Blogging Roller

I'm doing a RSS and Atom in Action book promotion at JavaRanch this week in the XML and Related Technologies forum. That means that I'll be checking the forum several times a day and answering all of your questions about the book's topics. At the end of the week, we'll be giving away copies of the book to four randomly selected posters.

So far, I've been answering basic questions like what is RSS, what's the difference between RSS and Atom and what's the book about?

Tags: topic:[RSS], topic:[Atom], topic:[feeds], topic:[Java], topic:[Web 2.0]

Rajendra has developed a blogging plugin for the JDeveloper IDE that enables blogging via Blogger API, MetaWeblog API and Atom 0.3. I wonder if he considered using the RSS and Atom in Action Blog Client library.

Even though we're still stuck at JDK 1.4.2 in Roller-land, I've been trying to come up to speed on Java EE 5. To that end, I bought Pro EJB 3 Java Persistence API by Mike Keith and Merrick Schincariol and I'm glad that I did, it's excellent. If you need to learn JPA, grab a copy and sit yourself down with Netbeans 5.5 beta2 and the Enterprise Pack -- it worked for me.

That's great news. Looks like JRuby is going to get the IDE support that Tim Bray asked for and JRuby is getting two full-time developers. The two core developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo just joined Sun. Dion will be pleased. Via Tor and Roumen.

Update: Tim Bray has written a nice FAQ about today's JRuby news.

Via Roumen, the JBoss Netbeans IDE is available with support for EJB3/JPA. The announcement is on the JBoss site, downloads are on the Netbeans site.

So now there are two easy ways to get started with EJB3/JPA and both are based on Netbeans: 1) JBoss Netbeans IDE and 2) Netbeans 5.5 plus the Enterprise Pack, which includes Glassfish/Sun Java App Server. Currently, both IDEs are based on Netbeans 5.5 beta 2 but don't let that scare you away.

I've been using Netbeans 5.5 beta 2 on my Solaris box for a week or so now and it's quite stable. On my Mac, not so much -- beta 2 worked fine until I installed the Enterprise Pack and then I started to get all sorts of slow downs and very strange repaint problems in the tree-view. I upgraded to a Q-Build (the 20060818 one) and now it's quite usable -- still a little sluggish but then again everything seems sluggish on my Powerbook these days.

Joe Gregorio has written a very interesting article that explores, with simple Python examples, some of the Python (and Ruby) language features that are missing from the Java language. As a Java fan I have to point out that, while those features are missing from the Java language, they are not missing from the Java platform. You can get all those goodies from Jython and JRuby and Groovy, which all run via Java VM.

Gilad Bracha: "It has come to our attention that some people want to program in things other than Java"

OMG! Roumen Strobl is taking the tech evangelist blog/caster deal to a whole new level. I think it's pretty clear now that Skerret and Scoble don't hold a candle to Strobl.

Pat Chanezon responds to James Snell's proposal for collaboration between ROME, which is (in my mind) the premier feeds API for Java, and Abdera, a newly proposed Apache project that aims to implement the Atom format and protocol.

After I got back from JavaOne, I loaded up on all of the cool new software I saw in action at the conference, including:

• Netbeans 5.5 beta (build 200605090801)
  
• Netbeans 5.5 Enterprise Pack
  
• Netbeans 5.5 Subversion Plugin (installed via Update Center)
  
• Java Studio Creator 2 (Update 1)
  
• Java EE 5 SDK: includes Sun Java App Server (SJAS) 9 plus Derby and other goodies

I installed all of this stuff and I've been using Netbeans 5.5 with Subversion support all week. On my Solaris/x64 box, Netbeans 5.5 seems very stable. The Subversion client is a little flakey, as is to be expected for pre-release software, but it's been really holding its own during some refactoring and package renaming work I've had to do this week.

So, if you're itching for Subversion support in Netbeans, give the 5.5 beta a try and help the Netbeans guys out providing feedback on the mailing lists and issue tracker.

The JavaOne general session demos last week (e.g. the build-a-blog-server in 5 minute demo) seemed to show an extremely fast build-deploy-test loop. So next, I'm going to try to switch to SJAS9 + Derby for development and debugging and see how it compares to working with Tomcat / MySQL. Last time I tried SJAS (version 8) for development, I found it to be a little too heavy for my tastes.

