Entries Tagged 'Java' ↓

Neil Bartlett explained exactly what OSGi is good for on his blog this weekend. This was in response to Chris Adamson’s article on java.net admitting that despite all of the OSGi news lately, he still didn’t know what he would ever use it for. [Fundamentally, OSGi is a module system that allows you to define dependencies between jar files… and much more.] You can find a good newbie explaination of OSGi on TheServerSide.com and further information in Neil’s free book OSGi in Practice.

Vladimir Silva has written an article for IBM DeveloperWorks outlining how to embed NASA World Wind into an Eclipse RCP or Plugin project. For those of you whom haven’t heard, NASA World Wind is basically an embeddable, open source version of Google Earth. It uses JOGL (Java OpenGL Bindings) to display map data on a 3D globe. Very cool stuff!

James Sugrue has posted his Top Five Sessions from JavaOne 2008 over at JavaLobby. You can check out some of the other sessions on Sun’s website and see if you agree.

The Spring community has been busy over the last month coming out with a slew of new releases. Spring Web Flow 2 has been released with better support for JavaServer Faces and JavaScript. For those of you whom haven’t heard of Web Flow, it is a continuations framework that allows you to write flows for your web  application. For example, think of the page flow of a user performing a search on your site and then interacting with the results. After running the search, the user may follow a result link or they may click the back button on their browser to refine their search. Web Flow helps you define the valid paths a user can take through the pages and helps manage state between these pages. Ajaxian has a writeup on the new JavaScript support and InfoQ has an interview with Keith Donald and Jeremy Grelle regarding the release.

In other Spring related news, the SpringSource Application Platform has been released. This is an OSGi-based application server that promises to allow you to update your application in real-time on the server. For more information on this, check out the discussion on TheServerSide.com as well as this interview with Spring creator Rod Johnson on dZone.

Boxy Systems has released a Java library for tracking application usage via Google Analytics (appropriately named jGoogleAnalytics). This enables you to track which features of your application your users are using the most. The app posts data to Google via an asynchronous, low-priority thread, so the tracking should be transparent to the end user.

via The Java Posse 

Apache Commons Lang version 2.4 has been released. Lots of new methods were introduced, including 17 new methods for the StringUtils class, and some new formatting classes. Check out the release notes for more information.

Antony Stubbs writes on his blog today about trying out Scala on a simple project. Mr. Stubbs takes care to lay out the original algorithm for the project first in Java, and then show how functional programming and Scala makes it much nicer and compact. Good read for those of you still wondering whether or not to try out Scala.

Code Commit has an article on UI development techniques in Java on their site today. Anyone can throw together a simple UI, but this article takes the reader through the entire process of working out a design on paper first, making a first attempt at the UI with a graphical layout tool (Matisse in this case), throwing that out because the auto-generated code sucks, and redoing the UI in a much more logical fashion by hand.

Geertjan Wielenga has an interview with Mark Ashworth on JavaLobby today about Mark’s connext-graphs project. Connext-graphs wraps Open Flash Chart as a Struts 2 plugin and allows easy generation of interactive charts in a Struts 2 application. The interview ends with Mark walking the reader through the code for getting a basic chart up and running with the plugin.

Struts 2 and Scala - Jeff Cunningham posts today about how he used Scala in a WebWork/Struts 2 application. Seems to have worked flawlessly without any sort of hacks or workarounds needed. I wonder if anybody has tried the same sort of thing with Groovy yet?

Lessons Learned From Using JBoss Seam -  Matt Raible has a post today listing some things learned while using JBoss Seam.