Shaun Abram
Java and Technology weblog
Subscribe to RSS FeedSilicon Valley Code Camp Notes
I am at the Silicon Valley Code Camp at the moment.
I will try to post some notes on the various talks I attend below…
Day 1:
- Session 1: JavaScript
- Session 2: Easing into Agile
- Session 3: Building Better Tests in Java
- Session 4: What is Python?
Day 2:
- Session 1: Basics of Threading
- Session 2: Introduction to Grails
Tags: agile, Java, JavaScript, python, Testing, threading
Workflow Management: JBoss’s JBPM
The project I’m currently working on had a requirement for a workflow engine to manage the various process flow options for an order management system. For example, an order can be created, modified, submitted etc and we need to be able to persist and retrieve the process at any stage as we wait for human involvement to move to the next stage. I have been evaluating JBoss’s JBPM. It seems to meet our requirements but has been very difficult to get up and running. Overall it has been a frustrating process so far. The main JBoss JBPM site is at here and theServerSide has a good article on using it with Spring/Hibernate integration.
Tags: bpel, Hibernate, Java, jboss, jbpm, jpdl, spring, workflow
Silicon Valley Code Camp
I have signed up for this code camp next weekend…
http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/
There are some interesting sessions on, amongst other things, Groovy, Grails, Java, Web Services, Testing, Agile development and more. And it’s all free and ran by volunteers…
I will post some feedback when the weekend is over.
Tags: Java
Spring talk from Rod Johnson
I attended a talk on Spring on Monday, given by the creator himself, Rod Johnson. He focused mainly on the new annotations features of Spring 2.5 which was interesting, but it was also good to hear an example of how Open Source Software funds itself. Basically SpringSource (of which Rod is CEO) as a company do the vast majority of the code contributions to Spring (and apparently to Tomcat as well), but get their revenue from things like their Enterprise level pay-for offerings such as their SpringSource Enterprise as well as support and training.
The talk was at the Google offices in Mountain View and co-hosted by the San Francisco Java User Group.
Tags: spring
POJOs in Action
My latest reading material is POJOs in Action - a good book about developing Enterprise Applications using Lightweight Frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate and JDO. It basically advocates an alternative approach to using heavyweight containers such as EJBs (although they seem have improved a lot since the release of EJB3).
I was also able to meet the author, Chris Richardson, after attending my first San Francisco Java User Group meeting.
NetBeans IDE
I have been playing around with the latest NetBeans IDE (v6.1) recently, mostly as part of some JEE and Glassfish research I’ve been doing. I am a long time Eclipse user (even back to its predecessor, VisualAge for Java), but I have been pleasantly surprised by NetBeans. It’s UI is definitely a litlle clunkier than Eclipse, but it is fairly intuitive and easy to use and it also seems to useful GUI builder tool that I would like to experiment with more.
See some reviews here and here.
Overall, interesting and I’d like to use it some more, but I still have no plans to stop using Eclipse as my main IDE.
Tags: eclipse, ide, netbeans, tools
JEE
So what exactly is Java Enterprise Edition?
Although I am a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect, and have worked with much of the J2EE family, I thought that with all the recent changes introduced in the latest version, JEE 5, it was worth writing a short article giving an overview of JEE to remind me of where it all stands.
See JEE.
Update: I just saw this posting on TheServerSide related to the upcoming JEE 6 release…
Effective Java
Just finished reading Effective Java by Joshua Bloch.
It is a great book that contains many nuggets of info, best practices and gotchas. Definitely the best Java book I have read in a while.
Next up, I have started on another book that Bloch contributed to: Java Concurrency in Practice.
Sun Certified Java Programmer for Java 6
I recently passed my Sun Certified Java Programmer for Java 6 exam. I took the 1.2 version several years ago and although it was good to get the refresher, I think this is the last time I will take it. My biggest gripe is that a lot of the material covered is something I’d simply check the Java API docs for in my your day to day work. But perhaps that is a necessary evil and it has forced me to learn some of the topics I hadn’t been paying enough attention to including Generics, Enumerations and Assertions, as well as reviewing older material such as threads and inner classes. Also it never does any harm to go over the basics of OO again: encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance and coupling/cohesion.
I have put together some thoughts on The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of SCJP.
Tags: certification
What’s new in Java 6?
Although it’s been around for a while, I’m still trying to get acquainted with version 6 of Java SE.
It has many neat new features, such as integrated scripting, enhanced JDBC features and better Web service support. See Java 6 for some more details on it’s offerings.
Also, even if you’re not interested in the new API and functionality, you might to consider just using it’s JRE as Java 6 is reported to be significantly faster. According to Sun, “existing applications will run faster than ever before on the new Java SE 6 release”.
Tags: Java