Spring, Java platform combos eyed
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Spring technology is an alternative to EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) for Java development, but an upcoming Java version will enable combinations of established Java platform technologies with Spring, the founder of the Spring Framework said on Tuesday.Interviewed at the WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference &amp; Expo, Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring Framework and CEO of SpringSource, anticipates accommodations with the enterprise Java platform once Java Platform, EE (Enterprise Edition) 6 is released. This is expected to happen sometime in 2008, according to a Java Community Process Java Specification Request focused on Java EE 6."I think it's pretty clear that Spring provides an alternative to EJB -- I recently blogged about how requirements for Spring skills have overtaken requirements for EJB in North America -- I don't think that necessarily means Spring is in opposition to Java EE as a whole, given that Java EE 6 is introducing the notion of profiles," Johnson said.?Java EE 6 could allow for standardized combinations of technologies without the legacy of the traditional, full Java EE platform, Johnson said. "We could combine our technology with the various standard technologies we support," he said.EJB provides the server-side component architecture in Java EE.SpringSource made a big splash Tuesday by announcing its acquisition of Apache technology support services vendor Covalent Technologies. This gives Spring and Apache technology users one-stop shopping for support for these open-source technologies.Shrinking IT budgets, if they are indeed shrinking, is likely to mean more use of open-source software, Johnson said. But during a panel session Tuesday, Johnson warned against uncontrolled use of open-source software. Governance will be needed over open source, he said."I certainly think that one popular misconception is that the 'free love' model is the right way to consume open source," Johnson said during the panel session, which focused on enterprise application development. "I think that there is a great danger in allowing uncontrolled consumption of open source." Panelists defined the 'free love' model as uncontrolled use of different software.Also during the session, Chris Keene, Chairman/CEO of Web 2.0 tool maker WaveMaker Software, emphasized that software development still remains the domain of developers and that the average user cannot do much with current tools."There's this great unwashed mass out there that today is not able to build very much," he said.With Web 2.0, the user community is able to drive requirements back to developers to produce applications, said panelist Joe Keller, chief marketing officer of mashup technology provider Kapow Technologies.Johnson also noted SpringSource plans in the virtualization space. The company intends to combine Spring software with the Apache Tomcat Java servlet container in a virtualization product to be announced later this quarter and ship by the end of 2008. The idea is the product would be used for the "internal cloud" at companies looking to get more use out of their existing infrastructure and add provisioning and deployment, said Johnson.
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Application developers are getting a raft of new options this week with Sun updating J2SE, Borland upping its CORBA ante, and Compuware detailing products that will work with Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 toolbox.
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The open-source project, still in early stages, is a cross-platform development tool that some are comparing to Java. Support is currently limited to Web applications and command-line tools.
