Raible Designs

JavaOne: Java.net: The JCP alternative?

This is why observers are saying that Sun's new Java.net open source portal, which the company will unveil at JavaOne this Tuesday, may prove to be a strategically important move as Sun seeks to remain a vital force in Java standards development. O'Reilly, whose company is codeveloping the network of Websites in partnership with Sun and collaborative tools maker CollabNet, said that in Java.net, Sun is creating "a space that they don't completely control," in the hope of encouraging other vendors to become more involved.

As the focus shifts to Java.net, however, the JCP may become less important, O'Reilly said. "The community is to some extent routing around the JCP, and this site will to some extent accelerate the process," he explained. [Full Article]

[ANNOUNCE] Struts 1.1 Release Candidate 2 released

The Struts team is proud to announce the release of Struts 1.1 Release Candidate 2. This release includes some new functionality, but mostly just fixes for a number of bugs which were reported against earlier versions. The Struts Team believes that this release is ready for prime time, hence its designation as a release candidate.

The binary distribution is available at:

http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/struts/binaries/

and the source distribution is available at:

http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/struts/source/

In addition, the library distribution, which contains updated binaries without the sample applications, is available at:

http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/struts/library/

Details of the changes in this release are available in the Release Notes, which can be found here:

http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/userGuide/release-notes-1.1-rc2.html

I'll be updating both Hibernate (to 2.0 Final) and Struts (to 1.1 RC2) today, so I'll let you know if I find any issues.

Update: I found two issues. One is that Hibernate identifies itself as "Hibernate 2.0 beta 6" in its logging (should not have beta 6). The second issue is that the commons-logging.jar file that ships with Struts 1.1 RC2 is missing some .class files. I replaced the commons-logging.jar file with one from a nightly build of Struts I was using and everything seems to be fine. Without the update, I get no logging. I also found that Hibernate no long includes jdom.jar in its distro (it used to be there), the lack of it doesn't seem to impact anything (all my tests run).

JavaWorld Editor's Choice Awards - Winners

Here's a quick summary of winners of JavaWorld's 2002 Editors' Choice Awards. Winners are emphasized with bold. However, we all know that being a finalist is pretty huge too.

• Best Java Data Access Tool: Oracle 9iAS TopLink, CocoBase Enterprise O/R 4.5, Hibernate 1.2.4
• Best Java IDE: IntelliJ IDEA 3.0, Borland JBuilder 8.0, Eclipse 2.1
• Best Java Performance Monitoring/Testing Tool: JUnit 3.8.1, JProbe 5.0, Optimizeit Suite 5
• Best Java Application Server: BEA WebLogic Server 8.1, IBM WebSphere Application Server 5.0, JBoss 3.0
• Best Java Device Application Development Tool: Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) Wireless Toolkit 2.0, IBM WebSphere Studio Device Developer 5.0, Sun ONE Studio 4 Update 1 Mobile Edition
• Best Java-XML Tool: Xerces2 Java Parser 2.4, JAXB (Java Architecture for XML Binding), Xalan-Java 2.5
• Best Java Installation Tool: Java Web Start 1.2, InstallAnywhere 5, InstallShield MultiPlatform 5
• Best Java Book: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Martin Fowler et al.), Java Development with Ant (Erik Hatcher and Steve Loughran), Java Performance Tuning, Second Edition (Jack Shirazi)
• Most Useful Java Community-Developed Technology: Apache Ant 1.5, Eclipse 2.1, Tomcat 4.1
• Most Innovative Java Product or Technology: AspectJ 1.0.6, Eclipse 2.1, JavaServer Faces

Congrats to all.

RE: Roller Feeds

As reported by Matt and Russ (via e-mail), my RSS Feed had some issues. Moments after receiving Russ's e-mail, I shot an e-mail to the roller-dev team. Dave fixed the problem, I updated my site - and my feed is fixed. Thanks to all that discovered and repaired - you guys rock!

RE: JavaOne 2003 Blogs

I might as well mirror this list from the great Cactus guru Vincent Massol.

