Java

Since the big meow on Friday, lot of unhappy people had been talking and blogging about how terrible and unacceptable is the absence of the Java 6 from the Leopard. Some post were sounding very dramatic "I would not buy Mac if I only knew ..." - which is a bit silly. The Leopard's 300 new features were posted and touted and hyped for two weeks. Some of the "great" improvements were actually fairly modest improvements - so it was OBVIOUS that Java 6 is not going to be included because it would definitely make the list. QED.

There is - after all - a Petstore implementation for Ruby. Somebody asked a question at the DZone and the response posted by Raphael Valyi was: Re: Is there a Pet Store in Grails/Rails? I'm speaking here for the Rails (JRuby) side: there is actually a petstore, it can be found there: http://viewvc.rubyforge.mmmultiworks.com/cgi/viewvc.cgi/?root=tw-commons Some guys used it to compare C-Ruby vs JRuby performance: http://www.nabble.com/JRuby-vs-MRI---Petstore-shootout-t4289470.html

If you try to deploy one of the Spring 2 samples included in the Spring framework source distribution - Petclinic on Tomcat 6 (6.0.14), the web application does not get loaded and fails with errror. The cause is the ClassNotFound exception for the class org.springframework.instrument.classloading.tomcat.TomcatInstrumentableClassLoader, more precisely: SEVERE: LifecycleException java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.springframework.instrument.classloading.tomcat.TomcatInstrumentableClassLoader at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)

Part of the technology upgrade in the three Java based projects is also tool update. We have started with Eclipse version 1 and gradually moved up to the currently used Eclipse 3.0. The build and deployment process was based on custom written Ant build script, which compiled, created WAR, deployed, undeployed, run the tests, created source snapshot - you name it. The Eclipse was used mostly as editor and debugger - using JPDA talking to Tomcat started in debug mode.

During my recent return to Javaland, I have noticed many improvements in newer releases of well established frameworks and toolkits, as well as many new ones. One such new release is version 2 of Spring framework. It is not really a hot news, because the final version of 2.0 is out for almost a year (October 2006), but it is new to me, because I spend pretty much all of last 12 months in DotNet, C# and OLAP worlds, with only brief visits to older Struts based, Spring-free Java projects.

Hi, all Java gurus inside and outside of Thinknostic - I have a very interesting problem. Imagine the following situation: we have three existing Java Web applications, written back in 2000/2001, based on open source libraries of that time: Struts 0.9/1.0 and JSP 1.x (no JSTL) with Tiles for Web layer, Apache Torque for ORM, early version of Quartz for job scheduling, Jasper Reports for PDF reports and Freemarker as template engine for email creation. The application has been (and still is) in production for almost 7 years and works great. Now the customer is expanding the functionality and wants add several Ajax features - in short, version 2.0 is on the table.

I have spent last two days (and few evenings before) playing with Rails and using Netbeans Ruby IDE. What a great experience ! Unlike before, it is so much easier to have really good debugger that allows put breakpoints not only into the Ruby code in controllers and model - but even into the RHTML view files ! Netbeans team works hard on improving the tool. With latest build - 2434, I have noticed great addition - Rails console. The IDE had IRB window even before, but the environment did not load the Rails context and would not recognize e.g. ActiveRecord. Now with latest build, everything works like charm.

Judging by the number of hits, Joel (and myself) are not the only people who would like to see nicer, better and faster MSDN documentation. As a very nice surprise, some of the feedback came directly from the people than actually can do something about it - like Darren Parker from Microsoft and Anand Raman from the Sandcastle project. Rob Relyea suggested and interesting looking tool based on XAML. Thanks everybody - it is always nice to find out that even really big companies listen to the developers and want to address the problems. It almost feels like OpenSource experience where (it was few years back) we have encountered an issue in one of many Java templating libraries, posted to discussion group a question and few hours + several emails later had patch for the bug from the library creator :-). But back to the topic.

Did it ever happened to you that you were using some tool day after day - and never realized it's pretty big deficiencies ? Until somebody, coming from different background pointed out what everything is wrong with the tool ? Before that moment of revelation, the issues were just inconvenience, but right after that they became real annoyance ? Exactly this happened to me last week and the credit for pointing out what is wrong with MSDN documentation (and the "standard" .NET documentation format in general) goes to Joel :-)

It has been quite some time since I used a Swing based Java application. Compared to beauty and close-to-native feeling of Eclipse based application, Swing just did not feel right - it looked differently and behaved a bit differently. For long time, my desktop was Swing-free (not counting the JDK demo). Not any more, though. What made me to reconsider, is new release of the Netbeans v 6. In the latest milestone builds (M6 to M9), Netbeans team built amazing Ruby development environment. Compared to Ruby plugin in Eclipse, it has way more functionality, better debugging, really impressive editing support and very cool Rails extensions. The full description of new features is here.