Hilarious Sun commercials
They might be old for those of you who live over the pond, but I found these Sun commercials over at youtube and the are absolutely brilliant. Go check them out
- Episode 1: “Good Enough” is still Good … Right?
- Episode 2: More Is More
- Episode 3: More Is Never Enough
- Episode 4: Out Of The Box
Minor update..
Well just a quick update what has been going on lately.
Another certification…
Last week I completed (and cleared) the Certified JBoss Developer, the test was quite interesting and a good followup to the the JBoss for Advanced J2EE Developer course I attended a couple of weeks back. Quite interesting to write an open-book certification, where you get 24h to complete the test (taking it at home). I recommend the course to anyone looking for the nitty-gritty details about JBoss AS (although you can pick up the information by reading the JBoss AS Guide). Although certification really doesn’t tell you anything, it can be a good edge to get interesting gigs.
Joined a JSR expert group..
Since I joined the JCP almost 10months ago, I have been more of a lurker (I haven’t participated actively in any JSRs). The time of change is here, some months ago I requested to join the JSR299 (WebBeans) expert group, and yesterday I got the approvement email. The JSR is really interesting, for those unfamiliar with it it’s basically Seam in a standardized way (the JSR is lead by Gavin King).
Work, work, work..
It has been real busy week at work (both client wise and internally). My current project is nearing it’s end (implementation wise) and I have had more time to actually do some coding in the project (ie less meetings, management, mentoring). I’ve been concentrating on verifying the overall architecture against the requirements. Also quite a bit of refactoring, moving out some common JSF functionalites to reusable components, this have given me a good chance to really dive into the JSF spec. Hopefully I will make these components available in some form over the coming months, it’s not exactly rocket-science component but usefully small tidbits.
I have also been busy on weekends, late nights migrating the infrastructure from old hardware/software to new servers. To this stage we been quite successfully and we have deprecated some applications, and old hardware. And I have begun to extend, and introduce a SSO solution to our business critical applications (most of them homegrown, and on diffent platforms such as .NET, J2EE, and classic ASP). We settled on CAS which seems to be a proven solution, but we are not quite there yet. We need to plug this into a Microsoft Active Directory for the authentication store, any suggestions here are very much welcome.
Seam 1.1CR1
The CR1 of Seam 1.1 were released yesterday, and it brings allot of new nice features. One nice feature are that you now have the option to use any Java EE application server along with your Seam-application. Another thing to note is the integration with the ICEFaces and Ajax4JSF frameworks.
- New concurrency model for AJAX-based applications
- Integration with ICEfaces and Ajax4JSF
- Support for J2EE environments
- The Seam Application Framework for data-oriented applications
- seam-gen, a command line tool for generating seam projects, actions, and reverse engineering existing databases
- Efficient clustering of Seam-managed extended persistence contexts and JavaBean components
- Support for atomic conversations
- Asynchronous methods and events
- Enhanced configuration via components.xml
- Exception handling via annotations or exceptions.xml
- Page fragment caching via <s:cache/>
- Decoration of invalid input via <s:decorate/>
- Page parameters for RESTful applications
- Themes
- Support for the Sun JSF 1.2 reference implementation
- Many, many bugfixes and other enhancements
Get the download here
Glassfish to be included in Ubuntu
News.com had a quick report (well no real information there) that Canonical (the commercial interest behind Ubuntu) and Sun has partnered to include the Glassfish Java EE server in the Ubuntu Server product, I think this is a nice thing to do, and hopefully it will be up there competing with the RedHat/Jboss stack (Red Hat Application Stack).
At this time I think that glassfish is more bleeding edge than Jboss, and perhaps the only real “final” Java EE server ready for production (Although I argue that the JBoss AS is real stable and production-ready as-well).
Questions about Open Source Java? This Podcast may have the answers!
Java has been released under the GPL v2 Licence. What does this mean for your Java apps? Are they GPL’d now too?
What is Java ME and why is it such a big deal that it too has been GPL’d?
How difficult is it to build Java from source? These and other questions answered by three of the big players from Sun Microsystems in this Podcast Interview
Java 5 for-each-loop
One of the nicer features of JDK5 is the enhanced for loop (or the foreach loop). Java.net has published an article with in-depth information about this construct. I highly recommend reading the article, it contains some (at least to me) new information.