Where Do You Get Your Java Resources?

Whenever I’m deep in the zone working on some new piece of software, I inevitably need to look something up. Each time, I have to start over with my search – going through Google to try and give some semblance of organization to all the information that exists in our space. Right now Java resources are spread out over tens of sites with no real linking between the resources on all the separate sites making it hard to remember what you’ve seen and how they work together with and relate to the resource you’re currently reading.

One of the things we’ve been trying to do at Javalobby is improve the types of resources that we offer. While many of you haven’t yet seen the effects of this on the public site, it really represents a shift in what we’re all about. While Javalobby may have had more of a political bent in prior years, we are actively working to increase the value and range of our services to the Java community as a whole. To help further our goal, we’d love some feedback from you guys. When you’re looking for resources, where’s the first place to go? Is it TSS? Is it JavaRanch? Java.net? Javalobby perhaps? We totally understand that Javalobby isn’t necessarily the first option for Java knowledge resources, but I want everyone to know that we’re actively working to change this perception. So, to help our team make this change a reality, please send us your feedback. Let us know where you get your resources, what makes those sites so great, and how we can make Javalobby into a place you want to visit each and every day. We value the opinion of each and every one of our readers and I hope that we hear from lots of you.

Fun With JSTL

Over the past two weeks Rick and I have been working on a site using JSTL, JSPs, and plain SQL. In the age of O/R mappings, MVC frameworks, and IoC, we decided to simplify things. I have to admit that so far I’ve been very, very impressed with the performance and speed of development. While many people will probably chastise us, being able to execute SQL queries with a JSP tag has been a breeze and has made getting right to our data easier than any other method I’ve tried on the web front end.

Now, some of you may be asking why in the world we decided to go this route. First, the data that we were trying to expose was populated outside of the web application and very little user entry or state keeping was required. In an application where you’re basically just outputting data from SQL results (sometimes complicated queries) sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. By going with this quick and dirty method, we’ve been able to get 85% of our application finished in just a few days. Keep your eyes out on Javalobby, I’m sure Rick will be talking about it more next week.

Spring + Hessian + Hibernate

In our last edition I asked for some help with my latest Hibernate and Spring experiments. Lots of you responded and through the helpful emails of you guys, I was finally able to get my code working – and without too many changes to my own code. In return for the great answers that you guys gave, I’d like to share the final answers that were given to me. In the end, there were two answers that work for the particular problem I was having, which was that all my Lists, which were controlled by Hibernate, seemed to believe they were lazy loading when Hessian was deserializing it on my client side.

The first solution (and the one that I’m currently using) wasn’t quite as robust as the second solution. It basically involves extending Spring’s Hessian exporter and adding a custom Hessian serializer that wraps any Hibernate list in a regular ArrayList. What this did is make sure that Hessian had a copy of a regular list on the client side instead of a Hibernate list, which prevented the lazy loading exception that I was experiencing.

The second solution that someone sent me was actually a much more robust answer to the problem. The first solution really only worked for Lists in the form that it was sent to me. A solution by Armond Avanes took care of all forms of Hibernate collections by creating a new ServiceExporter in Spring. He basically took the code to the Hessian exporter then modified it to write initialized Hibernate objects. While I haven’t tried this method yet, it seems to me like it should work.

As more and more people learn about Hessian, I think a problem like the one that I experienced will become more widespread. If you’d like the source code, just email me and I’ll forward you the emails that were sent to me.

Until Next Time,
Matthew Schmidt
matt@javalobby.org
Yahoo IM: mattschmidtjl

Analysts are calling on Sun Microsystems to make its NetBeans open-source integrated development environ- ment (IDE) work with the Eclipse open-source IDE, in order to head off the challenge from Microsoft's dot-Net.

Eclipse started life as an IBM initiative but last year IBM handed over control to the independent Eclipse Foundation. Sun contributed NetBeans to the open source community in June 2000, and IBM made Eclipse open source a year later.

Sun said that there have been two million downloads of the NetBeans IDE. But Eclipse - which supports development in other languages in addition to Java - has gained even greater traction among Java developers.

Found this funny animated blog entry making fun of the complexities of GridBagLayout:
http://madbean.com/blog/2004/17/totallygridbag.html

In the past I've always seen a good handful of people say that JGoodies Forms was very nice and helped simplify their GUI work. I tried getting into Forms before during one afternoon and found it to be just as confusing as GridBagLayout. Anyone have a great article that helped them out with Forms? Also how is the performance when resizing windows with complex layouts?

