persistence.persistenceProvider")
@Scope(ScopeType.STATELESS)
@BypassInterceptors
@Install(precedence = Install.APPLICATION,
 classDependencies={"org.hibernate.Session", "javax.persistence.EntityManager"})
public class OverrideHibernatePersistenceProvider extends PersistenceProvider {
}

Now also add a persistence provider as described in the Google docs and disable DataNucleus checking for multiple PersistenceContextFactory instantiations with this property in appengine-web.xml.

<property name="appengine.orm.disable.duplicate.emf.exception" value="true"/>

As before, also Seam needs a couple of patches. Main reasons for those are references to javax.naming.NamingException (which is not white listed, credits to Toby for the hint) and session/conversation components not implementing Serializable correctly. The last point is probably something not hitting Seam or your application the last time.

Identity

As a next step I tried to add some users to the application. Seam's Identity module builds around the javax.security.auth.Subject and Principal classes. Even though those classes are white listed, the SecurityManager blocks any attempt to add a Principal to a Subject. Well, how useful is that... As a quick fallback I integrated the Google Accounts API:

@Name("org.jboss.seam.security.identity")
@Scope(SESSION)
@Install(precedence = Install.APPLICATION)
@BypassInterceptors
@Startup
public class AppEngineIdentity extends Identity {

 private static final long serialVersionUID = -9111123179634646677L;

 public static final String ROLE_USER = "user";
 public static final String ROLE_ADMIN = "admin";

 private transient UserService userService;

 @Create
 @Override
 public void create() { 
 userService = UserServiceFactory.getUserService();
 }

 @Override
 public boolean isLoggedIn() {
 return getUserService().isUserLoggedIn();
 }

 @Override
 public Principal getPrincipal() {
 if (isLoggedIn())
 return new SimplePrincipal(getUserService().getCurrentUser().getNickname());
 return null;
 }

 @Override
 public void checkRole(String role) {
 if (!isLoggedIn())
 throw new NotLoggedInException();
 if ((ROLE_ADMIN.equals(role) && !getUserService().isUserAdmin()) || !ROLE_USER.equals(role))
 throw new AuthorizationException(String.format(
 "Authorization check failed for role [%s]", role));
 }

 @Override
 public boolean hasRole(String role) {
 if (!isLoggedIn())
 return false;
 return ((ROLE_ADMIN.equals(role) && getUserService().isUserAdmin()) || ROLE_USER.equals(role));
 }

 @Override
 public String getUsername() {
 if (isLoggedIn())
 return getUserService().getCurrentUser().getNickname();
 return null;
 }

 public String createLoginURL(String destination) {
 return getUserService().createLoginURL(destination);
 }

 public String createLogoutURL(String destination) {
 return getUserService().createLogoutURL(destination);
 }

 public User getUser() {
 if (isLoggedIn())
 return getUserService().getCurrentUser();
 return null;
 }

 private UserService getUserService() {
 if (userService == null)
 userService = UserServiceFactory.getUserService();
 return userService;
 }

}

Both create... methods can be used in the UI for generating login/logout URLs. Destination defines the URL the user gets redirected after successful login/logout. Also make sure that the identity configuration is removed from components.xml

Wrap up

Running this setup should give you a base for a very simple Seam app like in the screenshot below.

This first step has not been doing any persistence work, and my first tries with DataNucleus were not as straight forward as I had expected from a JPA implementation. Hope Google will catch up here with something more mature. Also, even the simple setup required a couple of nasty tweaks on the frameworks. Another big hurdle here are the runtime differences from production to local environment. For some serious work on App Engine, it's so far more recommendable to look into GWT.

Anyway, if you found this useful - looking forward to hear from your next steps in the cloud.

JBoss Seam Hot Deploy with Maven - Update

Thomas — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:46:00 -0700

I just published an updated version of the Seam Hotdeploy Maven Plugin (see my previous post here). For a detailed description on how to use it, have a look at the Google Code Wiki. I also updated the sample Maven POM featuring JBoss Seam 2.1.1.GA.

The new version should be easier to configure and play nicer with e.g. the Eclipse Maven plugin (I'm not using NetBeans/IntelliJ too often, but I hope this works also fine there). The new Eclipse builder configuration looks like shown in the image below:

Note: The Eclipse Maven plugin using its embedded Maven had somehow problems with the extended lifecycle of the Hotdeploy Plugin. Using an external Maven installation (2.0.10) felt not only faster but was also not having problems with it.

Java People Spotlight: Daniel Käppeli

Balz — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:00:00 -0800

The "People Spotlight" series continues with a Java fellow who is at Cambridge Technology Partners since years now: Dani is continuously working in projects that most often deal with Open Source technology stacks.

Java Competence Role:
Senior Developer
My Master Kung-Fu Skills:
... there are so many to choose from ...
I'd be excited to get my hands dirty on:
Java EE 6 : see how all the bits and pieces fit together

Q&A

Q: Hi Dani, how would your message look like if you would have to tell it via Twitter what you are currently doing?
A: Recovering from a busy week and from yesterday’s dinner.

Q: What was the greatest piece of code you have ever written so far?
A: Parsing an XML document in 1 LoC with Spring OXM. Isn't that cool?


@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
JAXBElement<GpxType> object = (JAXBElement<GpxType>)this.getUnmarshaller().unmarshal(new StreamSource(inputStream));

Q: What is the best quote you have ever heard about programming?
A: “These performance improvements are quite slow!”, K. K. 02.09

Q: What is the best quote you have heard from our managers?
A: "In the next quarter the hockey stick effect will kick in."

Q: What is the most cutting-edge technology or framework you actually used on projects?
A: RESTful Web Services with Jersey
Q: Wow! I actually didn't know that CTP uses that already... so we belong to the very early adopters of JSR-311 in customer projects! Nice Dani... when are you doing a Knowledge Share on this? ... Ok let's keep on with this short questionnaire first.

Q: What is your favorite podcast?
A: Discovery Channel Video Podcast – the US original of course – and the Java Posse Podcast

Q: Which Java book can you recommend and for what reason?
A: Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java Second Edition, by far the best Java book I’ve ever read