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Sam Newman's site, a Consultant at ThoughtWorks

Posts from the ‘Java’ category

A long piece over at “TheServerSide”:http://www.theserverside details the launch of Apache’s Geronimo project, which aims to produce a fully certified J2EE implementation.

One of the core commitments is for the J2EE implementation to be fully J2EE compliant. The Apache Foundation has access to the J2EE TCKs, which make the certification possible. The core developers who have “signed up” include: Richard
Monson-Haefel (OpenEJB), Geir Magnusson Jr. (Apache), Dain Sundstrum (Core Dev Network), James Strachan (Apache), and more.

Give the variety of Open Source projects out there which are already implementations of various bits of the J2EE specification (I thinking here of “Tomcat”:http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/, “JBoss”:http://www.jboss.org/, “OpenEJB”:http://openejb.sourceforge.net/ etc) it will be interesting to see if how many of these existing implementations become part of the project or if any will be rewritten. The inclusion of both OpenEJB developers and JBoss developers (or more specifically the guys who form the “Core Developers Network”:http://www.coredevelopers.net/) is interesting – I wonder which one will get used? There doesn’t seem to be a website for the project as yet. Expect more on this in the coming weeks.

August 6, 2003

Eric Burke posts on his O’Reilly weblog concerning the new version of his tool, “AntGraph”:http://www.ericburke.com/antgraph/index.html.

AntGraph uses an XSLT stylesheet to convert any Ant buildfile into a “dot” file, which is then converted into a GIF image using “Graphviz”:http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/ from ATT labs.

To be honest I think if your Ant files ever got complicated enough for this tool to be really useful then I’d suggest rewriting them, but it looks cool anyway.

August 4, 2003

Thanks to comments by “Francois Jordaan(Francois Jordaan’s weblog)”:http://www.fjordaan.uklinux.net/ on a topic concerning CMS Needs over at the “Measure Twice Weblog”:http://kalsey.com/blog/, I found a couple of interesting articles related to the use of MovableType as a simple CMS system. “Stopdesign”:http://www.stopdesign.com/ covers the “use of MT”:http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2003/07/11/adaptive_paths_mt_setup.html as part of the “Adaptive Path”:http://www.adaptivepath.com/ redesign. Meanwhile, “A Whole Lotta Nothing”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/’s article “Beyond the Blog”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/features.blah/entry/007162 gives some very clear examples for the use of MT for static-page generation. I’ll probably be following this for my About pages…
At work we are trying to move our content management in-house. Our current website is a JSP-driven affair, with well defined areas where we want our staff to upload content once a week or so. MovableType should let us do that – I’ll just have to write a custom Tag to grab the individual archive files and embed them.

August 1, 2003

A few product releases & other things of interest:

* “XPlanner (XPlanner homepage)”:http://www.xplanner.org/ is a web-based product management tool for exterme programming. (source: “Javalobby”:http://www.javalobby.org/).
* The “OpenSymphony(OpenSymphony Homepage)”:http://www.opensymphony.com/ group have released “OSWorkflow 2.5.0”:http://www.opensymphony.com/osworkflow/ and “OSCache 2.0 beta 1”:http://www.opensymphony.com/oscache/. OSWorkFlow is an interface-generic workflow engine, whereas OSCache handles the caching of dynamic content for websites. OpenSymphony are also in the process of moving their files over to “Java.net(Java.net – Suns site for opensource Java collaboration)”:http://www.java.net/. (source: “Javalobby”:http://www.javalobby.org/).
* The latest “early access version (Java Generics homepage – login required)”:http://developer.java.sun.com/servlet/SessionServlet?url=/developer/earlyAccess/adding_generics/index.html of the Java Generics is avaiable at “java.sun.com”:http://java.sun.com/ – developer connetion login required. From “The ServerSide”:http://www.theserverside.com:

Sun has released a new version of the Generics EA package. They have dropped variant type parameters, and added support for wildcard and bounded wildcard type
parameters. The varargs syntax has also been made more readable. Also supported are: Enumerations, Autoboxing, enhanced for loops and Static Imports.

July 29, 2003

“FindBugs”:http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/bugs/ is a Java tool which aims to find possible bugs in your code. I use “Eclipse’s”:http://www.eclipse.org/ own code checker and the Eclipse “Checkstyle”:http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/ “plugin”:http://eclipse-cs.sourceforge.net/ for this purpose, although it seems that Findbugs may pickup some things these tools don’t, such as:

  • Places where a null pointer might be dereferenced
  • I/O streams that are opened, do not escape the method, and are not closed on all paths out of the method
  • Methods that can return null instead of a zero-length array
  • Using the == or != operators to compare String objects

I might try runing it on my code base and see if it picks anything up…

July 24, 2003

From my forthcoming RSS-Java article – assuming it gets published! Actually this is as much to make sure the code formatting is still working…
Continue reading…

July 20, 2003

I have just started the process to submit an article I wrote on RSS and Java. Lets see how it goes…

July 20, 2003