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The Daily Grind
: Java EE BlogJBuilder Seeks Good Home
Across the web, headlines are proclaiming the demise of JBuilder, the venerable Java IDE from Borland.
The truth of the matter, as always, is not so clear cut. Borland has announced that it’s looking to sell off its IDE business, including all the developers and staff responsible for producing and selling JBuilder, as well as Delphi, C++Builder, C#Builder and others. The announcement has a number of encouraging quotes by the company’s chief product evangelist about the products’ bright future in the “new company.”
When such a company will eventuate, and whether or not it will have the budget and drive to keep JBuilder in the competitive Java IDE game (currently dominated by Eclipse and NetBeans, with IDEA a trendy contender), remains to be seen.
As a longtime JBuilder user, I always enjoyed the product’s rich feature set. It always seemed like if it was worth doing, JBuilder could do it. It wouldn’t always be easy or attractive, but you could do it. Borland recently released JBuilder 2006, the twelfth major release of the IDE, where the major changes (aside from supporting new standards and technologies) were in the area of team development: with the new version, two developers can work together …
Java Studio Creator 2 Released and Still Free
When I first announced that Sun was making its Java Studio Creator product available as a free download, some skeptics labelled this as a mere publicity stunt ahead of the release of Creator 2.
Well, Java Studio Creator 2 is now here, and it’s still free.
Java Studio Creator is based on JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology, a component-based approach to web development that is similar in style to ASP.NET. This positions Java Studio Creator as a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions. Both bring drag-and-drop rapid application development to the web and both are free downloads, but Creator is free of many of the restrictions placed on Microsoft’s Express Editions (e.g. it offers a full visual database query builder).
And of course, being written in Java, Creator will run on Mac OS X and Linux systems.
A brief overview of some of the new features:
- improved code completion in code editors (Java, HTML, CSS)
- a new graphical CSS editor
- EJB Support (was beta in Creator 1)
- many new JSF components
- a new database support layer
- HTTP monitoring
- AJAX components (including a Google Maps component)
- runs on Java 5 with associated speed and UI benefits
If you’ve considered Java web development in the past and were put …
YourKit Java Profiler: 75% Off!
YourKit Java Profiler is an excellent tool for tracking down and fixing performance issues and memory leaks in Java applications, from desktop apps to Web applications.
Much like a debugger, a profiler lets you connect to a running Java application, allow it to run for a little while, and then pause it to analyze its state at any given time. It lets you take “snapshots” of the hierarchy of Java objects that exist in memory, and compare snapshots taken at different times to identify memory leaks. It also analyzes the time your application spends running the different parts of your application’s code, so you can target areas that have a large impact on performance for optimization.
After playing with several options in this area, YourKit Java Profiler is certainly my pick of the bunch. It’s got really pleasant interface to work with, with facilities for analyzing just about any kind of Java program. It’s also better than the competition at analyzing programs in tricky conditions (e.g. an applet running in a Java 1.3-era browser plug-in). It will also integrate with all the major IDEs (Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEA, JBuilder and JDeveloper), to fit into your normal workflow.
Until January 15th, YourKit is selling …
Servlets 2.5: Scream or yawn?
It’s like a dream you try to remember but its gone,
Then you try to scream but it only comes out as a yawn
Pinch Me, Barenaked Ladies
JavaWorld yesterday published an article by Jason Hunter, the leading authority on Java Servlets. The article provides a pragmatic look at the changes in the recently finalized Servlet 2.5 specification (JSR 154).
At first glance, the updated spec may look pretty scary. Servlets form the foundation of almost all server-side Java Web development technology, and this latest update to the spec forces developers to use Java 5.0 (Servlets 2.4 worked on Java 1.3 or later) to take advantage of new language features like annotations.
Annotations allow you to pepper your Java classes, methods and properties with labels that are compiled into the resulting class files. When these classes are loaded, these annotations can identify how these classes, methods and properties should be used by the server. For example, one of the annotations supported by the Servlet 2.5 spec lets you tag a servlet class with the security role(s) that a user must have to access it.
In his article, Jason reveals that the changes in the spec are not as drastic as they …
10 Years of Java… for what?
Update (Dec 3): first should point out opinions expressed here I my own and I take responsibility for them - they are not Sitepoint’s or Maarten’s. In retrospect should have followed my first feeling and kept this opinion (which is all it is) to myself.
