TheServerSide.com is pointing to this SDTimes column by IT expert and author Allen Holub: Just Say No to XML.

Ruby expert and evangelist Pate was also able to interview the esteemed open source JRuby project team, found here on this blog and in this excerpt.

If you are interested in privacy issues, watch “Internet Data Brokers and Pretexting, Day 1″. It promises to be an interesting hearing, and you can watch it via CSPAN on a RealPlayer or an MS stream.

Some time ago I needed a unique identifier generator that will look up a value in a simple name-value kind of database table. Project’s database layer was based on Hibernate2 and since I couldn’t find such a solution I have implemented a MultiTableGenerator which I have blogged about here.

The project was finished and I moved on. Since then, many people reported that my solution was not compatible with Hibernate3 but unfortunately I never found time to fix it. Luckily, I was recently reported that Hibernate team introduced this functionality in Hibernate3. The class is called org.hibernate.id.MultipleHiLoPerTableGenerator. As I can see, it is not documented in the latest version of the reference documentation yet, but you can find a description in a JavaDoc documentation.

The configuration syntax of these two solutions looks similar (parameter names have been changed), which makes it even easier to port functionality if you are migrating to Hibernate3. It is good to see useful stuff becoming a standard part of the library.

The notion of bahavioral completeness as introduced with the Naked Objects approach comes across as a two-sided coin, at least to me. After taking note of Eitan Suez’ JMatter framework, I started cross-reading the book Naked Objects by Richard Pawson and Robert Mathews that can be found online. The core concept is a strict interpretation of object oriented methodology in a way such that every action that can be taken with a certain object must be defined within the boundaries of that object definition. The object must be behaviorally complete. This philosophy is in sync with the idea, that a software should display the internal model as closely to the user in its GUI as possible, which I agree with.

SDTimes publishes this news article: Slimming Down Java: Protocol laid out for deletion of SE features.

TheServerSide.com is highlighting the news that originally appeared on java.sun.com regarding daylight savings time changes starting next year on the second Sunday in March (Mar 11, 2007) instead of what’s been the first Sunday in April.

An open source project called Restlet is creating what is called a Restlet API as an alternative to the Servlet API to adopt REST (Representational State Transfer) with Java. The belief is that the Servlet API does not have a clear separation of concerns between the transport protocol and the application. The Servlet API is an object-oriented view on top of the Http request/response model. On the other hand, the REST perspective has a resource-oriented view. What this means is that domain concepts are resources which can be referenced with a URI and which can be manipulated by components. The representational state of resources, and not resources themselves, is what is exchanged and connectors provide a means for communication of these representations between components. This also alludes to the redundancy in separation of web components as clients and servers. They could simultaneously be both.

1060 NetKernel is another interesting REST and Java project. It is a REST based microkernel and application server.

Looking at these initiatives, the questions then are:
Is the object-oriented view non-optimal for the web?
Does Java need new definitions for REST?

If you are not already familiar with REST, then read Roy Thomas Fielding’s dissertation at https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

Charles Nutter responded to the responses in my last blog entry. Looks like he has answered my primary concern - that he’s being hired into the NetBeans team to work on NetBeans at the expense of JRuby, the first section, clears that up 100%:

CHARLES:Looks like I’m coming into this one a little late…but I’ll bite.

1. JRuby is secondary to NetBeans

Totally false. The principals at Sun…ALL the principals…have made it clear that our full-time responsibility is a solid JRuby 1.0 that can run the big popular Ruby apps (i.e. Rails, which necessitates Rake, IRB, RubyGems, Mongrel, and others). I’ve even gone as far as to say “I’d love to also help out language X” or “I’d also like to devote some cycles to working on C Ruby” and been told that JRuby should be my top priority. Time and time again, Sun folks are telling us and the general public that we’re being hired to work on JRuby first. Trust me, if it weren’t so, I’d tell you. I didn’t leave one fulltime job that took away from JRuby to join another.

more response below the fold…

Update(Sunday 2:02 PM): Charles Nutter has responded and made it clear that his first priority is JRuby 1.0.

Update(1:37PM): Curt Hibbs also blogged this in the Ruby Category

Sun hired two of the JRuby developers. I think this is good news, but I also see a real potential for problems, here’s a quote from Tim Bray’s weblog entry:

“Will they work on JRuby full time? · Yes, but they also have a mandate to think about developer tools. Right now, developers who use dynamic languages like Python and Ruby are poorly served, compared to what Java developers have.”

