The JVM Summit'10 is finished !

As last year and the year before it was fun, amazing and mind blowing to discuss and share ideas with brilliant people of the Java & JVM community.

If you want a fast forward glimpse of the state of the JVM languages future presentations are available on the wiki:
http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Main_Page

cheers,
Rémi

Content available at: http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/entry/qa_4_java_ee_6

The Oracle Video Challenge, which started yesterday and runs through August 9, will provide three winning contestants with a free Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne and Oracle Develop full conference pass. In addition, everyone who submits a "valid" video will receive a $400+ registration discount.

Here's a brief overview:

Test your power of persuasion. Grab your video camera, and convince your peers why you deserve to go to Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne or Oracle Develop for FREE. The community will pick the top five finalists in each category (Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne, and Oracle Develop), and a panel of Oracle judges will pick the final three winners (one for each category). Having trouble thinking of what to say? Tell your peers what session, track, or event you can’t miss out on. Explain how much Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne, or Oracle Develop will help further your career and/or development skills.

*EXTRA Bonus* - Everyone who submits a valid video entry will get a discount code for Early Bird pricing to use at time of registration for Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne and Oracle Develop. This is a savings of $400 or more over the onsite price!

Get the complete details at the Oracle Video Challenge site.

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

Content available at: http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/entry/fisl_2011_trip_report

You know that I've moved to Maven more than one year ago and I don't regret. I think I would be unable to manage the number of projects I'm managing on my own without it (or at least without an effective artifact repository).

But Maven needs a proper and clean environment. Maven experts are constantly advising about that. One of the most important pieces of the environment is the artifact repository. You can create a cheap one with a plain webdav resource, or you can install a specific tool such as Nexus or Artifactory. A plain webdav resource is simpler to manage and might sound as a good solution for simpler cases, while a specific tool is more powerful but more complex to setup and administer. It's your choice: the important thing is that everything is under your control and properly managed.

Hear what's happening to me since a couple of days. Before going on, I'll recap a couple of Maven concepts. When you have a multi-repository project (unfortunately it frequently happens, as some libraries you might depend have their own repo), Maven searches for artifacts in all of them - what typically happens is that the first repo responds with an HTTP 404 - Not Found and Maven searches on until it finds what it needs. Then it stores a metadata XML file to recall where it has last found the artifact. In this way it can avoid constantly polling for things and it's faster.

Now, I have still a few remaining messy things in my projects. When I made the switch one year ago, I thought that a webdav repo was ok for my stuff and used the webdav facility at Kenai. Later I realized that Nexus was worth while, and in any case I was able to deploy most of my stuff to the free Sonatype Maven hosting. But I have still three projects relying on Kenai's webdav. I planned for moving them sooner or later, but I didn't so far because I didn't touch them for some months.

Now, a couple of days ago, Kenai started randomly responding with a small text page saying HTTP 500 - Internal Server Error instead of the HTTP 404 when you ask for a non-existing resource - but the status code is set to 200 so Maven and Nexus, that clearly aren't much smart sometimes, instead of treating this as a "not found", are accepting the resource that is served with the error. The resource, of course, is a small HTML page with the text "Internal Server Error" etc... Of course, storing this as an artifact, a POM, or a metadata XML file isn't good at all and breaks the build. In a couple of days, the error literally poisoned all my repositories, both Nexus and the one on my disk, and all my builds are broken. Now I'm compelled to fix the thing ASAP - and I'm forced to postpone my next release of blueBill, since this week will be focused on the required clean up.

Clearly, it's not entirely a Maven fault (even though that silly way of handling HTTP 500 is crying out loud); the problem originated from Kenai and a messy situation in my software factory. With Maven, you must be very precise and accurate. You can take this as an annoyance - on the other hand it's also a stimulus for setting up things properly.

I do hope that the next release of the Maven tools, anyway, will have this sort of silly bugs fixed.

Entry posted to my new blog.

