I really dig on the eye candy that compiz and the awn window manager brings out for Linux.

Unfortunately I had to turn compiz off because java had some bugs with compiz like the unnerving blank dialog boxes in Swing based applications. Now there is a jdk early access that took care of that and so far so good. I haven't had drawbacks yet, but then again I have only played with it for 1 hour. To obtain the jdk6.0_u10 here is the link.

Enjoy.

The best java web framework, JBoss Seam 2.0.0GA is out and it is absolutely amazing.

What is so amazing about it?

• PDF generation
• email generation
• easiest ajax development
• integrated ajax widgets
• integrated facelets templating
• unit-test, functional-test, integration-test friendly
• component-based
• ejb3-based
• rapid-development
• conversation based scoping
• integrated security
• GWT integration
• extended JSF EL features
• and on and on...

I am so confident in everything that JBoss Seam does that I am ready to change my entire business around it. This is your complete solution in a web framework. I am updating a customer's site currently using JBoss Seam 2.0.0, and I am really excited about it mainly because Seam is expressive and keeps me productive. I look forward to doing more business with this framework for many years to come.

Disclaimer: I am not an employee or contractor with JBoss

• Groovy will enjoy great success. People will love the idea of having a powerful scripting language that uses the well known Java API at their disposal. Groovy will bring about the repatriation of several Ruby users that defected from Java.
  
• Grails will see some success, but that success won't come 'til late 2007. This is because people need time to learn Groovy first, and the Grails developers will probably be working diligently towards version 1.0 throughout 2007.
• Developers will realize that SOA has nothing to do with Web Services. The SOA community will also gain a general understanding of what SOA really is, hopefully before SOA 2.0 comes out. ;)
• The Java community will continue to seek clarity on the future of Java and whether or not Java is meant to be an easy language to learn. Such ruminations will lead to more great debates on generics, in-line XML, the arrow operator, and whether it is Java's manifest destiny to include features from other languages in the JDK in order for Java to remain on top.
• EJB3 will finally be released by major vendors and will gain acceptance by developers.
  
• JBoss Seam will gain acceptance by many web developers, but will continue to have problems selling its idea because those same web developers will have difficulty wrapping their heads around what stateful development is and how it's useful to them.
  
• Legions of well-known web and desktop Java developers will be bored with web and desktop development and will start to get creative with Java on other devices.
• JUnit dominance will be relinquished to TestNG.
• Ant will be demoted by the masses as merely a vehicle for scripting to get builds done.
• Dependency Injection and Interface Oriented Design will continue to be accepted by Java Developers.
• The Google Web Toolkit will be the most talked about Java based product in 2007. It will bring non-Java developers to the Java language, eager to do outstanding things with AJAX without the need to code in JavaScript.
  
• With systems like Subversion/CVS, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Feature/Bug Tracking software, Gmail, Blogs and Wikis. Developer machines will be and should be relegated to being hard drives dedicated to holding only the JDK, version controlled source code and libraries, and music files that developers listen to while coding. 
  

I was listening to the November 17th Buzz Out Loud, a C-Net podcast, in which they reported some very disturbing news. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft is making a claim that all Linux distros uses our intellectual property. The deal is that if you use SuSe Linux, then you are off the hook for violating copyright. Think of this as a modern day indulgence from St. Redmond's Square.

Now, because of this news, I have to reflect on what a good job Sun did in deflecting Microsoft from violating Java's rules and regulations by not providing a constant cross platform VM. Hypothetically, if the Sun lawsuit had not been won, I can assure you that there would be an announcement from Ballmer condemning all non-Microsoft Java VM programmers of violating Microsoft’s copyright for any features from any Microsoft Java version that may have seeped into Sun's Java version.

I stumbled upon a Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit.

Two days ago, version 0.8 of this plug in was released. I can't wait to give this a try. jEdit has always been a great application and it's user base can only grow with this plugin.

I took these screenshots a while back, but only recently found time to blog about them. The first picture is a capture of one of many articles about Richard Monson-Haefel declaring that this is the "Beginning of the End for Java EE" and that one of Java EE's murderers is the ever so villainous SOA.

Too bad the advertisement that leads into this article is for Oracle Fusion Middleware, which is, you guessed it, a Java EE-based middleware product that is SOA-ready.

