The World of a Penguin

I use the web to find solutions of my problems, as most people do today. I have noted a huge difference between two communities I am using, the Java and the Linux community. With the Linux community I mean it in a broad sense like Linux distributions and common software running on Linux like Postgres, Apache, Evolution, F-spot, Python etc. I.e classic open source software. When I search on a problem in the Linux area I most of the time get good hits with people having the same problem and good answers from people who knows how to solve it. The hits are on mailing lists, forums, and blogs. On the other hand when searching on problems around Java I most of the time find people who have the same problem, but no answers. I know this is a very big generalization but are anybody else experience the same? Why are people in classic open source more willing to help than in the Java world?

I just noticed that Springsource has released the Spring framework for Python. Interesting, especially since i like the Spring framework in Java and I prefer Python as language in a lot of cases. I must try it some day....

It is obvious most vendors are very focused on supporting the cloud. Ubuntu 9.04 focus on provide so you can have your "own" Amazon cloud. Canonical provides images for Amazon EC2. SpringSource makes it simpler to deploy spring applications on the cloud, both own Google AppEngine and Amazon. Vmware helps you to build your inhouse cloud. Then we have all SaaS services like Google Apps, Salesforce, sugarcrm. The big question is: How do we get single sign on on the cloud? Enough about clouds for today. One of the bigest news from SpringOne here in Amsterdam is that SpringSource development environment, STS, will be free as in no fees. Today it was mentioned in one conversation that a new minor release of STS will be released next thursday.

SpringSource is really pushing Groovy and Grails. Hope they start pushing Jython too. Heard a nice talk just before lunch about transactions. Transactions engines are hard to write. Recomendation is to skip XA transactions. Time for some The before the next session.

One session talked about the upcoming Springframework 3.0. It is more annotations, support for validation in JPA/Hibernate beans. Most interesting is that Spring will solve the REST -problem in Java. Python and Ruby has already solved it. JAX-RS does not solve it in Java. It does not support a way to negotiating what format the result should be in (JSON, XML, HTML etc). Spring 3.0 solves this. So this will be very usefull. Spring 3 will be available early this summer. The conference has ben good so far. Two days to go. I have also attended a talk about performance tuning of Tomcat and a more detailed talk about Roo wich I mentioned from the keynote.

Some interesting notes from the keynote by Rod Johnson. SpringSource modified Eclipse environment STS for make it easier to develop Spring applications will be free from now. Their new tool Roo (may change name) to kickstart web development looks very promising. Finally something in the java world that makes simple forms development as easy as VB or Delphi.

I am attending the SpringOne conference in Amsterdam. The conference will start any minute now. The program looks very interesting. the morning here in Amsterdam was a bit cloudy but the sun is now shining. For you that did not know that; you can be full on one pancake. I just eat one with mushrooms and cheese.

The 64-bit saga continues . Todays discovery is that Sun does not provide a webstart-plugin for 64-bit Linux environment, in my case Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). My plan was to poke around the 1.0.0 release of OpenDS for a few minutes and see what you get when running their 60 seconds installation from You Tube.

I have observed that I haven't written in this blog for nearly a month. Not much has happened in the area of this blog. Some more colleges has start using Linux on their desktop. Currently I am developing an "failsafe" system for emergency handling in Java/JEE/Spring. I am now working on the second generation. I have updated a lot of crypto keys as a follow up to the nasty openssl-bug in Debian/Ubuntu. Today I listened to a talk by Martin Fowler and Jim Webber about middleware and Enterprise Service Buses (ESB). A talk well worth listen to if you are working in or close to the SOA world.

I have started to take a closer look at Google Web Toolkit (GWT). It looks very nice giving me the possibility to debug AJAX-clients and removing the need for quirks for different browser (read MS IE). Unfortunatly GWT is only shiped as 32-bit and I am running a 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04. The SVN-repository of GWT include some pre-compiled libraries which are compiled for 32-bit Linux. The easy way is to download and install a 32-bit Java from Sun. Following the GWT getting started got me up and running. But I wanted to use my usual Eclipse in 64-bit version. So I started Eclipse and imported my lab project according to the instructions. Then it was time for some settings. First, add the 32-bit Java as an JRE to Eclipse: Open the Window menu and select Preferences. Select Java and then Installed JREs in the tree menu to the left. Select add and pointed out where you installed your 32-bit Java and closed all the dialogs. Now its time to connect the GWT-project to the 32-bit Java. Right click...