Maven 3, Selenium 2/WebDriver, easyb, Hudson, and more! The next sessions of the Java Power Tools Bootcamps are coming up soon in Wellington, London, and Canberra. Don't miss out on this great opportunity to learn some very useful and very cool skills and best practices in the areas of build automation, code quality, automated testing and continuous integration.

This is always a popular course, and once again all of the modules have been extensively updated with new material. Some of the highlights of this season include:

• Advanced Maven build automation, including automated releases, automated deployments, Nexus, and Maven 3
• Code quality best practices: Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs, Cobertura, Sonar, and how to make them work for your teams
• JUnit Kung Fu, parameterized tests, theories, custom Hamcrest asserts, Custom JUnit test runners,
• Automated web testing with Selenium 2/WebDriver, and Behavior-Driven Development/Acceptance Test Driven Development with easyb
• Advanced Continuous Integration with Hudson, including automated code quality and code coverage metrics, parameterized build jobs, build promotion, automated deployment and distributed builds. 

The session dates are:

• Wellington: August 30-September 3
• London:  September 13-17
• Canberra: October 18-22

Places are limited, so what are you waiting for? Sign up now!

 I've just committed mavenized version of swingx under the swingx-r3734-mavenized branch.

If you know nothing about maven here's the basic:

• download and install (unzip) maven from http://maven.apache.org
• you should not need to configure anything apart from geting maven/bin on your path so you can run maven
• to build swingx you need to run "mvn install" or "mvn clean install"
• to skip the tests run the above with "-Dmaven.test.skip=true"
• to produce html report for the test run "mvn surefire-report:report" instead
• to open the project in IDE you should be able to import it directly with NetBeans, and you might need m2eclipse plugin for eclipse
• the source location changed a bit (swingx-core/src/main/java, swingx-core/src/test/java, swingx-beaninfo/src/main/java)
• java and non java project files are now separated (.../java vs. .../resources)
• after running the build, jar files can be found in the "target" directory of each module

I was under the impression that we semi agreed to move the project to maven based build while ago, but in case it was just in my head here are few pros:

• cleaner structure
• more plugins and better automation of library management
• simpler releases (and upload to central repository)
• possibility to provide release candidate builds and promote those when passing the community vote (with nexus)
• open ways to modularization and intra project dependency management (we can break release into tiny core, graphigs-util, tree/table components, date/cal components, layout components, etc allowing everybody to download only what needed) and have dependency checks at compile time already.
• lower maintenance overhead then ant
• possibility to deploy snapshots to the maven repo and have people test fixes without having to manually download specific builds

If you are going to play with that branch, there are 4 tests failing currently (at least on my mac) ... feel free to fix them and commit those fixes on the branch or provide the patch in issues tracker :D

JXTreeTableUnitTest 2x
BasicSearchFieldUITest 1x
AutoCompleteDecoratorTest 1x

In case I didn't deliver the point yet - this branch is supposed to be base for the discussion whether we should move to maven and work more on the modularization or not ... I'm not imposing this on anyone.

If/when we agree to go this way I'll commit this on the trunk and start breaking down the components in separate modules.

The above is cross posted to the forum and on the blogs to get more coverage. Please keep the discussion on the forum. Thanks.

Cheers,

The focus of interest on java.net this past week shifted strongly to JVM/JDK/JSR-related topics, and JavaFX. Excitement is building as Java 7 comes into existence, step by step. Meanwhile, Stephen Chin announced a Petition to Open Source JavaFX, while many others (Dustin Marx, Shai Almog, and Kirill Grouchnikov among them) are assessing JavaFX's past, present value, and future.

If you didn't get a chance to visit java.net on a daily basis in the past week, read on, and you'll find all of the week's Java Today news items, a selection of java.net blog posts, and the old and new java.net spotlights and polls.