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(InfoWorld) - A potpourri of Java client application technologies is on the agenda at the Desktop Matters conference in San Jose, Calif. on Friday, where the desktop gets top billing over the Web. Again dominating the discussion, as was the case on Thursday, are technologies pertaining to the Swing desktop client platform for Java. Presentations are featured on such projects as the Spring Rich Client Project, jMatter, and SwiXml. The desktop can be a better option than the Web in some circumstances, one attendee said. "For certain types of applications, desktop's the only way to go," said Rob Abbe, chief software architect at Captovation, which develops document capture software. He cited applications that need to interface with peripherals like high-speed scanners as an example. "The Web would be better [as a deployment choice] when the footprint needs to remain low [like] in situations where administrative policies would prevent people from installing desktop applications," Abbe said. One technology featured, the open-source Spring Rich Client Project, shares code with the popular Spring application framework for Java but is geared to rich client applications. "There are hundreds of major companies using this for very large and significant production applications," said Jim Moore, a consultant at Interface21, which oversees Spring technologies. The mission of the project is to provide an elegant way to build rich client applications that leverage the Spring framework, he said. The initial focus is support for Swing applications, according to the project's Web site. Another open-source project, jMatter, is built for developing applications for small businesses. It leverages Naked Objects Architectural Pattern, which presents new ideas on how to build applications, said Eitan Suez, author of jMatter and president of Uptodata. "I'm on a mission to get these ideas out," Suez said. "JMatter is a manifestation of these ideas and it's a framework that I think empowers the developers to focus on their customers' needs without having to worry or spend [an] inordinate amount of time on plumbing or framework or spending time building or maintaining the GUI."Â  Swing and the Hibernate object-relational persistence software are featured in jMatter. SwiXml is a GUI generating engine for Swing applications. GUIs are described in XML documents that are parsed at runtime and then rendered into javax.swing objects, according to the SwiXml Web site. SwiXml is used mostly for desktop applications. With SwixML, code is separated from the layout like with HTML, making for easier maintenance, said Wolf Paulus, developer of SwixML and a software architect at Cardiff. Another technology discussed, Canoo UltraLightClient, leverages Swing and a Web architecture. Application logic resides on the server rather than the client. A component-oriented programming model is leveraged. The UI is rendered in Swing rather than in HTML. "You get a much richer user experience," this way, said Etienne Studer, a developer at Navis who worked on development of the framework when he worked at Canoo. Now, he uses UltraLightClient. "It's like a better AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) then," said one audience member, responding to Studer's presentation.Â  Studer cited one application of UltraLightClientClient in which it is being used in a marine terminal operations system by shipping companies. Users have access to the same UI. Another topic slated for discussion at Desktop Matters on Friday is Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, which is the company's new presentation technology. Also on the agenda is Adobe Systems's Flex technology, for building rich Internet applications, and its Apollo software, for running Web applications off-line.
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P&aacute;draic Brady, looking ahead to the work he will be doing over the next few months, is proposing on his blog about a new Zend Framework component - Zend_Service_Currency.    I did a quick check on what PHP classes are available for the purpose. There's really not a whole lot out there. There's a PEAR class along the lines I need, but it's released under the PHP License and, not to be too argumentative, I prefer non-PEAR solutions where the end-user may have no access to update PEAR.   So since the project is planned to use the Zend Framework, I shot off a mail to the Framework's fw-general mailing list to see if it would be a worthwhile contribution.    He sees that someone else had already opened a proposal for the same idea and decided to join with that group to work up the module. He also links to his original proposal and gives a brief overview of the goals of the package.
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Tiny, sensor-driven devices exposed A brainchild of Sun Microsystems' research wing, the Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) platform code is now open to Java developers at large.â¦
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A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:    Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.    On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.    He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").   You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.
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Ivo Jansch has a recent post made the other day that takes a look at one of the recent offerings from IBM targeted at PHP developers - the functionality to allow PHP to run on their System i platform.   Some of the developers at Ibuildings are working with PHP on IBM's System-i platform. If that name doesn't ring a bell, it has been called 'iSeries' for a while and it's basically a new name for the old AS/400. [...] Recently IBM and Zend have teamed up to port PHP to the i5/OS operating system. So far this port seems succesful; one of the reasons is perhaps that PHP is easier to adopt by traditional System-i developers than Java, which forces you to learn Object Oriented Programming.   He makes mention of the db2 database extension you can use to access the database as well as a "i5 toolkit" to help with the same. He even links to an article talking about it.
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The Java runtime may be coming to browsers as on-demand modules with  Java Standard Edition 6, Update 4.
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Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) announced the availability of two upgrades to its software development platforms on Tuesday. Java Studio Enterprise (JSE) 7, the Santa Clara, Calif.
