Monday June 30, 2008 GlassFish & MySQL Unlimited - I Miss One Feature
It seems like Sun started a commercial support strategy for Glassfish and MySQL bundle called "Unlimited".
An excerpt:
"...At a Glance
- Unlimited server deployments of GlassFish Enterprise Server and MySQL Enterprise
- Reliable, extensible, record-setting application server
- The world's most popular open source database—the defacto standard for massive scale in the network economy
- 90% lower total cost of ownership than traditional database and application server solutions, same enterprise-class support
- Global mission-critical support & services from 1000s of trained field services personnel
- No counting sockets or cores
- No counting support incidents
- No counting servers
- No auditing or true-ups
..."
I would like to see the point: "Global mission-critical support..." extended to something like: "Global mission-critical support, without necessary reproduction of errors with additional, docs, proofs and reproduction samples". I had to open cases for different other application servers and it was as time-consuming, as fixing the error myself. The quality of commercial support is really crucial. Right now, the overall quality of commercial support of the competition is not very high it often operates in "Inversion Of Control" mode. You have to provide the isolated sample app with reproduction code, unit tests and even documentation first, before the support-machinery actually kicks in. It can take even weeks, until a problem is recognized (not solved!) as such.
Let see, but this could be a huge opportunity for Glassfish. See also: "The End Of Commercial Java EE 5 Servers?"
Sunday June 08, 2008 Java 6 SE update 10 and the Great Java Cache Viewer - The Dream Team
Java 6 SE update 10 comes with many non-functional (often not directly visible enhancements). The Cache Viewer is an exception - it is a visual tool which allows the management of all installed webstart and JNLP-installed applets (both were unified) applications. This tool can be launched with [JAVA_HOME]/bin/javaws -viewer. The Java Cache Viewer is able to:
- list all installed WebStart (and probably cached Applet) applications
- deinstall existing application
- reinstall a deinstalled application
- display the JNLP of a particular application
- directly (offline/online) execute the application
- install shortcuts on the desktop (tested on Vista)
- display the cache size
Gesendet von admin [General] ( June 08, 2008 12:41 PM ) Permalink | Kommentare [0]
Monday June 02, 2008 The Java Pen, Executable Manual And Waiting For the Java SDK
I got the very last livescribe pen at the JavaONE 2008. The pen is nice with aluminium finish. The responsiveness is really fast- the pen reacts to user's actions immediately. The pen comes with a 6 page manual, which is amazing. At the first go I just ignored the hints "Tap here" and wondered about the nice looking icons :-). Tapping the icons, you will be able to set the date, time or hear additional information (the pen comes with speakers). I'm already curious about the Java SDK - it should come in July / June. The installation of the desktop was easy and fast as well - however it seems to be developed with .NET, what would explain the exclusive Windows availability. It is really interesting, how the user interfaces evolve in the last time. iPhone, Livescribe and Nike+. Just fresh new ideas. Gesendet von admin [General] ( June 02, 2008 01:29 PM ) Permalink | Kommentare [4]
Wednesday May 28, 2008 Sun xVM Virtual Box - the Killer Virtualization Tool? Second Smoke Test with Ubuntu
I had to test some stuff under Linux (I'm still running Vista :-(), and installed Ubuntu "under" Sun xVM Virtual Box instead of VMWare Workstation. During my first test I installed opensolaris - now I had to map virtual drives and exchange some files. The whole installation again went without any problems - surprisingly smoothly (very comparable to VMWare Workstation). Even the installation of the additional Virtual Box tools was really simple - then I was able to set up higher screen resolution. The only, little bit tricky thing, was the access to the virtual drive. Instead of reading the help I googled for this - and lost about 1 hour. However the help is helpful in this case:
"In a Linux guest, use the following command:
mount -t vboxsf [-o OPTIONS] sharename mountpoint
Replace sharename with the share name
specified with VBoxManage, and mountpoint with the path where you want the share to
be mounted (e.g. /mnt/share). The usual mount
rules apply, that is, create this directory first if it does not exist yet.
Beyond the standard options supplied by the mount command, the following are available"
Virtual Box is really amazing, you can suspend, restart, "store" images, take snapshots, even configure the "seemless" mode - I'm still searching for shortcoming / caveats :-). Perhaps a small issue: I just tried to setup the ubuntu's fancy 3D stuff - but it didn't worked inside the Virtual Box....