Hereby I nominate ant to the challenge of most stupid build environment. Why? Its function for tar files together does not preserve the rights on the files as all normal tar-programs does. If it were on windows I can understand it, but not on Linux/Ubuntu. Theres a work around where one can say that this file has these rights and those files has some other rights. But why make it so complicated? Well there is some kind of motivation for it; Java does not support file permissions. This is the big drawback with write once, run everywhere. One cannot take advantage of different Operating systems features. By the way... The world has been a better place, at least according to all Vista fans. M$ start shipping SP1. I am sad for them their world only gets better less than ones a year. Mine and all other ubunteros world gets better every six month.

We need to learn Java programmers that stack traces are not valid error messages. They should neither write, eventually, extra error information within the stack trace. Please write a clear error message that is separable from the stack traces. The stack traces are OK in debug mode, not in production mode.

One of my biggest problems when working with Eclipse were until now that I did not know how to be in two different places in one file at the same time. For you that know emacs, C-x 2 and then have the same file in both windows. But to night I stumbled up on the solution . Right click on the editors tab and select New Editor. The file appears in two different editor tabs. Now right click on one of the editor tabs again and select the Move submenu and then Editor. Drag your framed window until you are below the editor frame. This will definitely simplify my development in Eclipse.

I continued the day by listening to a re-run of Ivar Jacobssons talk, which where I missed yesterday due to the room got full before I got there. It was the most interesting talk at the conferens, even if it wasn't about Java. As you may know Dr. Jacobsson is one of the three gurus behind RUP . He admitted during the talk that RUP and Objectory were too heavy and why throw out everything if only one part of your process fail. Instead he have broken down processes into eight practices . Practices are parts of processes which more or less all processes include in different forms. Example of practices are teams or architecture. There are not only one way to implement a team, so there will be several practices that describes teams and you should select the one that fits your organization. Jacobsson have one way to implement each of the eight practices. Other will present others, in total there are 100s of practices. Each practice is documented as ten to twenty cards and then some page...

It is day 2 of JavaZone 2007. I have today listened on several new good talks. Two about SOA; one were a case study and the other was about how to use Apache Tuscany . Tuscany may fit well into my current project about handling warnings using CAP . Futher, I listened to Matt Raibles overview of Java web-frameworks. Which not make the choice of a web-framework easier. But I have drawn the conclusion that Spring is rather popular du to is improvements of J2EE.

The day continued with seminar from Sun about new things in Java. They talked about JavaFx as a alternative for Adobe Flash. Then they showed robots controlled by Linux and, of course, Java. The question is how to convince my boss that we need one to make better weather forecasts. Next talk was about Scrum and agile methods, with focus on CMMI 5 certified companies. It gave a very good overview of Scrum and a lot of figures that it is good for productivity (up to a factor 10). I am personally pro to Agile methods, but I question if the figures can is that good. The speaker Jeff Suunerland also mentioned a new study that to gain the most of a programmer, it should work 16 hours a week. I doubt I can convince my boss that I work 16 hours a week with the same salary. Back to more Java specific topics and two talks about Spring. One about a new batch processing framework and one about security functionality. The Security part looks very promising. I still wounder why and when to choose J2E...

After a quick lunch I planned to listen o the OO and process guru Ivar Jacobsson but the room was full even before I got my sandwich. Instead I entered a seminar about REST which was quite interesting. Teh speach presented the fundamental architectural principles and explained problems and possibilities with real world examples. Then I entered a seminar about how to structural code in a good manner to allow the software to evolve. It is quite connected to my old research area of maintainability of object oriented programs. The conclusion is the same as for ten years, but they need to be repeated; Avoid circular dependencies. Have cleare aims of your packages, modules etc. If you get circular dependencies, do refactoring. Of course it may break backward compability. You need of course think how to handle lack of backward compability. So far I haven't seen any Linux computers, except of my own Ubuntu. The rest are Mac or Windows, I wonder why.

It is a nice September day here in Oslo and JavaZone have started. I started the morning with a seminar about Domain Driven Design and Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). I continued with a seminar about the state of Ajax held by some Ajaxians . It seams that we will start using Ajax for offline applications as well as on server side. Client Ajax applications will be packaged as native applications. Javascript 2 is on its way inspired by Python.

I have just arrived to Oslo, Norway, to join the JavaZone conference for the next two days. It looks like the hot topics in the Java World at the moment are: Spring Mule SOA Why is Ruby on Rails becoming so popular? Agile methods It seems that J2EE and JBoss have taken a step back. I look forward to two exciting days.

Since I do Python programming at my spare time and Java programming, including a bunch of other Java technologies such as JSP, JSTL etc, at work. These articles were very interesting to read even if they are 2½ years old: Python is not Java Java is not Python, either Python interfaces is not Java interfaces