The article with advertisement: (click to enlarge)

The full page advertisement: (click to enlarge)

From the Oracle Fusion Middleware Overview

Oracle incorporates the leading technical and industry standards across the entire Oracle Fusion Middleware family, com- bining the design concepts of SOA and event-driven architecture (EDA) with widely accepted development methods such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL); Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE); and Java Connector Architecture (JCA). Leveraging these standards guaran- tees compatibility among all your information systems.

Oh, by the way, Paul McCartney is still alive.

Alright! This is the ABQJUG announcement for our meeting that will take place this coming Wednesday, July 26th, 2006. Training session time using JBoss Seam!

I know our previous ABQJUG Session in May was about JBoss Seam, but I got to thinking… the JUG website really, really sucks. My fault? Perhaps. But now is not the time to point fingers. ;)

So, after my morning cup of java, my creative juices started working, and behold - the perfect meeting idea! This Wednesday, we will have an interactive project that builds our ABQJUG website from scratch using JBoss Seam! If you have ever wanted to know how to build quick and easy web applications in Java with database integration then you will definitely want to attend this upcoming meeting. This training session will offer many great benefits:

• One brand-spanking-new dynamic ABJQUG website
• Tons of new technologies, including EJB3, JSF, JBoss Seam, AJAX
• Massive amounts of audience participation
• Absolutely perfect forum for beginners learning Java.
• Endless possibilities to make play dates with other Java programmers
• But most importantly… A quenching of the audience’s thirst to bask in the warm glow of my good looks.

Uh, scratch that last one...

The meeting will start at 3:00 PM. Because there will be a lot of fun stuff to do and not a lot of time to do it, I do plan to start at 3:00 PM sharp! You may arrive late, free country, but if you do, you will miss out on some primo stuff and have no one to blame except yourself. ;) The meeting will extend to 5:30 PM, at the latest. However, I will try my best to wrap it up by 5:00 PM.

The meeting will be held at our regular meeting place - the Cherry Hills Library at 6901 Barstow NE Albuquerque, NM 87111. Please do not bring any food or beverages with the exception of bottled water.

This meeting is free. If you know of anyone that would like to be a part of our ABQJUG, please have them email me at dhinojosa [that squiggly character] evolutionnext.com.

Meeting information is also on our website

Danno

On this month's TIOBE index, Java has held on to number one yet again. I was surprised to find that popularity had grown by +2.19%. Well, it looks like the java language has narrowly escaped its "impending doom" yet again. Take that java doomsayers! Don't quit your day job, whatever that is...

The other surprise is Ruby which is positioned at #17 - a magnificent climb from last year's rank of #30. The evangelists for Ruby are certainly getting their jobs done. Congratulations to them.

There are some WTF movers and shakers in this latest index too. Visual Fox Pro went from #35 a year ago to #13! The editors of the wikipedia entry for FoxPro seem to be proud of this feat. Given the so-called popularity of Visual FoxPro I have to now dub it the "Michael Bolton" of computer languages. Sure, it's popular, but do you really know of anyone who uses Visual Fox Pro, or, for that matter, do you know anyone who owns a Michael Bolton album?

The other active languages on the list are Pascal (up 5 positions) , ActionScript (up 15 positions), VB (up 3), VB.NET (down 3), and COBOL is almost out of the top list (down 9).

I am a member of the pragmatic programmer mailing list. One of our list members, Joe Van Dyk, sparked off a discussion titled “What goes into version control?”. It was a great question that I had to find an answer for myself over the years, because there were no actual rules.

I personally recommend that you put into your version control all of the things that will allow you to jump from one machine onto to another, checkout your project, and start your work. This recommendation comes in particularly handy when your primary machine is on the blink.

In this vein, items that get placed into my version control include documentation from the customer, library documentation, library binaries, keystores, and even IDE project files. I do not include class files, or jars that get created by my “build” or “dist” target.

You might also consider placing into your version control other types of files that should be safely stored in case you become unhinged and start eating your laptop while yelling “melted butter”. Believe me, if you have ever programmed in EJB 2.x or even 1.x, you have, at one time or another, thought about eating a laptop.