Sunday January 20, 2008 Sun's deal with MySql is great, but few months too late (then it would be perfect)?
The SAP's database SapDB, was rebranded to MaxDB and then donated to MySQL. MaxDB is really great, enterprise scale, but easy to install and manage, database even Oracle compatible. However, it seems like MaxDB moved back to SAP in October last year (2007) - which is potentially bad news for Sun. I used MaxDB/SAPDB in several projects - it was really great. Now the question, is MaxDB part of Sun's deal, or not? Gesendet von admin [General] ( January 20, 2008 07:37 PM ) Permalink | Kommentare [3]
Saturday January 12, 2008 During the Sun Tech Days Conference in Frankfurt, Sebastian Meyen (the editor of the JavaMagazin), asked James Gosling really good questions during this video interview. Some answers were really surprising - e.g. Sun is working already on Netbeans 7.0 with Java FX tool support targeted for artists and developers. The sound and picture quality are excellent - high resolution, clear sound - well produced. However, don't be afraid - the first 30 seconds are in German :-).
Btw. JavaMagazin is celebrating its10th anniversary - which is noteworthy. Actually I like this magazin very much from the beginning. At the JDK 1.0/1.1 time frame (cannot remember, but long before the advent of JavaMail) I had to implement an email functionality for one of my projects. I didn't like to implement such a protocol from scratch and searched for "reuse". Fortunately, I saw at the one of the first JavaMagazin editions in the metro an article about POP3 implementation (and full source code on the CD) - which saved my weekend. Since then I read almost all magazines until now... What I really like is the steady search for new ideas, topics and openness for new trends. Eg. Germany is an Eclipse land (still, but is changing a little bit), and the publisher of Java Magazin releases frequently the Eclipse Magazin as well. However at the anniversary edition of JM Netbeans 6.0 is mentioned on the cover at the very first place, long before Eclipse (I don't think it is caused by the alphabetical order... :-)). The anniversary edition of JavaMagazin comes with DVD loaded with slides, tools and even two free books... So be prepared to catch the InformationOverflowException (this one should be checked).
JavaMagazin is good for (human) language education too. James Gosling intend to learn German, just to be able to understand it :-).
Gesendet von admin [General] ( January 12, 2008 09:44 PM ) Permalink | Kommentare [0]
Sunday December 23, 2007 Thinking loud about Eclipse and Netbeans
As Eclipse came out it was a revelation for me. It was lean, fast and came with refactoring. These time there was nothing comparable. The commercial "enterprise" tools were overbloated with unnecessary functionality - at the same time essential things like refactoring just didn't work. Eclipse was the solution and the escape. I actually managed to convert many developers from using e.g. Visual Cafe or JBuilder to Eclipse. Netbeans these days was actually not usable (for me). There were many developers who really liked Netbeans 3.X - but I cannot understand this. Eclipse was just times better. I even tried ForteJ - a commercial variant of Netbeans these days, but some really strange concepts like "mounting Jars" instead of setting up a classpath maked me to go away. I even used Eclipse in official Sun courses on Solaris - the students liked it. What I liked and still like in Eclipse is the puristic IDE, which can be easily extended. It was the directly opposite to the commercial, overblown enterprise tools which were used these days. I switched completely to Netbeans since about version 5.0, not because it is better, but more complete for my needs. I'm working as a consultant, so I had several installations of Eclipse installed, everyone was adjusted for the particular customer. The "plugin hell" begun. I spent to much time to install everything I needed, Netbeans comes with everything I need - and in 99% of all cases my projects could be easily opened by other developers. In Eclipse world there is a lot of overlapping functionality, which is good and bad at the same time. E.g. commercial plugins like MyEclipse overlapp partially with WTP and are/were incompatible with others like EMF. I spent more and more time to figure out such interferences . However I still like the puristic approach of Eclipse and the complete "out-of-the-box" Netbeans experience and started to search for parallels.
The Eclipse model works very like Linux. You have a base, compatible system which can be easily extended, but if like to have more comfort, you should rely on distributions. And Eclipse is working in similar manner. There are already many Eclipse distributions (Yoxos, Codegear, Easyeclipse, Myeclipse) which provide a compatible set of plugins, which can be used for a certain purpose and safe a lot of installation time. However the chances are high, that there will be some fraction moving a project created from one distro to another (Just like porting one linux application between different distros), and you are already somehow dependent on the distros as well.