This week's index:

• Conferences, JUG Meetings (4 items)
• JavaEE, GlassFish (2 items)
• Tools, IDEs, etc. (2 items)
• Platforms, Frameworks (5 items)
• JDK, JVM, JSRs (8 items)
• Programming (1 item)
• Mobile (1 item)
• Java Community Process (2 items)
• Miscellaneous (2 items)

Conferences, JUG Meetings

The JavaOne Conference Blog posted the second installment of Agent Kar-Rek's adventure, The Most Important Conference...in the Universe! Part Two:

In this episode, Agent Kar-Rek (from Planet Lu-Zor) is determined to go to JavaOne so he can learn more about Java and save his planet by discovering a better way to control their renegade devices. How far will he go to get into JavaOne? ...

The JavaOne Conference Blog reported JavaOne Brazil and China Dates Announced!

We know JavaOne in San Francisco is the most important conference *in the universe!* We also understand that you may not be able to join us in San Francisco this year. :-( But we wanted to let you know that Oracle is taking JavaOne on the road. We have two other JavaOne conferences scheduled: December 7 - 9, 2010 in Brazil and on December 13 - 16, 2010 in China. Those conferences will be similar to JavaOne in San Francisco...

Dustin Marx noted that the JavaOne 2010 Schedule Builder is Now Available:

I previously posted that I was looking forward to JavaOne 2010 and this is even more true today.  Like Mitch Pronschinske, the trouble now is determining which presentations to attend.  This "problem" is complicated by the coexistence of Oracle OpenWorld and Oracle Develop with JavaOne 2010.  There are roughly 2400 different options for sessions, conferences, keynotes, Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, and so forth between the three simultaneous conferences...

Stephen Colebourne announced The Next Big JVM Language talk JavaOne:

I'm talking at JavaOne 2010 on the subject of the "Next Big JVM language" (S314355). I suspect that it might cause some controversey! Talk: Before writing the talk, I wanted to get some feedback from the community. So, I've got some basic topics and questions I'm looking for feedback on. 1) What makes a language big and popular? Lots of people have drawn up lists...

JavaEE, GlassFish

Arun Gupta posted Screencast #30: Java EE 6 & GlassFish 3 using NetBeans 6.9 - 5 screencasts:

This 5-part screencast shows how NetBeans 6.9 provides comprehensive tooling for Java EE 6 & GlassFish 3. The video tutorial starts with building a simple Java EE 6 application and evolves to add features from several new technologies such as Java Persistence API 2, Java Server Faces 2, Contexts & Dependency Injection, and Java API for RESTful Web services from the platform. Specifically, the different parts show...

Ed Burns announced Mojarra 1.2_15 released:

With very little pomp and only extenuating circumstance, we are releasing Mojarra 1.2_15. This release does have most of the performance fixes I mentioned...

Tools, IDEs, etc.

Hudson Labs announced the availability of Hudson with Selenium and Sauce On-Demand Videos:

A few weeks ago, Kohsuke stopped by the San Francisco Selenium Meetup hosted by Sauce Labs to talk about all things Selenium and Hudson related (with a bit of Sauce in there too). The good folks over at Sauce Labs have gotten around to posting some of the videos taken with Kohsuke...

John Ferguson Smart presented Useful tricks in easyb - tags and parallel tests

Easyb is an excellent BDD testing framework, with a heap of very cool features. In this article, we look at two more recent features: tags and parallel tests. If you're looking for a good Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) or Acceptance-Test Driven Development (ATDD), you owe it to yourself to check out Easyb. Easyb is a great BDD-style testing framework where you express your tests as "stories"...

Platforms, Frameworks

Stephen Chin announced a Petition to Open Source JavaFX:

At last night’s Silicon Valley JavaFX User Group event, I announced a petition to Open Source the JavaFX Platform. This is a petition from the Java and JavaFX Community directed to the management of Oracle Corporation. The goal of the petition is to increase the viability of the JavaFX platform to the benefit of both the community and Oracle. To the Leaders, Management, and Board of Directors at Oracle Corporation, We the undersigned formally request that Oracle Corporation release the entire JavaFX Platform as open source software available for modification and reuse by individuals, educators, and corporations...

