The editors of SYS-CON Media's Java Developer's Journal are in a unique
position when it comes to Java development. All are active coders in their
"day jobs," and they have the good fortune in getting a heads-up on many of
the latest and greatest software releases. They were asked to nominate three
products from the last 12 months that they felt had not only made a major
impact on their own development, but also on the Java community as a whole.
The following is a list of each editor's selections and the reason why they
chose that product.
Joe Winchester
Desktop Java Editor
SwingLabs
SwingLabs is an open source laboratory for exploring new ways to make Swing
applications easier to write, with improved performance and greater visual
appeal. It is an umbrella project for various open source initiatives
sponsored by Sun Microsystems and is part of the java.net community... (more)
Since Eclipse's first release in 2001, it has become a popular environment
for Java development. In the period between March 10 and May 11, 2005, users
downloaded over 17,000 copies of one of the production SDK releases and over
3,500 copies of one of the stable (milestone) SDK builds on average every
day. A vibrant eco-system of developers, plug-in providers, authors, and
bloggers has grown up around it. Eclipse has also gained the backing of the
key Java vendors including BEA, Borland, IBM, SAP, and Sybase. Developers
like Eclipse because it provides a great platform for building Java
applications, and companies like it because it unifies their software tools
under one open source umbrella.
In late June of this year, the latest release of the Eclipse Platform,
version 3.1, will be available for download from eclipse.org. In this
article, I'll highlight some of t... (more)
2007 was undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008? Will
'08 be the year of "Unified Communications" or the year when CMS comes to
stand for "Community Management System" - or even "Collaboration Management
System"? Or will it be the year of a giga-merger, to beat the mere
mega-mergers of 2007?
As usual at the end of each year, SYS-CON has been informally polling its
globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives,
commentators, investors, writers, and editors. As always, the range and depth
of their answers is fascinating, throwing light not just on where the
industry is going but also how it's going to get there, why, because of who,
within what kind of time-scale.
Enjoy!
RIAs versus AJAX . Ruby on Rails . PHP . Facebook Competitors
TIM BRAY
Director of Web Technologies, Sun
Tim Bray managed the Oxford English Dictionary projec... (more)
Migration of software systems to the OSGi platform is gaining momentum with
wide acceptance of the OSGi technology as the dynamic module system for Java.
This transition is of special interest when it comes to popular Java
application frameworks, which attract a growing number of Java developers
around the world. Although the technical merits of the OSGi platform are
broadly recognized, the migration of existing application frameworks is slow
due to significant redesign and re-implementation efforts involved. We
present an alternative lightweight approach - an adaptation of existing Java
application framework for component based OSGi environment. Adaptation, as
opposed to migration, eliminates the necessity of modularizing or redesigning
the existing framework. This is particularly important when existing software
platform and the associated programming model is mat... (more)
"We continue to struggle a bit with what developers think “Eclipse”
means. They have heard of it, but they believe that we are entirely focused
on Java tools when in fact we are doing so much more," says Mike Milinkovich,
Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, in this exclusive Q&A; with
Jeremy Geelan. "Our goals at Eclipse are to create an industrial-strength
open source development platform that spans extensible tools, frameworks and
runtimes," adds Milinkovich - pictured here during a previous Webcast on
SYS-CON.TV from our Times Square studio.
Eclipse Developer's Journal: May 20th marked your 4th anniversary as the
Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. What have been the biggest
changes in the Eclipse ecosystem in that time?
Mike Milinkovich: I believe the biggest change is the breadth of the projects
that are happening at Eclipse today, and the eco... (more)
To view our full selection of recent Eclipse stories click here
Today the Eclipse Foundation announced general availability of the
royalty-free 3.0 release of Eclipse - described by the Ottowa-based
foundation as a platform "for tools integration, software modeling, and
testing that has been broadly adopted by commercial vendors, academic
institutions, and open technology developers."