Last Wednesday evening hooked up with Maarten to open up Sitepoint’s Zurich office ;). Told Maarten about this amusing (to me) Java rant I was dying to post but figured it would generate too many bad vibes. But Maarten, as a fellow PHP fan, found it pretty amusing as well and told me to “Go for it!” - so blame him. In the spirit of kicking a man while he’s down (or calling in an airstike on your own position)…
Back in May this year, Javaworld was celebrating 10 years of Java. Since then Ruby on Rails has been generating much buzz, to the point where it’s got people talking about the death of Java.
That got me thinking “If Java dies, how will it be remembered by future generations?”. What is Java’s legacy? What Java applications will people still be using 20 years from now and saying “Wow - …
Sun’s Java Studio Creator is also a free download
Microsoft isn’t the only one giving away IDEs. Java Studio Creator is now a free download.
Either Sun wasn’t getting many takers at the normal US$99 price point (which was chosen to accomodate the entry-level developers for whom this tool was designed), or they feel a free IDE will promote the Java platform even better.
No word yet on whether this is a permanent change, so you should probably jump on this offer right away if you don’t want to miss out.
Previously: Quick-and-dirty Web Development with Java Studio Creator
JavaOne 2004 and 2005 presentations free online
Last year at this time, I was considering just when to buy a one-year subscription to JavaOne online. If I timed it right, I figured, I could pay for one year and watch two years’ worth of JavaOne conference presentations. Well, I guess I wasn’t the only one paralyzed by indecision, because this year Sun has just plonked the presentations online for all to see–no charge!
Every presentation at JavaOne 2004 and 2005 can be viewed in full-motion video, complete with live transcription and synchronized presentation slides, or downloaded in PDF form. The Web tier presentations alone could keep you busy all day!
Whether motivated by a lack of developer interest in the paid subscriptions, or by a desire to promote next year’s conference, this is a great resource for those of us who are either too cash-strapped (like me) or too far away (also me) to attend the conference in person.
So why not take your phone off the hook, uncork a nice bottle of wine, and curl up with some cutting-edge Java presentations tonight? If anyone asks, I’ll say you had a hot date.
Preview: JBuilder 2006 vs. IntelliJ IDEA 5.0
All of the Java IDE announcements I reported on a few months back have come to fruition, with recent releases of Eclipse 3.1, NetBeans 5.0 Beta, IntelliJ IDEA 5.0 and Borland JBuilder 2006.
As a longtime user of JBuilder, I’ve always been in something of a niche. At last count, only 8 per cent of Java developers were using JBuilder, with the most popular choices being the free Eclipse (76%) and NetBeans (21%), with IDEA as the most popular commercial option at 13%. With this wave of new releases, I figured it was about time to reevaluate my own choice.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve jumped back and forth between IDEA 5.0 and JBuilder 2006, working on various projects including complex Web applications, heavy-lifting desktop apps, nimble applets and lightweight mobile games.
JBuilder has always been my choice due to its feature-richness. In my experience, if JBuilder didn’t have it, it wasn’t worth having. The tradeoff was always usability–JBuilder was never a particularly attractive environment to work in, and a bad configuration choice (a slow CVS server, for example) could immediately bring it to its knees. A venerable product indeed, it …
JavaForge: SVN hosting for your open source project
The fine folks at JavaLobby have just announced a new community for open source Java projects: JavaForge.
With SourceForge.net and Java.net already hosting thriving open source Java development communities, JavaForge is set to distinguish itself with the modern Subversion code versioning system (SourceForge.net and Java.net still use the older CVS system) and a raft of other features offered by the CodeBeamer platform.
I really hope this site takes off, or at the very least nudges the established sites closer to deploying Subversion. It really does address so many of the annoying issues that plague developers forced to use CVS.
Jetty 6.0 to provide new architecture for AJAX apps
AJAX applications, websites that communicate with the server in the background to update displayed pages on-the-fly, are increasingly presenting a new challenge to Web servers that were not designed with AJAX in mind. The lightweight Jetty Java Web server software is set to offer a new AJAX-friendly architecture so that such applications can be supported without overwhelming the server with traffic.
Most Web servers, and the standards they comply with, were designed to handle a simple request-response cycle, where Web browsers will issue requests for content and the server will return responses as quickly as possible. AJAX applications break this mold, often requiring the Web server to send notifications of events when they happen, without the browser issuing a specific request.
To do this within the current capabilities of the Web, AJAX applications will often send a request to the server with the expectation that that request will not receive a response until the server wishes to notify the browser of some event (e.g. receiving a new message in a chat application). Because Web browsers will give up waiting for a response after a certain amount of time, the AJAX application will reissue the request whenever it times out.
On the browser …
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