Google seems to know how to make a splash at the trade shows, don’t they?
The big OSCON announcement is code.google.com/hosting, their foray into the SourceForge world. Given the the bubbling animus with SF.net, this might represent a very opportune moment.
The hosting service is really quite lean: Subversion and Google’s own bugtracker, as well as a tie-in with groups.google.com for mailing/discussion lists. Really, though, I think this “less is more” approach is really a good thing. TestNG is an early adopter — not surprising given Cedric’s employment. While the lack of free-form web hosting could be a small issue, it is hard not to note that with just your svn server, Google Pages and Blogger, you could put together a pretty reasonable web presence for you project, though it would certainly be less coherent than Java.net or SF.net’s project page.
Chris ran down the Top 10 RFEs pointing out some silliness there, and there was some discussion on the JavaPosse about the post.
One of the things that came up was adding Ogg V/T support to Java/JMF. I had a similar initial response to this: why bother, really. I am a Linux user myself, and I don’t use Ogg. Don’t get me wrong, it is a fine codec, but its limited adoption outside of the open source world (read: My iPod) makes it inconvenient to use for personal media. Joe didn’t even know what it was. That is how big a splash it has really made.
However, I began thinking back to the conversation on Romain’s blog about Java Media and iondb. Now, because Nathan has been an active part of the ROME community in the development of the iondb code, I have seen this project go through many… not quite ready for prime time releases now. They have done a great job at abstracting players for Linux, and adding Ogg support wouldn’t really change the nature of their project. However, when discussing what “media support” in Java actually means, he made this comment:
So, what is necessary then for Java to be able to truly “do media”? Something like Flash’s support for MP3 and its own proprietary Flash Video format? Does the format/codec/engine have to be pure Java code or just part of the platform?
As much as I love the idea, I don’t think platform-wide support for OGG Vorbis/Theora is the answer, unless Sun is willing to make a big investment in media tools for developers. I’ve also not been too impressed with pure Java Theora decoding, even with small files. Built-in MP3 and MPEG-4 support would be welcome. IBM has a nice MPEG-4 codec that supports JMF.
Perhaps partnering with DIVX is a possible solution, since they could offer up developer support, desktop and server tools, much in the same way ON2 does for Flash with their Flix product line.
Now, while I certainly like DivX too, I think there is something to be said for Flash/Flix/FLV. The thing is, Ogg V/T would be perfectly suitable as a “This is Java video” analogue to Flash video. While this doesn’t even begin to address Chris’s issues with JMF from an editing/production standpoint, it would at least offer some of that missing functionality in Java and provide an alternative to QT4J for the handful of consumer products in Java on the market.
Yesterday, 16 Java developers from Dublin met online to discuss What technologies should I be learning in the next 12 months? The results of the Virtual Java Meetup are here.If you couldn’t be bothered reading the entire thing , here’s the summary:
- Web services are going to be big, but only if they can be simple.
- EJB 3 and Netbeans are both worth taking a look at again, they are now much better than the previous versions that gave them a bad name.
- Middleware (e.g. workflow and Rules Engines) are interesting in a corporate environment, but there is a high barrier to entry.
- Struts , and to a lesser extent JSF , will continue to be dominant Java Web frameworks, despite not being the best technical choice.
- A lot of companies are still using Java 1.4, but may make the leap to Java 6 (Mustang).
- Service Orientated Architecuture (SOA) is a nice idea, but not so many projects have been implemented using it.
- IDE’s (Netbeans / Eclipse / JDeveloper) can deliver a lot of value, but only if backed up by lower level tools (e.g. Ant and Maven).
- More for the next 24 months , keep an eye on Apache Service Mix.
What do you think? Did we miss anything?
In this JavaWorld.com/ComputerWorld interview, “Sun’s Simon Phipps details open source strategy: As Java moves toward open source, other Sun products will follow.”
There were a lot of discussions lately about inclusion of Derby (aka JavaDB) in the Sun JDK. First of all, I personally think that it will not really change anything.
I’m sure that developers that wanted embedded database until now were savvy enough to download Derby and include it in the project. One other argument that has been often used is that this will put unnecessary burden on the size of the JDK itself. While this is certainly true, with current Internet speeds extra 2MB size is not something that would worry most of the developers, and of course there are always alternatives to Sun JDK.
But instead of heating up this discussion again, I would like to write down some of my experiences with Derby. The focus will be on Derby as an embedded database since I haven’t (and don’t plan to) use Derby as a standalone enterprise database server.
InfoWorld has a discussion with Brewin about open sourcing Java in stages. While it is not a new idea, open sourcing SWING out of the gate would not be bad. I imagine that out of things in the JRE stack, there is less baggage there than in the rest JVM. Plus that would move a lot of things like GCJ and Harmony along at a much much faster clip. I did find this a bit annoying:
Some components of Java that could be open-sourced in an incremental fashion include the Java virtual machine, the runtime environment, the Web services stack and the Swing GUI components. There has been some discussion about releasing the virtual machine, Swing, and the runtime at the same time, Brewin said.
Now, pretty much the whole Web Services stack is already available with Glassfish. There are only a few components left that are not open source, and most of those are just API specs. However having a list of licenses like this is a bit offputting.
