Juixe Techknow

This was another session by Karsten Lentzsch, founder of JGoodies. JGoodies has a data binding project and right at the start of the session Karsten cautioned those in attendance on its use. He did this not because the project is in a horrible state but because the domain has been difficult to address. There were several talks during this conference that covered the issue of data binding. At this time there are several data binding projects but nothing that will solve all of the problems all of the time. According to Karsten, some projects that try to address data binding are the SwingLabs, Eclipse 3.2, and JClient from Oracle. I have to say that I am not familiar with these projects in this regard so I can’t comment on this further.

During this session, Karsten also went over the Anonymous View, the Model View Presenter, and the Presentation Model pattern.

Technorati Tags: javaone, java, mvc, jgoodies, data binding, jclient,

I went Enterprise JavaBananas over this session. The original goal of EJBs was to simplify the enterprise application development process but what was delivered in the form of the EJB 2.x specification was a powerful yet complex technology. In EJB 2.x, the developer codes against a set of APIs intended for and required by the container.

In EJB 3.0, session and message beans are plain old POJOs with descriptive annotations. For example, a stateless session bean is marked with a @stateless annotation. A stateful session bean is marked as @Stateful. A bean’s pre-destroy life cycle event method is denoted with the @PreDestroy annotation. The good news for EJB 2.x is that that existing applications will be forward compatible, including the deployment descriptors. For the most part, deployment descriptors are not needed in the new specification, except for certain situations, but you can still use them as you have.

Once phrase that I have already heard twice during this conference is configuration by exception. I heard it again in this session. Having experienced Ruby on Rails I know of configuration by convention. How do you configure by exception? I don’t know yet but this is something to look into if you are going to be deploying your application on a EJB 3.0 container.

I was once part of a large enterprise application project. I thought that if I ever worked on an EJB project it would be too soon. Now I can’t wait.

This session was all over the map in terms of scripting in an enterprise environment. At first it started as another Groovy session, then it turned into a general JSR 223 which intends to bring scripting to the Java platform in the next major release. What I got most from this session was some additional feature in Groovy such a GStrings. GStrings are Groovy strings that allows you to embed a variable in a string to insert its value. Groovy also provides a poor mans ORM in the form of a DataSet. I also like that fact that you can declare properties in Groovy with an @property annotation, you don’t have to define setter and getter methods.

Technorati Tags: javaone, java, scripting, groovy, orm, dataset

This session introduced Project Simplice. According to the speakers, Project Simplice intends to attract Visual Basic programmer to the Java camp. Project Simplice is inspired by Visual Basic and compile Basic code to a class file which runs in the JVM. Basically, this makes the Java platform basically simple to the Basic programmer. The whole project is still at an early stage. The project is not available to the general project yet even. That said they Project Simplice team made some impressive demos.

As a demo, the Project Simplice imported the Visual Basic code for a calculator example written by Microsoft with the original copyright. Once imported they hit the build button to launch a program originally original written for the Windows platform but now running on JVM power. Wow. Now that is some impressive compiler magic. In NetBeans, you can edit the UI in the UI Builder and update the code and have the same context help, color highlighting, and language support that you come to expect from NetBeans.

What was hard to believe was that an exe fractal application written in Visual Basic for the Windows platform ran considerably slower than when that same code was compiled and ran in the JVM. There was general disbelief and awe when that Windows version ran over 10 times slower.

It seems that Project Simplice, or marketing eventually names it, is intended a language that can be used to teach programming to beginners.

Technorati Tags: javaone, java, visual basic, jvm, project simplice, netbeans

Yesterday I posted an entry titled: Java One Tuesday: General Session. That post should have been name Java One Wednesday: General Session. Thomas Kurian from Oracle spoke on Wednesday. Tuesdays speakers was Sun’s new CEO Jonathan Schwartz. I oversleep today and missed most of the general session. I did see a partial demo of something being worked by IBM that seems to be integrating your version control, bug tracker, and build system into a more integrated development environment. I believe on of the speakers referred it as bringing the team to the tools.

Technorati Tags: javaone, java

For me the last session of the day was, RAD for the Java Platform Web Tier: Frameworks Panel Discussion. The three frameworks covered for this session was Grails, previously known as Groovy on Rails, Trails, and RIFE. Both Grails and Trails are heavily influenced by Ruby on Rails. All of these frameworks where developed because a web application on Java has been harder than it should be. According to the Trails author, once you develop your model you get your application for free. In the case of Trails, the framework heavily depends on annotations, a Java 1.5 feature.

All of these frameworks are not re-inventing the wheel, they are built on top of Java Open Source projects such as Hibernate or Spring MVC.

I am planning to attend the BOF sessions for these frameworks tomorrow. I am interested in using one of these frameworks for a project. Struts is pretty much out of the question, but at this point all three frameworks contenders. Maybe after tomorrow I will have a better idea of which framework to use.

Technorati Tags: javaone, java, rad, framework, grails, trails, rife, struts