July 2, 2004
Via Dion, my quote of the week :
All I wanted was to build my jar and I got a web site.
Jonas Boner, AspectWerkz/BEA
I see more and more projects which use Maven as their build process also use Maven to run their applications...
Maven is a build process with (some) advantages and (lots of) inconveniences but it's not made to run applications. Yes, it is possible to do it but I find insane to have to download Maven, set it up just to run another application which has all its dependencies already downloaded... Maybe (crazy thought!) Maven and Ant could be used in a complementary way:
Maven for the build process (but IMHO Ant 1.6 is a better choice)
Ant to run the application
Or maybe, even better, we could improve java -jar and use scripting (Jython, Groovy,...) to get rid of Ant or Maven to run the applications (cf. Jetty or Eclipse).
July 1, 2004
That's a good idea from the expert group to release an early draft for JavaOne.
I now have an answer for my Message-Driven Beans question: they won't change.
One remark on the draft, it's a good idea to put in it only what has changed since EJB 2.1 because it makes it a quick read (93 pages) and helps to diff. But I hope that in the next release of the specification, they will put everything in it so that we don't have to refer to the EJB 2.1 specification sections. There are 2 pages about Message-Driven Beans in the EJB 3.0 spec which references 20 pages in the EJB 2.1 spec! ;-)
June 29, 2004
Apple previewed yesterday Mac OS X Tiger. I haven't watched the keynote but from the description, it does not contain a killer feature like Expose for Mac OS X Panther.
The enhanced search engine, Spotlight, or Safari RSS may be interesting but I don't think it is worth the price of Tiger when it is released.
All in all, that is a good thing that there is nothing I want badly from Tiger: I just got my PowerBook with Panther and I'd prefer to skip a release of Mac OS X. I'll keep my bucks for Mac OS X.5 (whatever its name is!).
June 28, 2004
Sun finally confirmed that Tiger is J2SE 5.0.
Frankly, I think the versioning of Java is quite absurd: you don't know if the number version refer to the edition, the platform or the language... I'd have preferred that Sun had chosen to go for Java Standard Edition 5.0 but
Well, enough complaints for such small stuff... I've to keep some for Apple when they release Mac OS XI!
Update: Apparently, I'm not the only one who is confused, David Flanagan is also wondering about the version numbers.
June 28, 2004
Apparently, Sun will change the version number of Java to 5.0 with Tiger. But it seems that they'll keep the name J2SE and J2EE.
It reminded me of a good laugh I had with a thread on TheServerSide.com about J3EE and the related bileblog.
Maybe Sun and the JCP will suprise anybody by going directly to J5SE and J5EE... Imagine all the consequences:
- Who would care about J2EE compliance, J5EE compliance is the way to go
- if J3EE would have been all about lightweight containers and aspects, what could be J5EE?
- Why EJB 3.0? I want my EJB 5.0 (but they'll have to be backwards compatible to version 1.0)!
- All the J3EE proponents will look so passé...
Seriously though, I think it's a good idea to update the major version number of Java but it'd be a good idea to also remove the 2 number from Java 2 Standard and Enterprise Edition. I'd prefer a Java Enterprise Edition 1.5 rather than explaining that the J2EE version 1.5 is dependent of Java language in version 5.0.
June 24, 2004
There's been a lot of discussions in the Java bloggosphere related to EJB 3.0 and its persistence mechanism.
But I haven't seen anything on changes or enhancements to Message-Driven Beans... I wonder if they'll follow the POJO way like the Entity Beans or if they'll remain the same. Well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
June 22, 2004
There's a lot going on related to asynchronous stuff in Java.
I expect to see a new breed of message bus which leverages all this stuff and others (e.g. NIO) to provide the core infrastructure to build <buzzword>SOA</buzzword> applications.
June 21, 2004
For my current mission, I've to port a web application developped for Tomcat 3.2 to Tomcat 4.x. Not a big deal, I thought...
Unfortunately, there is a minor change between Tomcat 3.2 and 4.x which made my working life a hell today: by default, Tomcat 3.2 imports java.util.Vector in the JSP page while Tomcat 4.x doesn't.
Since almost all the JSP pages of the application use Vector to iterate the data, I've to check every JSP page and explicitely add the import statement to make it work on Tomcat 4.x
I've got the weird feeling of being a Java archeologist: Java is not that old but it's still quite amazing to see the differences between the code written in early Java (and JSP 1.0 for the circumstances) and current Java state of the art.
I wondered how it'll feel when Java 1.5 (generics, metadata, concurrency) is be used everyday?
June 21, 2004
I've received Gmail invitations and I'm running out of friends to invite! :-)
If you are interested to get a Gmail invitation, leave a comment and I'll send you an invitation (I've got 3 ones left).
June 18, 2004
Every time, I've to work on a new project, I spend lots of time to understand the structure of the projects and the location of the files.
Eclipse is a tremendous help for that: on my new project (thousands of JSP/XML files, dozens of CVS modules), when I use the web applications and I want the source of a given jsp, I use Eclipe Navigate -> Open Resource... (Shift+Ctrl+R) to locate the files corresponding to a given regexp (e.g. *Summary.jsp).
It's also a good shorcut to know when you have to work on big projects where browsing the project hierarchy is just too slow (and requires way too many clicks!).