Shai Almog conducted a poll in conjuction with his latest post, How Can Oracle Make JavaFX More Popular?

The guys at the JavaLobby asked "How Can Oracle Make JavaFX More Popular?", however the discussion seems to be hopelessly slanted towards the desktop crowd and a couple of Android related posts. I'm quite curious to see what the thoughts of the crowd visiting this blog which mostly focuses on mobile and LWUIT. So I added a poll to the top of the blog...

Dustin Marx talked about The Continuing Struggles of JavaFX:

In the post O JavaFX, What Art Thou? I publicly posted questions about JavaFX that largely pertain to its future.  As I stated in that post, I had felt somewhat deceived by Sun's overhasty JavaFX marketing at 2007 JavaOne and 2008 JavaOne and wasted more time than I like to waste looking into what JavaFX was (or in most cases, was supposed to become).  I have hesitated to really invest time and effort into it a third time until I feel better about its future.  Since posting O JavaFX,What Art Thou? there's been little to make me feel more optimistic about JavaFX's future.  This week, there was a major piece of bad press for JavaFX. In his blog post JavaFX is a Train Wreck, Kirill Grouchnikov expresses frustration at JavaFX not delivering on early promises to make it easy for developers and designers to work together to build compelling user interfaces with JavaFX...

Kirill Grouchnikov posted Pixel complete:

In an indirect response to my earlier post, David Grace writes: "All this talk about not being able to create something that looks good in JavaFX is hot air. JavaFX has the functionality to do so, you just have to know how. What JavaFX needs is for the preview controls and layouts to be finished, controls such as a table implemented, and the Prism renderer implemented. When this is done it will be easy to write any application that could be written in Swing quicker, looking much better and with far greater performance. Personally i would of rathered investment in Swing instead, but..."http://www.java.net/blogfront

Jim Weaver changed the title of his blog to "Jim Weaver's JavaFX and HTML5 Blog" and asked What posts would you like to see about HTML5?

Now that HTML5 is coming of age, I've been exploring synergies between JavaFX and HTML5 in order to leverage the strengths of both. Are there areas of HTML5, like WebSockets for example, that you'd like to see posted on this blog? ...

JDK, JVM, JSRs

Last week's new java.net Spotlight was the Scala team's announcement Scala 2.8.0 final:

It is finally here!! After many, many months of hard work, the Scala team is truly happy to announce the new, much-awaited stable release of Scala! The all-new Scala 2.8.0 final distribution is ready to be downloaded from our Download Page. The Scala 2.8.0 codebase includes a huge number of bug fixes with respect to 2.7.7, and an impressive amount of new features. Please read below for further details! ...

On the same topic, last week's java.net poll was Scala 2.8.0 was just released. Do you plan to download it? 362 votes were cast, with the following results:

• 4% (15 votes) - Of course! My job involves Scala.
• 29% (104 votes) - Yes, I'm very interested in Scala.
• 14% (50 votes) - Maybe
• 10% (38 votes) - Probably not
• 36% (131 votes) - No
• 6% (22 votes) - I don't know
• 1% (2 votes) - Other

Joe Darcy anounced Project Coin ARM Implementation:

I'm happy to announce that starting with a prototype written by Tom Ball, Oracle's javac team has produced and pushed an implementation of the try-with-resources statement, otherwise known as ARM blocks, into JDK 7. Today the resourceful can apply a changeset to a copy of the JDK 7 langtools repository and do a build to get a compiler supporting this feature...

Joe also talked about Writing javac regression and unit tests for new language features:

With Java language changes in progress for JDK 7, such as Project Coin's strings in switch, improved exception handling, and try-with-resources statement, writing effective regression and unit tests for javac is an integral component of developing the new language features. Unit and regression tests differ from conformance tests...