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Michael Kimsal points out the posting of the latest part of his "Grails for PHP developers" series to his blog site - Part Five of the series.   I've put up the latest installment in my "Grails for PHP developers".  Rather than delve too much more in to Grails head on, I'm taking this installment (and at least the next one) to delve more in to the Groovy language itself.  Groovy offers similarities to PHP, but also many differences which can trip you up if you're not careful.  I'll try to lay those out as best I can in the next couple of installments.   This new part of the series goes back and puts the spotlight on GRoovy, the base of the Groovy/Grails combo. He talks about working with variables and arrays as containers for multiple pieces of data and some possible gotchas that could come up along the way.
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As mentioned in this new post from Chris Shiflett, an announcement was made at the most recent Columbia PHP meetup by Andrew van der Stock (of OWASP) about an incentive to work in their Spring of Code 2007 competition - a bit of financial reward.   The Spring of Code 2007, an effort that will distribute $100,000 to worthy projects, is divided approximately as follows:  $20,000 for one lucky project. $10,000 for 10 open source projects. $40,000 for 8 large projects. $22,500 for 9 medium projects. $7,500 for an internship.    Chris notes that the projects should be related somehow to web application security and interest was shown in helping out with the security issues that surround PHP (both the language and developing applications in it).
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Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).   The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time.  This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.   The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.
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On the IBM developerWorks site, the next part of their tutorial series looking at working with AIX and PHP has been posted. This time, there's a focus on integrating a Java business application in using DB2 (version 9) as the backend.   It is possible to develop applications that employ both Java and PHP technology on AIX. You can use the Java programming language for the core logic (or redeploy an existing Java-based application), while gaining the benefits of PHP as a Web-based interface platform. In this article, the third of the series, find out how to connect the core application created in the second installment to a DB2 database for the storage of the survey questions and responses.   They talk some about database roles before working through the DB2 database installation. Then it's time to make the connection to the application, create the table structures and insert information.
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InfoWorld - Application developers got several new options last week as Sun Microsystems updated J2SE, Borland upped its CORBA ante, and Compuware announced products that will work with Microsoft&#8217;s Visual Studio 2005 toolbox.
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InfoWorld - SpringSource, the keepers of the popular Spring Framework for Java application development, this week introduced Spring Integration, a framework to ease enterprise integration.
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(InfoWorld) - Although Java itself was only offered up to open source last month, many open source development projects have arisen around Java already. One of the better known ones, the Spring Framework, will be the subject of a technical conference this week. The Spring Experience will bring together 400 Spring devotees in Hollywood, Florida to discuss the framework and related technologies. Spring, which was upgraded to version 2.0 in October, has been downloaded about 2 million times, said Rod Johnson, lead developer of Spring and CEO of the Interface21 consulting firm, which oversees Spring. The technology features a Java application framework that reduces development efforts and improves test coverage and quality, according to Interface21. "There's a thriving community" built up around Spring, Johnson said on Wednesday. The conference will cover not just the framework itself but the portfolio of open source products bearing the Spring brand, he said. These include products such as the the Acegi Security Framework, which will be re-branded as Spring Security; Spring LDAP, Spring.Net, Spring IDE and Spring-OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative). These products are in various stages of development, Johnson noted. Spring-OSGi, which enables deployment of application subsystems, is due for a release in the second quarter of 2007, for example.Â  Spring's success can be attributed to its usefulness, according to Johnson. "I think the reason that people are attracted to it is that itâs a solution that came out of experience and actually works," he said. Spring has the potential to improve return on investment because it can work in a variety of environments, said Johnson, A Spring application running on Tomcat today could be redeployed to BEA Systems's WebLogic or IBM's WebSphere application servers tomorrow, he said. The technology is being adopted by companies such as BEA, Oracle and Terracotta; grid computing vendors are becoming interested as well, said Johnson. Meanwhile, the new open source path for Java received Johnson's endorsement. "We welcome this move. We think it's good that Sun is recognizing the central importance of open source to today's enterprise software. We think that Sun has done a pretty good job to date in its stewardship of the Java language, but involving a broader community has a potential to further increase the penetration of the Java platform and accelerate innovation in the language," Johnson said.