techno.blog("Dion")

I was happy to read Bill Burke mention the additions to the EJB 3 spec:

What particularly excites me is that persistence is will now pluggable into J2EE 5. What I mean by this is that third-party vendors that focus soley on persistence will have a standard mechanism to deploy their products into J2EE 5 compliant application servers. JMS has had this for years and I hope what happened to JMS happens to persistence: that a healthy subcomponent market materializes. This can only serve to strengthen J2EE as a whole and bring more choice to users. As usual, I’ll tout a little JBoss arrogance and say that Hibernate will still continue dominate Java ORM, but strong competition keeps everybody honest and on their toes. Anyways…

A lot of us have been asking for this for years, and it will be a good day when it happens. Imagine BEA WebLogic running Hibernate as your EJB CMP engine :)

Technorati peaked my interest when it found the same entry regarding AOP and Ajax.

AOP and Caching

I was recently developing a new AJAX based system for picking a drugs from a long potential list. Specifically, there are two drop down lists – picking an element from the first select list makes the page look up the entry from the server.

In itself, this is rather unexciting, but i got a chance to code is in what is IMHO a rather elegant manner:

I used JSON for the javascript-server client communication, and spring+hibernate for all server side interaction. Now, at this point, we are still talking a decent implementation, the part that I really liked was using AOP for method level caching.

RMH has written a new entry, in which he gives his thoughts on Why Standardize BeanShell and Groovy?.

I am not trying to bash the JCP, or Groovy, or BeanShell.

However:

• I do not believe that standardizing anything before there are multiple parties involved that need to put a standard touch on it
• I believe standards should come on very late in the process, to clean up and make common ground (concurrency, not EJB)
• Although I can see how some “management” like the notion of standardization. It isn’t a cure. We are seeing a lot of interest in Ruby, and it isn’t a “standard”. It just happens to be scratching an itch. If JRuby was 100% done and solid, then a whole lot of people would be using it. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is standardized or not.

So, first, make something that is very usable and useful. Maybe later in the day it will get standardized, but why are we putting so much into that?

Just my 2p.

We were taught to avoid conflicts by using a package name such as com.adigio.subproject.package. This is much better than just using a project name such as “web.” for sure.

However, I keep running into packages such as com.mything.* where mything isn’t a domain at all that the owner owns.

So now, we have moved the namespace clash down a notch.

Do we need the com package anymore? Would adigio.* really be so much worse?

A large part of me thinks not, and as long as we are not stupid and do not pick generic top level packages, we would be fine. This seems to work OK in the other language camps :)

In fact, in some ways, I always liked the fact that: Net::FTP and Net::HTTP could actually be written by different parties…. and that is managed in a different way.

Do you like the com package? (or .net, or .countrycode, etc).

Think about how much package renaming we wouldn’t have to go through in open source (net.sf.* -> org.myproject.*). For example, if Hibernate was just hibernate.* to begin with.

RMH pointed me to a new JSR 274: The BeanShell Scripting Language.

Now, I am VERY much in support for getting various languages running on the JVM. I think that is the future for Java as a platform. I would LOVE to see JRuby kick ahead, see Groovy come to 1.0, and any other cool DSL that would allow us to express ourselves in a different way on the Java platform.

However, what is with standardizing these languages? In my opinion it made NO sense for Groovy, and I thought we had seen this.

Best of luck to the BeanShell guys, but wow.

It is fun to watch the Sun and Microsoft show. Have they done a lot in their first year of not fighting? Is Sun just doing this to try to gang up against IBM? ;)

I also saw that Microsoft is going to be in a bunch of JavaOne talks.

In my opinion this is only a good thing. There have always been MSFT guys at the show of course, but often they are in stealth mode. If you see Doug Purdy around stop him for a chat. I think you will be impressed. They know a LOT about our world, and are keen to grok it.

The closer Java and MSFT get together the better IMO.

Update: Jonathan Schwartz has his say, including IBM jabs…

Stephan Janssen of JavaPolis and BeJUG fame, sent over a mixed song, based on James Strachan quotes from the presentation on Groovy that we both gave to the euro crowd in Belgium (which was a really lovely time).

I have put the groovy song up here.

Quality :)

The Spring Framework 1.2 Final has been released by the Spring team.

On this lucky Friday the 13th, we are pleased to announce that Spring 1.2 final has just been released.

(Thanks to Juergen for doing the packaging and his usual coding heroics). 

The major new features since 1.2 RC2 are:

• TopLink support (for both TopLink 9.0.4 and 10.1.3)
• JDO 2.0 support (tested against JPOX 1.1 beta 3)
• Hibernate 3.0.3 support (aggressive release of Connections)

The overall major new features of Spring 1.2 are:

• finer-grained distribution jar files
• simplified XML bean definitions
• JMX support
• JDK 1.5 transaction annotation
• support for WebLogic JTA extensions
• JDBC RowSet support
• JCA CCI support
• JDO2 support
• Hibernate3 support
• TopLink support

Thanks to Oracle for donating the original TopLink support
prototype,  and in particular to Jim Clark from Oracle – for all his
help in getting the TopLink support into its final shape!

For details on new features, deprecations and bug fixes, please see the change log.

FYI, we have a 1.2.1 release scheduled for June, featuring minor
enhancements that did not make 1.2 final. See our JIRA road map for
details.

Kudos to the Spring team for a nice new final release :)

Time to test production code and get a migration plan…

So, the Project Harmony effort has a lot of supporters.

Interestingly, it seems like it was lead by good ‘ole Geir Magnusson.

Maybe nothing was read into that when the proposal came out. But now, Geir is an IBMer.

The whole Project Harmony could take on a new level of importance. I think a lot of sentiment out there was:

We have seen the troubles of having an opensource JVM/libraries a la GNU Classpath and co. Do they really think they can pull it off?

Maybe they can with the IBM VM team (as well as with help from other folks).

Imagine this world….

• Apache has a leading opensource JVM
• Developers start to go to use that JVM rather than going to java.sun.com
• IBM has another level of control over Java, making Sun more and more of a fringe player
• BEA JRockit folks join in, offering their own JIT and tools that work in this world

It is a very ambitious project, but there is a lot to be gained. Who has their hand up for writing the Swing implementation :/

Stallman is also at it again, talking about OpenOffice.org’s use of Java, and his rampage for a free Java.

IBM developerWorks has an interview with Jeremy Boynes, CTO of Gluecode where he talks about “Building a better J2EE server, the open source way”.

Marc Fleury also came out firing, with IBM Turns the Guns on Professional Open Source.

I had a double take when I saw the news that IBM has purchased Gluecode.

IBM is really looking to do something different here. Maybe it is just an experiment with opensource, or maybe something more fully planned.

One of the most interesting parts of the press release is the graph:

Is Gluecode really less that WebSphere Express even??? hopefully not for long!

This makes it look like a migration path too. It will be interesting to see how the brands are marketed (”If you like Gluecode, why not upgrade to the full blown WebSphere”????).

Again, we can read into:

Continuation of IBM’s open source strategy

IBM is making a major commitment to Apache Geronimo as the Open Source application server of the future. The Gluecode team will continue to be major participants in the Apache Software Foundation