On a recent project , the choice was between Enterprise Java (using frameworks such as DWR and Struts) , or Oracle Forms. The newest latest Java technology , versus a 15 year old technology that Oracle is comitted to phasing out (and moving to ADF / Oracle fusion). No contest , you think , until you hear that the decision was made (and rightly so) to us Oracle Forms.
‘What?!’ I hear you say - how could this happen? The project in question was fairly simple - get information and store it in a database. The problem is , despite being mainstream for the last 6 years, there is no standard, easy ‘drag and drop’ method of doing these applications in Java. C# does it in Visual Studio. Oracle does it with Forms. With Java (and despite having doing 10 or so of these projects), there is still too much plumbing that the developer needs to know.
I’m expecting a deluge of ‘have you tried project X’ on this post. And yes, I expect that an Eclipse based tool will probably fill the gap. But for these simple applications , there is no standard way of doing this (standard being a solution that dominates the market in the way Struts did the Web App framework space, until recently). But we’ve been waiting 6 long years!
All of which brings me to Ruby. Ruby on Rails’ sweet spot is exactly these kind of simple, ajax enabled , no frills ‘get info from web and store it on database’ applications. Enterprise Java’s sweet spot is the heavy lifting workflow , Rules , Calculations, Integration with Legacy and other systems , web services and basically anything to do with Business logic. The two are a perfect complement to each other, which is why the news that JRuby now runs Ruby on Rails is especially interesting.
JRuby is a version of Ruby that runs in the Standard Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It means that (1) You don’t have to install Ruby, which might meet resistance in a corporate environment. It also means (2) that all the methods you have available in Java you have available in Ruby. The O’Reilly Ruby site and this Javaworld Article are good places to start learning more about Ruby and linking it into Java. Fellow O’Reilly Blogger Steve Anglin also has more information about the latest JRuby release.
More on Technology in plain English
Dolphin is coming… do you think they’ll listen to us? From the looks of the most popular RFE’s, I’m kind of hoping they don’t.
The O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2006 takes place from July 24-28, in Portland, OR. As usual, it includes a Java conference session track.
IBM has a big article up today about working with Microformats. I know this is one of those “buzz heavy” items on the interwebs 2.0 these says. Ray Ozzie gives it a lot of play with the new Live Clipboard stuff coming out of MS — which I admit is a hella cool idea. Pat thinks they are really cool, and Calvin has grown Tails into a whole big deal now.
The problem is, however, they are stupid. They are a hack to get around a problem that is going away VERY shortly.
After hours or during your lunch away from your Java coding, check out this live panda bear action in Wolong National Park (panda reserve), China.
Take a look at the following list. How many would you agree with from a Web 2.0 point of view? 8 of them? 9 of them? All of them?
- Thou shalt not disrupt the legacy system.
- Thou shalt avoid massive overhauls. Honor incremental partial solutions instead.
- Thou shalt worship configuration over customization.
- Thou shalt not re-invent the wheel.
- Thou shalt not fix what is not broken.
- Thou shalt intercept or adapt rather than re-write.
- Thou shalt build federations before attempting any integration.
- Thou shalt prefer simple recovery over complex prevention.
- Thou shalt avoid gratuitously complex standards.
- Thou shalt create an architecture of participation. The social aspects of successful implementation tend to dominate the techinical aspects.
Would you be surpised if this was Not about Web 2.0 , but about a thing called Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), as written by Carlos E. Perez on Managability.org. With a great degree of understatement , Carlos says
There certainly an untapped opportunity to Web 2.0 social networking technologies to the process of implementing SOA across an enterprise.
We’ve touched (briefly) before on this , calling it Enterprise Web 2.0.
So is there any difference between the terms? In my view , SOA has been consumed by the hype. Web 2.0 people just got on out and did it, giving us useful examples to copy with Enterprise Java.
Genuitec, the creator of MyEclipse integrates Matisse(well-known WYSIWYG Swing user-interface designer of NetBeans) functionality into MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench to enable the easy creation of Java rich client applications within the MyEclipse environment. Built on top of the Eclipse software development kit, MyEclipse 5.0 will have the Matisse4MyEclipse, an interface builder based on the NetBeans Matisse technology.
Its good to see the best-of-breed components under one roof. Whenever I switch my Java IDE, I tend to compare the IDE with other IDEs and I always feel that its missing some of the features. May be not any more, as MyEclipse proves the integration of the different components/features together in one IDE, I am sure soon we will see the IDE which is made out of the best components from different IDEs.
Apart from NetBeans Matisse, do you think any other best components that should be under one roof? I would like to see the IntelliJ IDEA’s refactoring tool in Eclipse or NetBeans? Unfortunately IntelliJ IDEA is not a open source product to integrate with Eclipse/NetBeans, but IntelliJ can integrate the best components from Eclipse/NetBeans into their product. Being a commercial company I don’t think they will integrate the open source components into their product. Don’t you think so?
Internetnews.com asks: Is Java EE’s Complexity Its Worst Enemy? And given other, perhaps more, lightweight alternatives like Spring and Ruby on Rails, what do you think?