Also I'd like to take this opportunity to say that I rely on the NetBeans GUI builder whenever I need to do a quick GUI like a dialog or something along those lines. The "Customize" feature for the GridBagLayout is absolutely excellent IMO, really top notch work to the NB team.

Autoboxing might become a very confusing experience for Java developers.

Now that JavaOne is over (not that I got to go) and we are all more up-to-date with where Java is 'believed' to be going, I have a simple question: as Java developers are we in a better position to develop web applications that offer a richer user experience? To this end I have developed a simple test scenario:

Test Scenario
I have a service that can provide the metadata for several thousand items (id, title, creation date, status, etc) and a service that can deliver an HTML description giving further details of an item specified by its id. I want to develop a web application that displays the metadata in a table on the left (allowing the user to resize, reorder columns etc) and the HTML description of a 'selected' item on the right. When the user selects a row in the table, the HTML description on the right is updated. As a complication the description may also reference zero or more other items. Selecting one of these links should update the both the description and reset the selection in the table.

Netbeans 4.0 contains a very nice tab component. I have extracted it =). It has four different views and is model driven. It also appears to support Metal, GTK, Aqua, WinXP, and Windows Classic look and feels out of the box.

YourKit, LLC has launched the Early Access Program for YourKit Java Profiler 3.0, the next major version to be released in August 2004.

We invite all interested developers to participate in the early access program and share their comments and

nib4j 1.01 is available for download.

nib4j is a simple but powerfull Java library that permits the use of Apple's Interface Builder to design Swing-based user interfaces.

More informations at:

jClientUpload is a client-side JAVA component (Applet) that allows to upload files to a web server. This component could be integrated in any application. Server-side technology could be JSP/Servlet, PHP or Microsoft ASP. Front-end provides an upload

KNCwebserver is a simple multi threaded HTTP (web) server that is open source written solely in Java. Is very configurable, contains templates and has built in access logging.

Check it out @

Adobe has optimized its new release of Adobe Designer 6.0 and Adobe LiveCycle server software with the WebSphere Studio open standards environment, which embraces ebXML, XML, J2EE, and Web Services. This intergration enables you to build easy,

Whizlabs Software, the global leader in J2EE Certification Exam Preparation, has upgraded its SCWCD 1.4 Exam Simulator for CX-310-081 Certification.

Whizlabs SCWCD 1.4 (J2EE Certification) Exam Simulator for the CX-310-081 Exam, authored by

Wi.Ser is a Java/XML server-side GUI-framework which enables an application to run as either a monolithic Swing app, a thin-client/server Swing application, or as a Web application without any change.

The framework supports a mixed

OpenReports Designer is a visual report design tool for JasperReports, a powerful open source Java reporting engine. OpenReports Designer combines a visual report designer, XML report definition editor, and report viewer into one interface in

Recently, Sun and Microsoft have both pledged to make Java and Windows work better together. Microsoft now advertises tools which allow .NET and J2EE to interoperate. Sun invites Microsoft to join the JCP. Despite these moves, neither company has made

Hi everyone,

We are please to announce that

BlueJ 2.0.0 beta

is now available for download.

This version of BlueJ includes major feature improvements, including added support for J2SE 5.0 with all its new features

jIRCii is a cross platform java Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Client. The client is fully scriptable using a perl-like language called sleep. jIRCii supports CTCP/DCC protocols, connects to SSL servers, and has a ton of

KNCforum is web-based message board software that is open source written solely in Java. A few of the prominent features text based topic searching, confirmation registration via email, cookie/session based login capability and admin

The Embedded Voice Toolkit allows developers to more easily build embedded speech applications using a graphical user interface

Excelsior JET 3.6 has been released for Windows and Linux on Intel x86 platform. Evaluation packages are available for immediate

File transfer mode added both to Windows and Mac OS version.
To see, how it works, download the trial package from http://www.gnome.sk and unzip it.
Go to the examples directory of the unzipped Morena package and

Hello,

I've bundled up all slide decks in the "Rich Client, Rich Browser, Rich Portals" lecture series in a package that you can download for offline reading.

The lineup includes:

XUL Intros
==========

The Future of

JDBInsight 2.5 "Trace in Time" is now available for immediate download. This new release focuses on the timeline analysis of transaction and SQL statement executions allowing for the immediate identification of performance bottlenecks as a result of

Today we introduce the prerelease of new JNIWrapper 2.5 and a new Beta version of JExplorer - Beta 3.

New JNIWrapper is the Beta release that covers many important issues resolved after version 2.4.1 and adds some new features to the

The first product of the Developer AOP project is available in the form of an AspectJ addin for JDeveloper. Please take a look at this early version as feedback would be appreciated.