jsync | Java Staffing Specialist

Tech Tips from April 2008 Newsletter

04/09/2008

• Sun released Java SE for Business which will now be known as JFB – another acronym to learn. It is a subscription-based support program essentially for the Java SE spec, with the offer of extended support, quicker access to fixes, and some non-descript claims for the future. Here is a blog that sums it up from Sun’s point of view. This article provides pricing and details on the services. This move seems to surprise no one – give something away for free, and offer something ‘better’ for a price. It will be interesting to see how many companies take advantage of this offer.
• A fairly interesting (and incredibly true) article from eWeek, 10 Signs Your Company Wants You Gone.
• Heard about Google App Engine yet? It was announced on Monday It is in a preview release now, but definitely worth checking out (seems to be a limited release of 10,000 users for now).
• JavaWorld article comparing Eclipse and NetBeans. NetBeans seems to be making some strides and refuses to be ignored.
• A little posting on TSS that gives one symposium attendee’s insight to his day at the conference.

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jsync sent one of our consultants to act as our ‘man on the street’ at last month’s TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas. Here is his report:

“Normally what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I believe there is a special exception to the conference facilities at the Venetian. Here are some of the interesting themes that seemed to recur throughout the 2 days of sessions at the 2008 TheServerSide Java Symposium…

Concurrency: Pay attention to all that is being said and written about concurrent Java programming. As multi-core processing becomes more and more prevalent, writing good/safe concurrent code will become more necessary and more challenging.

REST: What most people that spend 3 days in Vegas need. Also a style of software architecture (Representational State Transfer). Some good discussions around what REST really is and isn’t and how it can be used in conjunction with SOAP based web services.

DSLs (domain specific languages): DSLs as the next logical progression of abstraction in programming languages. Mainly the discussion and examples were based on JRuby and Groovy, but there was a lot of focus on why DSLs are becoming more prevalent. There will not likely be one that dominates, rather many that are popular for different reasons.

Web Frameworks: As you would expect there were varied opinions from all the camps (JSF, Spring, Struts2, JRuby, etc..). No clear winner, just clear that there continue to be many options.” *******************************************************

Classic Vinyl – Perhaps you were at the office early in the morning in September 2001 reading this article before the world was forever changed by the events of that day. This month’s Classic Vinyl looks back to a time when Struts was the hot new framework that was going to solve all of your Java web development problems. While Struts did change the landscape and provided a somewhat united approach for building Java web apps, it has largely been taken off the plate of options for new development these days. There are very few frameworks that enjoyed the massive rapid adoption seen by Struts – so what’s wrong with Struts now? Nothing really, it still occupies a place in the architecture of roughly 60-70% of the enterprise Java web apps today. However, there are more efficient ways and several newer options to solve the same problem (JRuby, Spring, Struts2, etc.). This article is classic because Struts was classic. There is no doubt it helped position Java web development as the best option in the enterprise at the time.

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