Netbeans model on the other hand is similar to the Mac or openBSD (with Application Packages) experience. You get not only the base system, but the extensions from one source as well. So the amount of Netbeans plugins/extensions is significantly slower, because everything what you really need is already part of the basic download. Although I prefer Linux over Mac and work with Windows :-) (another story), in the IDE space I enjoy the easy of installation and compatibility between different Netbeans projects. I'm even able to work with daily builds easily - no additional installation of plugins is required. I actually have only few plugins installed on top of Netbeans 6.0 Web & Java EE "edition" (UML, Maven and JavaFX), everything else what I need comes with the download. What I also enjoy now is the pace of development in Netbeans land. It reminds me at the early eclipse days, when I looked forward to every new milestone and installed it immediately. It's a lot of fun.
In Netbeans 6.0 even the Profiler and Visual Pack are part of the main download, so you can rely on such functionality as well. In Netbeans 5.5.X days you had to download an additional "Pack" for this purpose. The Netbeans extension mechanism is intuitive as well. You can use the search option to find an extension, without knowing from which URL it is actually downloaded (e.g. the UML-support is a good candidate). Even the update mechanism works similar to the Mac. Instead of downloading a new version from netbeans.org, a small icon appears which lets you install the patches incrementally. It works well so far (the first patch for Netbeans 6.0 is available through this channel).
Btw. you can use Netbeans without the extensions as well. Then the download takes only 21MB (just check out the Java SE edition) and the startup of netbeans becomes lightning fast. Btw. if you like to find more about the "out of the box Java EE 5 power" - in Munich at 24.01.2008 I will give a talk about Java EE 5, Patterns, Architectures with (but not about) Netbeans 6.0.
Friday September 07, 2007 Interesting Resources For Java SE/EE Developers
Some interesting links for (motivated) Java developers, programmers, architects and leaders:http://www.infoq.com
http://www.theserverside.com
http://www.javablogs.com
http://www.java.net
http://www.javasoft.com
http://blogs.sun.com especially http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/, http://blogs.sun.com/geertjan/, http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks
http://www.onjava.com/
http://www.developer.com/java/
http://www.javaworld.com/
http://www.java.com/
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/index.html
http://www.eclipse.org
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/index.html
http://www.javaranch.com
http://www.javablackbelt.com
http://www.jugcologne.org
http://www.dzone.com
Enjoy! ...but don't forget programming :-)
Gesendet von admin [General] ( September 07, 2007 01:02 PM ) Permalink | Kommentare [4]
Tuesday August 28, 2007 Netbeans 6.0 Daily Build - new logo, new splash, is faster
I just downloaded yesterdays daily build (27.08.2007) and found Netbeans 6.0 in new look and feel. The logo as well the splash-screen and welcome pages changed. I like the new art work. Beyond that it is faster than m10. It is absolutely usable, but the editor throws still from time to time exceptions. The new page flow editor looks great (especially the animations). Netbeans comes already with some more complicated JSF-samples like "SingleCrudWithTable". There ist still room of performance improvement of the visual editor - but it's usable. Also the EJB-support, JPA (generating JPA-Entities from table etc.) work well - there were no problems.Gesendet von admin [General] ( August 28, 2007 10:44 AM ) Permalink | Kommentare [3]
Sunday August 19, 2007 Java EE 6, Multimedia, Clientside Java, Transparency, Openness and JCP Event in Munich
At the 17th August in Munich there was a JCP-Roundtable Event with some luminaries:- Ed Cobb,BEA Systems, JCP EC Java SE/EE;
- Danny Coward, Sun Microsystems, JCP EC Java SE/EE;
- Michael DeNicola, Fujitsu, JCP EC Java SE/EE;
- Jean-Marie Dautelle, freelancer, JCP EC Java ME;
- Calinel Pasteanu, Sun Microsystems, JCP EC Java ME,
- Ono Kluyt, senior director of the JCP
My general impression was: the ECs were really interested to make the JCP even more open and transparent.
Gesendet von admin [General] ( August 19, 2007 11:26 AM ) Permalink | Kommentare [1]