Sam Ruby, James Snell and Robert Yates have proposed a new Apache project to provide a reference implementation for Atom: the Atom Reference Implementation or ARI. The plan is to implement an Atom parser, client and server libraries.

Code is already available from James Snell's site (ari.tar.gz, under IBM copyright) and, currently, there are two simple examples: one for parsing a feed and one for posting an entry. I've already taken a quick look and the code looks very good. But it does require Java 5 generics, so we couldn't use it in Roller right now now even if we wanted to.

ARI will definitely overlap with ROME to some extent, because ROME provides an Atom format parser and has plans to include an Atom protocol client and server toolkit. But ROME has always focused on supporting all feed formats (e.g. RSS 0.9X, 1.0, 2.0, Atom 1.0 and even the old and deprecated Atom 0.3) and that's not the intent of the ARI.

Some little notes from JavaOne in roughly chronological order:

• Netbeans Subversion plugin looks really good (and I'm using it now)
  
• Netbeans Maven integration is deep and wide
• Those MacBooks can be pretty flakey (and my sympathies to Jason)
  
• For open source Java, the question is how, not if
  
• You can now apt-get Java on Debian, Ubuntu and other Linuxes
• Sun Portal, Creator and JMS to be open sourced very soon via Java.Net
• The Java Petstore has been updated to use AJAX and Java EE 5
  
• Sun is helping with Eclipse for Solaris/X86
• Disney is using Roller for internal blogs
• The Geronimo guys like to use Roller to demo ease-of-installation
• The Java Web Server guys like to do the very same thing
• Google Web Toolkit compiles Java code to AJAXy JavaScript UIs
  
• Tim Bray's Sigrid is a sweet little Java grid engine (but where's the source?)
  
• The JMaki project brings AJAX (Dojo, Scriptalicious, etc.) to JSP and JSF
• Visual Basic for Java is on the way via Sun's Project Semplice
• Slides for all JavaOne talks are now available online, audio coming soon
• Webcasts of general sessions are available too
  

Danese Cooper: Earlier this week we all heard about Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green hinting they were about ready to release Java under some OSI-approved license. Supposedly they just need to nail down "How to Deal with Compatibility". I read this news with some irony, since I know that they bloody well know exactly what to do already. Its been discussed every year since 1999 inside of Sun. Their covenant with Apache and the Geronimo has already successfully demonstrated that it can be done (compatible FOSS reimplementations of Sun-generated specifications). They are simply being disingenuous. What they really mean is "How can we placate the FOSS community without giving up control?" which is the age-old question for Sun.

Give us Sun-folk a little credit. If you want open source Java runtimes (and I do), then the announcements this week were most definitely good news. Up until now, we didn't have our story straight. Jonathan Schwartz was telling people that all Sun software would be open source and the OpenSolaris folks were showing us how it could be done, but Java leaders like Gosling (and many others) seemed to be saying that Sun's implementation can never be made open source for fear of incompatible forks. Now we're all on the same wavelength. That is a good thing.

And I don't think anybody really knows "exactly what to do." I'm more than happy that the Java community is going to figure out how to do it right. I believe (and I think Danese would agree) the JCP needs some work and more participation before it can get us all working in harmony (no pun intended) on compatibility.

Tags: topic:[Open Source], topic:[Java], topic:[Harmony], topic:[JCP]

(Usual disclaimer applies: I do not speak for Sun)

(photo thanks to Marc Hadley)

I haven't seen any reviews yet, but I thought my talk went quite well. Over 500 people registered and it seemed that the room (capacity 620) was overflowing. My demo worked, despite the fact that I had to work on a Windows box (and found some problems in my .BAT scripts). And I got the timing right too. I finished about ten minutes early, but that was perfect because there were lots of questions.

I think I got the point across that Atom protocol is generic, not just for blogs and applicable to a wide range of problems. I also made a point of promoting Marc Hadley's work on WADL and his talk on RESTful web services with JAX-WS.  Turns out Marc Hadley was in the audience. We'd never met before and my talk ended at noon, so we had lunch together and had a nice chat about WS-* and REST and life in general.

