Blogging Roller

On Tuesday I attended talks on new trends in web security, Lenya and JackRabbit, iBatis, Apache XML-binding approaches, Struts and Struts Shale. I didn't learn a whole lot new, but it was good to get an update on these projects, status and plans for the future -- especially in the case of Struts, which seems to be forking into two incompatible frameworks (Struts TI and Struts Shale). Here's Ted Husted introducing Craig McClanahan's talk on Struts Shale.



After the early evening lightning talks, there was a screening of Michael Wechner's excellent documentary film FUD (Wyona Pictures), which included interviews with Brian Behlendorf, Danese Cooper, Ken Coar, Sam Ruby and others. Sam wasn't able to come to the conference, so it was nice to see/hear him up on the big screen. Here's Sam:

Tim Bray's slides for ApacheCon/US 2005 contained just five works: Derby, Threads, Beyond Java, Thanks. While the Derby slide was on the screen, Tim announced that Sun will be using and supporting Derby under the name Open Java DB and Francois Orsini gave demo of Derby embedded in Firefox and scripted by JavaScript, cool enough to excite even jaded Ted. While the word Threads was on the screen, Tim talked about Niagara and how CMT processors are going to be part of every webapp developer's future. For Beyond Java, Tim recommended the book of the same name, but took issue with some of the points (see his post on Beyond Java) and tried to stir some controversy by saying that threading features in Python and Ruby are "toys." Surprisingly, nobody took issue with this in the Q&A that followed the talk. On the Thanks slide, Tim took some time to thank Apache for 10 years of wonderful software and finally ended with a simple plea: don't screw up.

Here's Tim delivering the Tuesday keynote (apologies for the fuzzy photos).

I arrived at ApacheCon yesterday (Saturday) on a beautiful San Diego day, clear skies mild weather. I took a couple of pictures and posted them on Flickr for kids back home. Of course, the sunshine didn't stop me from marching right down to the basement for the hackathon, where I met Henri Yandell for the first time and ran into most of the same characters I'd encountered at last years's hackaton. I didn't stay late last night because I picked up a cold. Instead, I decided to sleep (for 10 hours!). After coffee, advil, sudafed and a long walk down the cruise ship docks this morning, I'm back and feeling much better.

Despite the beer, pizza, comfy couches and dinners that keep on rolling into the room, the hackathon is not just a social event. People have work to do and seem to be able to go heads-down and focus on getting things done. For example, today I'm sitting at the Geronimo table with Bruce Synder, David Jencks and others, where they're working to finish the Geronimo 1.0 release before the actual conference begins. I've got a little work to do today as well. My goal for the day is prepare the first Blogapps release, get ready for my talk tomorrow and help out with the extra beer problem. More later...

Tags: topic:{technorati}[ApacheCon], topic:{technorati}[ApacheCon2005]

Here's to Eduardo, Carla and Rich who recently launched The Aquarium, the first Roller-powered group blog that I've seen in the wild. They'll be blogging the growing Glassfish community and, I hope, providing us with some feedback to help us improve the Roller group blogging experience.

Cedric Beust: dynamic languages are not making fast progress in developer mindshare

I wonder when that was published. The evidence from Tim O'Reilly seems to contradict such a claim. Tim says Python book sales are up 20% and Ruby are up 1552%. Quote found via James Robertson.

It's not too late to sneak one in. I just submitted one myself. Here's the link:
https://www28.cplan.com/cfp_2006J1/CFPLogin.jsp

Cool! Mustang (Java SE 6) will have built-in continuations via the Rhino JavaScript engine. So my old JSPFlow code and it's much more successful child StrutsFlow should work right out of the box.

The ServerSide reports that two popular Java web application frameworks, Struts and WebWork, are merging. Here's the Merger with Webwork proposal. That's really good news for Struts users (like me). We'll get the WebWork innovations (and maybe even a good upgrade path) and WebWork users will get a bigger/stronger community.

