Blogging Roller

David Berlind recently blogged about using JavaDB (aka Apache Derby) to provide the browser-based persistence needed for offline AJAX applications. The downside is that you need a JVM in the browser, but the upside is cross-browser portability. Oh, wait. Maybe the JVM requirement is an upside (for a second, I forgot I work for Sun).

Berlind didn't mention the mozStorage project, which is adding the open source SQLite database to Firefox. According to the mozStorage docs, you'll be able to issue SQL queries from JavaScript in the Firefox 3.0 timeframe. The downside is that it's Firefox only -- or may that's the upside.

Via The Aquarium I see that Mark Hadley's work on Web Application Description Language (WADL) is now a Sun Technical Report. WADL provides a way to describe a REST based web application or service so that tools can discover services, generate proxies, etc. As I understand it, WADL is to REST as WSDL is to SOAP.

There's also something new since the last time I looked at WADL. Mark has added a section on the Atom protocol and examples that show how to use a WADL file to replace an Atom introspection document. Looks like good stuff to me. If you need an introspection doc for your REST based web service, why not use WADL?

Via Google, I found that there's also a WADL presentation on-line.

I've got  to admit, I'm itchin' to start using the JDK 5.0 features. I want to see how EJB3/Annotations stack up against the Hibernate/XDoclet setup I've been using for years now in various projects. And I'd love to check out Xzajo's new Hibernate plugin for Netbeans 5.5. But I can't do that at work because Roller is still stuck in JDK 1.4.2 land. I can development, test and deploy using JDK 5.0, but we're still keeping the Roller code-base 1.4.2 compatible. Sigh.

And that reminds me. Hibernate itself is becoming something of a plugin. Why? Because Hibernate is providing an implementation of the Java pesistence API.

For example, if Roller used the Java persistence API instead of the Hibernate API, we could eliminiate our Hibernate dependency and still allow Roller users to continue to use Hibernate. We'd be coding against an API with multiple implementations: the Hibernate EJB3 implementation under the LGPL, the Glassfish EJB3 implementation under the CDDL and someday the Geronimo EJB3 implementation under the Apache license. We could plug-out Hibernate and plug-in something else. Plus, we be waving good-bye to JDK 1.4.2 -- a very nice side-effect.

Jim Hurley on the JINI-USERS mailing list: we feel that "Jini" would make a compelling top level project at Apache, and plan to make contacts there in hopes of successfully proposing "Jini" as a project.

Right on!

... an obligatory Sun-related post to counter all that borg talk

The news had already leaked out via blogs, but now it's official: Java Studio Enterprise is going open source as part of Netbeans 5.5. I'm really looking forward to 5.5. I'm most interesed in the Subversion support, but I'll definitely be checking out the 2-way UML modeler and the new XML tools as well. No doubt about it, the 5.5 feature set will lure a lot of new developers to Netbeans.

JavaOne sessions have been scheduled. I'm speaking on Tuesday at 11AM, a much better time slot than last year when Patrick, Kevin and I were stuck with a lunch-time slot on the last day for our Beyond Blogging session.

    Session Id: TS-1756
    Session Title: Java™ Technology and REST: Implementing the Atom Protocol
    Track: XML and Web Services; Web Tier
    Room: Esplanade 301
    Date: 16-MAY-06
    Start Time: 11:00

In related news, I also submitted two proposals for ApacheCon EU 2006 in Dublin.

For Blojsom 3.0, David Czarnecki is injecting a Hibernate backend into the codebase via Spring and working to keep the easy-install in place. It should be very interesting to watch his progress.

I just heard from the JavaPosse podcast that the GRASS Geographic Information System (GIS) is back with a new Java/Swing based front-end called JGRASS. The screenshots look pretty nice. Just, so you don't have to endure the absolutely horiffic ad-packed Sys-Con web site, which is linked to in the JavaPosse #40 show notes, here are some better links JGRASS information:

• The JGRASS documentation page at HydroloGIS.com
• Abstract of a JGRASS talk by John Preston and others

Why do I care? GRASS was my life for most of my early career and I worked with John Prestion in Kingston, Jamaica for over a year. I mentioned GRASS recently  in the eWeek interview and I've mentioned it here on the blog a couple of times before: 1993, Hey, I wrote that and That was fun.

I've complained in the past about the fact that Eclipse for Solaris/X86 is linked to Motif and thus, drag-and-drop doesn't work, the mouse-wheel support is broken and  the whole thing looks like crap.