I attended Marc's talk later in the day and it was packed; I'd estimate he had over a thousand attendees. Based on the attendance at my talk, Marc's talk and the number of times I've heard or seen the acronym REST mentioned, I'd have to say that Java folks are pretty interested in putting the web back into web services (is that a Jon Udellism?).

You can get my slides from the JavaOne Content Catalog (link is TS-1756). You can also get the software that I demonstrated, which was the Blogapps Server (the Atom server) and the Chapter 10 code from the Blogapps Examples (the Atom client) download. You can get both of those from the Blogapps project on Java.Net.

Tags: topic:[Java], topic:[JavaOne], topic:[REST], topic:[Atom]

I'm here in San Francisco and ready for JavaOne. Time for some more horn tooting: one more reminder to come see my talk on Tuesday morning. Here's the info:

Thanks to Simon Phipps and Tim Bray for putting together another blogger gathering at JavaOne. It's Thirsty Bear time again. Here are the details straight from Simon's blog:

Event:

JavaOne Bloggers' Social

Venue

Thirsty Bear Brewing Company

Date & Time

5:30pm-7pm, Tuesday, May 16 2006

Registration:

Please register!

I'm looking forward to meeting-up with some of the folks from the Roller-dev mailing list; sounds like Anil, Raible, Sean Gilligan and a couple others will be there. Roller bloggers, users and developers come on down (but don't forget to register).

Anne Thomas Manes has written an insightful overview of the REST vs. WS-* debate. She starts out by explaining that she doesn't just drink the WS-* Kool-Aid.

I'm one of the folks responsible for mixing the Kool-Aid. I presented at the W3C Workshop on Web Services (representing Sun). I participated in numerous standardization efforts at W3C, OASIS, WS-I, uddi.org, and JCP. I have a vested interest in making sure that WS-* succeeds.

She covers some of the same points I'm covering in my Atom talk (JavaOne 2006 TS-1756), which includes a brief overview of the debate, but she goes a bit further than  my slides dare to go with this:

But I can't ignore the debate between REST and WS-*. I'm a huge proponent of the KISS principle. So I don't recommend using WS-* for all service interactions. If an application doesn't require enterprisey infrastructure semantics, then it's much more appropriate to use a simpler middleware system, such as "plain old XML" (POX) over HTTP. In fact, for applications that require Internet scalability (e.g., mass consumer-oriented services), POX is a much better solution than WS-*.

Sounds like she mixes the Kool-Aid, but she stopped drinking it some time ago.

Anne was responding to a blog post by Mike Herrick, which compared big-and-bloated WS-* to big-and-bloated J2EE. I wonder, now that J2EE has been reborn as JEE5 and EJB as we once knew it is dead, does WS-* need the same treatment? Anne's post seems to imply that WS-* just needs better tools. And, does simply making it possible to build and consume RESTful web services with a WS-* stack, as JEE5 does, go far enough? Maybe I'll get some answers in Mark Hadley's talk on building RESTful Web Services with JAX-WS (JavaOne 2006 TS-1222).

Tags: topic:[REST], topic:[Atom], topic:[Java], topic:[JavaOne2006]

Simon Phipps: We've gathered bloggers for free beer each year at JavaOne for the last few years - what say we do it again? I propose 5:30pm-7:30pm on Tuesday 16th May. Anyone interested? If so, say in the comments I'll go try to book the usual space! I can promise at least two well-known Sun bloggers will show up apart from me...

This will be the 3rd annual meetup. Great things happen at these blog meetups, BTW. I wouldn't miss it for the world.

Andy Oliver: Spent much of the day on something stupid that I did wrong. Thank god for the NetBeans's WORKING debugger (hear that Eclipsers...their debugger works AND they don't eat more CPU and memory than every Microsoft app I can get running on a Mac including Virtual PC combined -- simultaneously!!) -- or I might have never found it.

RTP blogger and JBoss hacker extraordinare is diggin' Netbeans. Not sure how long his Netbeans honeymoon will last; Andy's a tough customer.

You can tell by the frequency of "will Sun open source Java?" stories and rumors flying about that JavaOne is right around the corner. My talk is exactly two weeks from now, so it's time to stop blogging and start practicing