WRONG, has he ever used RadRails, Eclipse, Komodo? Probably not, at Sun, the only IDE that exists is NetBeans, and I certainly hope tihs doesn’t mean that Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo and going to be forced to work on the NetBeans team. I fear that might be the case. The one common theme I’ve noticed from Sun over the past few years is that they spend an irrational amount of time hyping NetBeans as the answer to every problem. I hope this is good news, and I hope that they didn’t just hire the JRuby guys to be semi-junior developers on the NetBeans team.

If this means that we can look forward to a JRuby that really is efficient and ready for production use, I think this is great news. Maybe then we can continuing using Java for what it is good at (enterprise development), and start benefiting from rails as a lightwight MVC framework without having to deal with an impedance mismatch between the two systems.

Artima today has some discussion about Ethan Nicholas’s mission to reduce the size of the JRE for Applet use.

Let me be frank. I don’t care. Really. Download size is not the thing that keeps people from using Applets instead of Flash.

Just some perspective here:

JRE 1.5.0 Windows offline installation: 16.00 MB
Adobe Acrobat 7.0.8: 27.7 MB
Real Player 10.5: 13.5 MB
.NET 1.1: 23.1 MB

Obviously size is not the limiting factor here for adoption. *Acrobat* is nearly twice the download, but nobody is going “hmmm, maybe we should rethink using PDFs.” The reason I, and I think most, don’t use applets is the user experience is generally bad. The Java plug in is sketchy about working at all — on fully half of my machines, applets simply won’t start up in Firefox at all. It takes way to long to start up, and unlike Flash, you don’t get the option of having a nice wait screen while stuff downloads and spins up. Media support is nil, and lets face it, a lot of the time on the interwebs these days, you want to use some kind of media. Until 1.6, there is still no support for SOAP. Romain’s evangelism to the contrary, it is seriously hard to make a nice looking Java application.

I am not opposed to a general use library manager and a slimmed down set of core libraries that can be grabbed at runtime — how many times has that wheel been invented? Maven, WebStart, etc — but I think it is a bit of delusion to think that solving that problem will in any way affect the penetration Applets see in the RIA space.

Hosting a website is a cheap matter these days. One could get a fairly good shared hosting package for around 1.5-6$ per month. These hosting packages offer a wide variety of features including support for PHP, PERL on LINUX or ASP (or ASP.NET) on Windows and MySQL DB. The problem is that prices soar when you want JSP/Servlet support.

I think Java should be as affordable as PHP and .NET or else it will loss a lot of private developers to the competitors. Expensive Java hosting is a problem when you want to deploy a privately-held/budget-aware website.

I like Java and wanted my open-source website to be written in Java. At the end I had to settle for PHP (which is cool too).

Why should ASP/PHP enabled hosting cost 1.5-10$ per month and Java enabled hosting cost 12-30$ per month?

Christophe Coenraets posts this: 30 Minutes Flex Test-Drive for Java Developers. “The objective of this test-drive is to give you, in a very short amount of time, an understanding of how Flex works and what it can do. This test-drive consists of a series of samples kept as concise as possible (typically between 10 and 50 lines of code) to clearly expose features of interest. The samples focus primarily on using Flex with a Java back-end. The intended audience is Java developers with no prior knowledge of Flex.”

Do you think Flex and/or Flash will be big for Java developers; and are you using it? If not, are you considering?

I started the Maven Registry merely as a personal tool, I just needed a better way to search the Maven repository, and the result became an unpolished web application which gets a fair amount of daily traffic (about 1k searches/day). Maven Registry is a stop gap solution, the repository parsing scripts are written in Ruby on Rails so the sytem doesn’t benefit from the libraries that the Maven project is producing that read a POM and take care of interpolating and ineriting values from POMs that extend other POMs. Plus, it is a one man effort, I *could* make Maven registry an open source project, but, honestly, I’m more interested in reaping the benefits of the Maven Repository Manager (MRM) which is now being refered to as Archiva. In other words, Maven Registry is a useful little tool, but, eventually, you should be using Archiva to search the repository, and when i see that Archiva is ready and that someone has created a derivative that allows for public searching, Maven Registry will be no more.

If you have a Maven repository on your local filesystem, and you are interested in directions for taking a prerelease version of Archiva for a test drive, read on.