This particular scenario has forced me to put into my version control items like customer invoices, RFPs, copies of emails, agreements, electronic receipts, etc. It is a sound insurance policy to do so. This rule falls in line with a blog entry that I read a long time ago by Joey Hess, who likes to keep his life in subversion. Joey's blog entry is the main reason for my transformation into the digital packrat that I am today.

Lastly, I highly recommend that your version control be somewhere other than your office. In fact, it should be in a completely different building, unless you have a very good emergency plan. I currently pay $200+ a month to kattare.com for them to host my dedicated server. The dedicated server contains my web site and blog, my version control, my build automation tool, and whatever else I can put into it. The cost may seem high to you, but if your career is as a self-employed programmer, or even an overzealous company programmer, this option is a no-brainer. Plus, it's a nice business write-off.

Let me know what you, as a Java programmer, put into your version control. If you are part of a company development team, what are you allowed or not allowed to put into your version control?

So I am looking for more books to read, and I start by perusing the Pragmatic Programmer Bookshelf web site - they have been my one of my favorite publishing companies since last year and I have been a convert to many of their ideals. In fact, to expound on this aside, I have changed as a programmer since I read their first book The Pragmatic Programmer and even more so with the starter kit trilogy Pragmatic Version Control, Pragmatic Project Automation, and Pragmatic Unit Testing.

Getting back to my perusal of the Pragmatic Programmer Bookshelf web site, this Sunday, while looking through their catalog for new stuff to buy, what do I find… a book that, in concept, rubs me the wrong way. The title is From Java to Ruby: Things every manager should know and it is going to be released in or around this week. I have not read it yet, because it hasn't been released, so I am just commenting on the teaser description provided by the website.

The description for From Ruby to Java echoes a lot like programming language propaganda. The first part of it reads:

Wow! I didn't realize that I was so unproductive with Java. All those happy moments programming away and getting things done was just a facade. Thanks Ruby and Rails!

The next line is the definition of propaganda, in fact, the description is just flat out saying it:

Yikes! What is going on? Shades of Khrushchev. Managers and executives must be persuaded by the Ruby red manifesto to crush the troublesome and insipid Java with all of its freedoms, its red, white and blue logo, and its JCP capitalistic mindset.

I like Ruby and I like Java. Ruby is my new language of the year 2006 (according the Pragmatic Programmer, good programmers need to learn a new language once a year), and I am enjoying what Ruby has to offer. I especially like its callback functionality and mixins. There is a lot to Ruby that I wish was in Java, and there are some things that are in Ruby that I don't want to see in Java. So this post is nothing negative on Ruby, just on the tone of this new book and its implied purpose.

Ruby can stand on its own. It is a great language, and it can, as it has been doing, climb up on the popularity ladder without crushing skulls.

I will order this book so that I can experience its true meaning, but I am a bit guarded. I hope the book won't be a free-for-all Java bash manual. Instead, I hope that this book will highlight positives on both languages and analyze when it is appropriate to use one over the other.

I did a search a couple of minutes ago on Podcast.net. I was looking for Java podcasts to subscribe to. I typed in 'java' and was surprised to see that a professor at Harvard Extension School had his computer science podcasts up online. The content he provides is an XML and J2EE course for the spring 2006 semester.

The course, which you can listen to now, covers XML, DTD, Schemas, SVG, and what looks like every other conceivable X*. Click here to review the podcasts for yourselves.

I found the idea of educational podcasts pretty interesting and quite groundbreaking. Educational podcasts may possibly evolve into the new university curriculum standard, reducing the university campus to an amusement park where students go only to find parties and sex.

I set up an enterprise application with email functionality on a secure network. The SMTP server happened to be on a secure network as well. At first, when I ran the application, I received the following exception:

530 5.7.0 Must issue a STARTTLS command first

Let me take this opportunity to log into my blog the simple solution to overcome this problem.

First off, upgrade the mail.jar library in your application or application server. The latest and greatest comes with TLS support in it.

The next thing to do is to set the property mail.imap.starttls.enable or mail.smtp.starttls.enable to "true".

That's it.

You can find more information on the new TLS features in a text document called SSLNOTES. This text document comes along as part of the javamail download.

Good Luck!