Bill Dudney, JDJ's Eclipse editor, commented, "I am very excited about the
promise of Eclipse 3.0. With each new milestone release the platform has
become richer in its feature set, better performing and generally more
productive to use."
"From the enhanced Java tools to the improved integration with Ant and other
open source projects," Dudney continues, "Eclipse 3.0 is a great leap
forward. In addition to enhancements to the Java developer tool box the whole
plugin architecture has bee... (more)
Many articles have already been written about service-oriented architecture
(SOA) and Service Component Architecture (SCA), for example, see references
[1] and [2]. In this article we'll focus on a freely available, open source
implementation of the Service Component Architecture that provides a simple
way to implement SOA solutions. This SCA implementation is being developed in
the Apache Tuscany Incubator project. The project started in 2006 and is
being used by many who are looking for a simple SOA infrastructure. The
recent Tuscany SCA version 1.0, which was released in September 2007,
supports the Service Component Architecture specifications 1.0. In addition
to implementing the SCA specifications, Tuscany is also a nursery for new
ideas. Some of these ideas will find their way into the specifications and
some will be regarded as extensions available in Apache ... (more)
The Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) Alliance is working to realize
the vision of a "universal middleware" that will address issues such as
application packaging, versioning, deployment, publication, and discovery.
In this article we'll examine the need for the kind of container model
provided by the OSGi, outline the capabilities it would provide, and discuss
its relationship to complementary technologies such as SOA, SCA, and Spring.
Enterprise software is often composed of large amounts of complex
interdependent logic that makes it hard to adapt readily to changes in
requirements from the business. You can enable this kind of agility by
following a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) pattern that refactors a
system into application modules grouped by business functions that expose
their public functionality as services (interfaces).
For example, a customer... (more)
Mike, thanks for agreeing to talk to JDJ and bringing us all up to date with
Eclipse since our last interview with you. The best way is probably just to
fire off questions and allow you to answer without getting in your way!
JDJ: Overall, how's the independence from IBM going? Since most of Eclipse's
committers were IBM employees when you first went independent, how is
building a community around Eclipse that is not so IBM focused going?
MM: It's going really well. Frankly, it's going much better and much faster
than I had originally anticipated when I started the job. In many ways we
have accomplished in the past year what I had expected would take two years
or more.
First, the importance of adding companies such as BEA, Borland, and Computer
Associates to our board cannot be overstated. Each of these companies
competes fiercely with IBM in the marketplace. Each is ... (more)
DeCare Systems Ireland Blog
Even though 'Service' comes first in SCA (Service Component Architecture),
SCA is a distributed component model. It's about designing components (and
composites) rather than designing services. It doesn't feel like it was
designed to build a SOA. It feels like its main goal was to define a
distributed component model. And as we all
know, the distributed component models failed in the past. I think SCA will
too.
For the second day of JavaOne my schedule contained technical sessions and
BoFs about mostly SOA, SCA, REST and Comet.
SCA
I attended two more sessions about SCA:
- Open-Source SOA with SCA and Apache Tuscany
- Open Standards for SOA and Java technology
The second one was a panel session. The host was MC David Chappell of
Chappell and Associates and the panellists were David Chappell of Oracle,
Mike Edwards of IBM, Steve Jones of Capgem... (more)
Callisto is the simultaneous release of 10 major Eclipse projects at the same
time. An important thing to note about Callisto is that even though it's the
simultaneous release of 10 projects, it doesn't mean these projects are
unified. Each one remains a separate Open Source project operating with its
own project leadership, its own committers, and its own development plan. In
the end, Callisto is about improving the productivity of developers working
on top of Eclipse projects by providing a more transparent and predictable
development cycle.
A Quick Tour of Callisto's Projects
In this article, we 'll go through each of the Callisto components. We'll
give a brief overview of each and quote an Eclipse committer about what's
exciting about his component in the Callisto release. Then we'll discuss some
of the challenges that faced Callisto and conclude with the advanta... (more)
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