Dalibor Topic presented OpenJDK News (2010-07-19):

JDK 7 build 100 is available. Build 100 contains changes to fix build issues on Windows, integrate JAX-WS 2.2 and JAXB 2.2, an implementation of the Simplified Varargs Method Invocation feature from Project Coin as well as a set of improvements across the class library. You can check out the list of changes for details, and get the source code. This year's JVM Language Summit is just one more week away...

Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart announced that Java SE 6 u21 is Now Available:

Java SE 6 update 21 is now available (Downloads, release notes, bug fixes). This release includes performance improvements, support for Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle VM, and Google Chrome, and Visual VM 1.2.2 ...

This week's new java.net Spotlight is the Oracle Technology Network's latest TechCast Live: Toward a Universal VM, Episode 11:

TechCast host Justin Kestelyn interviews Oracle's Alex Buckley, who explains why the JVM has been good not only for Java, but also for other languages -- and why JSR 292 will have a major impact on developers.

This week's new java.net poll asks What impact do you expect JSR 292 (invokedynamic) to have long term?

Programming

Geertjan Wielenga asked How Evil is "instanceof"?

My understanding is that "instanceof" should be avoided, in favor of using the NetBeans Lookup. However, what about this situation—we have a node for libraries, with different subnodes, depending on the instance of the object in question, which is either Book or Borrower...

Mobile

Shai Almog shared some thoughts on LWUIT in The Highest Common Denominator Strategy:

Normally I try to keep my blog posts on the technical or showcase side but for a change I want to share some general thoughts I have about the state of LWUIT and the recent enlightening poll on this blog and the javalobby. While there is still a day to go with our poll as I write this, the results are quite interesting and not what I expected. Although in retrospect they make sense, after all this is a blog for an open source project so it makes sense that most of you would vote to open source FX. However, the blog poll otherwise is almost identical to the JavaLobby poll in the sense that 70% of the votes voted for either open sourcing FX or giving up on it altogether...

Java Community Process

The JCP Program Office provided an update on The latest JCP EC meeting summaries:

It has been a while since there has been much activity on the JCP PMO groug blog.  My aim is to increase the frequency of postings in the coming months!  As we approach JavaOne (by the way, "Early Bird" registration discount deadline is today, Friday, 16 July), there will be information on JCP related plans and activities posted here. To catch you up, there have been 3 JCP EC Meetings in 2010, and the next one is scheduled 2 weeks from Monday on 27 July (see calendar)...

The JCP Program Office also announced Nominations Open for 2010 JCP Program Awards:

Nominations for the eighth annual JCP Program Awards are now open! As has become customary, the JCP program office will present the JCP program annual awards during JavaOne. Last year we opened nominations to the community, and the plan is to open a board similar to last years' where nominations from the community can be posted for six award categories (see below). There is an open board for nominations on jcp.org--community members may submit nominations online or via email...

Miscellaneous

Eric Armstrong wondered, Have Generics Killed Java?

Summary: In which I argue that (a) Generics have done egregious harm to both the elegance and readability of the Java language and, (b) they prove by example that static type checking is a linguistic dead-end. Are you persuaded? Do you agree? Read on... I confess. I'm a Ruby hacker, at heart. Ruby's Perl-isms can't go away fast enough to suit me, but what's left after removing them is a thing of utter beauty and precision. Not to mention power. But long before I became enamored of Ruby, I was a Java hacker...

Jeorg Plewe posted 50.000 times too slow?:

Recently I was in urged to do a web project with the latest and coolest web framework Ruby on Rails. One line of code sprang to me eyes...

Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of java.net in the java.net home page archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

  As Karl mentioned already in his blog, SwingX 1.6.1 was released few weeks ago. There were some issues uploading the artifacts to central repo this time, due to previous nexus migration and changes in structure of repositories, but all is solved now.

To use 1.6.1 simply update your pom to  

</dependency>
  <groupId>org.swinglabs</groupId>
  <artifactId>swingx</artifactId>
  <version>1.6.1</version>
</dependency>

 Enjoy,

Jan