Here are some persons that will be blogging from JavaOne 2003

• http://www.simongbrown.com/blog/index.jsp
• http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/113
• http://www.eugenebelyaev.com/begblog
• http://blog.fuzzymagic.com/blog/page/sean
• http://alan.blog-city.com/index.cfm
• http://212.100.191.199/blog/page/werner
• http://blog.troublescope.org/blojsom/blog
• http://linuxintegrators.com/hl30/blog
• http://www.freeroller.net/page/cpurdy
• http://www.drunkandretired.com
• http://www.freeroller.net/page/cbeust
• http://www.webmink.net/minkblog.htm

Update: I added a link in the top-left for JavaOne Blogs. I will continue to add to this list as I find them.

Update 2: You can also checkout the webcasts.

Apple G5s - 1.8 MHz

From Slashdot (via Erik of course):

Apple Insider is reporting that Apple will announce computers based on IBM's 64 bit PPC 970 processor in the upcomming WWDC and will market them as G5. The new Power Mac G5s will sport a completely new motherboard design utilizing DDR 400 RAM as well as AGP 8x graphics, FireWire 800, and USB 2.0, sources said. "In the box" connectivity among the news systems is based on Hypertransport which provides 64-bit addressing and will replace Apple's multilevel bus architecture found in current systems. Initial offerings of the Power Mac G5 are said to boast 1.4 to 1.8GHz, single core PPC 970 processors, with the possibility of a dual 1.8GHz chips shortly thereafter.

Sounds good, but how long will those processors take to put in the PowerBooks? My advise - just go Intel - you'll get more customers and it'll be faster! How sweet would it be to buy a new Dell laptop and be able to run Windows, Linux and OS X on the same machine?! That would rock - and I'm willing to bet you'd get a lot of folks buying OS X. But then again, OS X is cheap - it's Apple's hardware that's spendy and it's probably a good revenue driver for them.

[ANNOUNCE] Hibernate 2.0 Released!

Sweet! The Hibernate Team has lived up to their promise and released Hibernate 2.0 Final! [Download, Release Notes]

Sunday Morning Ride

Mt. Falcon

RE: While I'm choosing Hibernate over JDO ... for now

Now I will talk to you about the dealbreaker - the one thing about JDO that pushed me pretty rapidly over to the Hibernate camp: the query language. The JDO query language is just poor, very poor and of a syntax that only the designer could appreciate.

Class gameObjectClass = com.foo.GameObject.class;
Extent oldObjects = pm.getExtent (gameObjectClass, false);
String filter = "age > 25";
Query q = pm.newQuery (gameObjectClass, oldObjects, filter);
Collection oldGameObjects = q.execute ();

This unfortunately gets more and more complex as you have to introduce other variables into the query. This is a major failing of JDO IMO. Hibernate was just so much easier to deal with from the query perspective (and since that's what you'll be spending most of your time doing...).

List oldObjects = sess.find( "from obj in class com.foo.GameObjects where age > 25" );

Big difference in both presentation, LOC and generally understandability in my opinion. [Nation of Greg :: Redux]

I have to agree with Greg here. Hibernate's query language (HQL) is extremely easy to use. In fact, I've been amazed at how I've been able to guess the syntax and get it right 9 times out of 10! It's the best of SQL and OQL. If you think HQL is good - wait until you checkout the Query by Criteria syntax (very cool IMO). There's supposed to be a Hibernate 2.0 Final this weekend... only 26 hours left in my neck of the woods.

w.bloggar problems with Roller

I've been trying to post to this site with w.bloggar with morning. It's been working, however, w.bloggar doesn't think it is. When I click "Post", it gives me a w.bloggar: 500 dialog that states: HTTP POST failed. The error number is returned HTTP status code. I upgraded this site to use the latest snapshot of Roller from CVS, but no luck, I still get the same error. I don't normally use w.bloggar, so it's not a big deal. However, moblogger is also failing.

As for the Roller upgrade, the only noticeable changes are 1) the "Editor" menu has changed from showing tabs/sublinks to just sublinks on my Weblog page, and 2) it seems to ping weblogs.com after I update. There are some issues behind the scenes, but they don't seem to be affecting anything too badly. I guess I'd better turn off e-mail notification of errors - I've received 80 since I upgraded!