The weekend is over so I suppose I should blog something to move that awful underwear experiment post down of the page. So how about this. As Rich Sharples asks, why would anybody use Websphere Community Edition rather than Glassfish/Sun Java App Server? Know why? Leave him a comment.

Lookin' good!

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/5.0beta2-button.jpg" alt="Netbeans 5.0b2 badge" />

I gave up on the first Netbeans 5.0 beta, it threw way too many weird exceptions and I just didn't have the time. Fortuately, the new beta2 release looks a lot better. I switched to beta2 on my Mac and tomorrow, I'll do the same on my Solaris x86 box. It's got all the refactorings I'd been using in Eclipse and the new CVS client is fantastic compared to the old one and only an interation (or two) away from matching the one in Eclipse.

The only significant shortcomings I've found are the lack of Subversion support and no global search-and-replace. Actually, Netbeans 5.0 does have Subversion support, but it's based on the crummy old "generic VCS" system and, what's worse, you can't use both the new CVS client and the Subversion client at the same time. That's pretty disappointing for those who have projects in both CVS and Subversion (like me). So Netbeans guys, want me to delete Eclipse from my hard-dive? You're almost there. Just add those two missing features.

YeeeHAI! I've been accepted as a committer on the ROME project, which is very convenient because I have a big ole chunk'o'code to commit for Atom 1.0 format support. After reviews and tweaks, Atom format 1.0 support should be available in ROME v0.8.

Both Java Studio Creator and Java Studio Enterprise are now free to Sun Developer Network members, which is also free. Judging from the wording on the page, this looks like a limited time offer. Check out the <a href= "http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/jsenterprise/learning/tutorials/jse8/overview/index.html">flash-demo of Studio Enterpise on the SDN free Java tools page, the UML tool looks very cool.

<a href= "http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/geertjan?entry=blogging_in_netbeans_on_netbeans"> Geertjan's got a very cool screenshot of (what looks like) Mozilla embedded in Netbeans via the JDIC project's Embedded Browser Component.

In case you live under a rock and haven't heard the news yet, Netbeans 5.0 beta is out. I'm downloading it now. I tried one of the q-builds a couple of weeks ago and was amazed by the new CVS integration. This time around I'm going to take the new Matisse GUI builder for a spin and see what it can do for my clunky little BlogClient.

After getting some feedback from Alejandro Abdelur of the ROME project, I spent part of my weekend revising my Atom 1.0 patch. I sent my new patch to Alejandro and to the ROME dev list today.

RIFE, a continuations-based web application framework for Java has decided to use the CDDL license. I like the way Geert puts it, CDDL: a copy-left license without ambiguities.

<a href= "http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2005/9/24/rife_adopts_the_cddl_license">Geert Bevin: For the 1.1 release of RIFE, we have decided to dual license the framework and add CDDL as an option alongside the previous LGPL license.

The CDDL offers a copy-left open-source license that doesn't have any ambiguities regarding the terms 'linking' and 'executable', which make no sense in a Java application. There is no possible viral behavior that extends beyond RIFE itself. The CDDL protects us by requiring all source modifications to RIFE to be contributed back under the same license, but imposes no restrictions at all on the use of RIFE in a commercial application.

However, to be able to combine RIFE with a GPL license, a stronger copy-left license is required. In this case, the LGPL can be selected.

Since I posted yesterday, I've learned that Subversion is in the works for Java.net. If your new project can't wait for that, you can try Javalobby's new JavaForge service.

<a href= "http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd?anchor=subversion_options_for_open_source">Matt wonders when Java.net will provide Subversion based source code control.

The Netbeans guys want feedback on Netbeans 5.0, which is essentially feature-complete. Download it, give it a spin and let them know what you think. I'm downloading it right now.

Alejandro announces a new release of ROME (the Java-based feedparser that powers Roller's built-in aggregator) is available. ROME v0.7 BETA is primarily a bug fix release. Judging from the mailing-list, I'd say Atom 1.0 format support is probably coming in the next release.