Since then I've switched over to Netbeans, but I when I saw that instructions were available for building Eclipse 3.1.1 on Solaris/X86/GTK, I just couldn't resist trying them out. Here's the result, Eclipse 3.1.1 running on Solaris 10 for X86. Looks almost as good as Netbeans, eh? Maybe they'll finally put an end to those awful Motif builds.

Did I miss something? When did it become possible to just apt-get the JDK as Tim does in his Nexenta review?

Tim O'Reilly: I was just browsing the buzz game, and discovered something that surprised me. While the futures market still has its money on Eclipse, in the past year Netbeans has passed Eclipse in actual Yahoo! search volume.

Want to learn about parsing and producing RSS and Atom with Java? You're in luck. New ROME contributor Randy Ray has written an excellent intro titled Taking a tour of ROME and published it on Java.Net.



And in case you missed it I'll say it again: ROME v0.8 is available! This new (beta) release adds support for Atom 1.0 support and a bunch of new modules including "Content, iTunes Podcast, Slash, Google Base, Creative Commons, and MediaRSS."

Matt Raible: It's interesting to hear someone from Sun say that "JDO is dead". What are your thoughts? Should Roller change their persistence backend just to satisfy Apache?

Chris Adamson: Pixel-accuracy has led to a miserable fool's errand for both of the major Java GUI toolkits, Swing and SWT. Being rather coupled to the native Windows API's, SWT should enjoy a huge advantage here, but its obsessive fidelity to Windows' GUI shows no signs of ushering in a new era of Java Desktop development... just a lot of very loud evangelists, and complaints about its performance on other platforms. Swing, despite its bulk and sometimes ruefully ornate design, is probably better suited for the long run, because its goals are ultimately based in functionality, not appearance.

Project Teepee. Great news. I love the new CVS client in Netbeans 5 and now Subversion is getting the same treatment, possibly as soon as May. Via Roumen.

I'm very happy to announce that my proposal Java and REST: Implementing the Atom protocol was accepted for JavaOne 2006. Tags: topic:[JavaOne 2006], topic:[Atom protocol]

Dion Almer: Sun: hire a couple of people to work on JRuby so Rails can run on the JVM. Or, fund Groovy to finish the job, or.... do something!

This comment on Dion's post is interesting too:

Mikael Gueck: Please Sun, do about Python and Ruby exactly what you did about VB - concentrate on building actually useful tools. Pandering to bored programmers is not a viable long term strategy, it's not like the current fad will last any longer than any of the previous ones.

I'm not sure that pandering to bored programmers (developing "crippety crap," as the Drunk and Retired guys might say) is a bad strategy as there are probably a lot of them out there, but I do agree that Groovy, Jython and JRuby are very important efforts.

My first ebook is Raible's Spring Live. Roller now ships with the Spring jar (but currently only for Acegi), so I figured I should read up on Spring. I'm looking forward to having more time to read it next month.

It took a bit longer than I'd expected, but I made it through the Tigers upgrade. I'm now working with J2SE 5.0 Tiger on my Solaris x64 box, my Powerbook and as of a couple of minutes ago, this site is running on  5.0 as well.

I also upgraded my Powerbook from Panther to Mac OS X 10.4.3 Tiger. Along the way I learned that you shouldn't try to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone to a network mounted drive (it will work, but it's extremely slow) and that I didn't really need to buy iLife (the old versions of iMovie, iDVD and iPhoto continue to work). Migrating to the new Mail.app took all morning, so I'm only now getting to my overflowing mailbox.

I had no idea. I've read a number of presentations and internals docs about our portal product, but somehow I completely missed the fact that Sun portal 7 (or for the lawyers in the audience Sun Java™ System Portal Server 7) will include my favorite wiki software JSPWiki.

Rich Shaples: this means you can deploy and manage the wiki infrastructure centrally yet allow communities to maintain their own sites - so you get the benefits of centralized management without the inflexibility. As well as support for Wiki Portlets (and Portlets within wikis), Portal Server 7 introduces the new concept of communities - to reflect the informal. non hierarchical nature of many workgroups (ie. virtual teams). There is also great support for AJAX in Portlets to enable you to develop apps. with a much richer user interface.

Cool beans. And that got me thinking. Sun's open source java projects (e.g. Glassfish and eventually Portal) will have an advantage of sorts over Apache's open source Java projects (e.g. Geronimo and Pluto) because Sun can include LGPL components. Apache policy forbids ASF products from having dependencies on components with licenses more restrictive than the ASL. Sun has no such policy. So for example, Sun can bundle JSPWiki, use Hibernate and have bundelicious relationships with other LGPL goodies. Very interesting...

Tags: topic:[wiki], topic:[JSPWiki], topic:[Sun], topic:[LGPL], topic:[Apache]