Matt Quinlan of Appcelerator visited the Denver Open Source Users Group for our October meeting and gave a great presentation on how Appcelerator is an abstraction layer from your choice of backend web service provider (Java, PHP, ruby, .Net) and also provides a tag library that gives you access to the best of Prototype, JQuery (coming soon), YUI, Scriptaculous, and more.
JQuery is, in my opinion, the most unique JavaScript libraries in terms of being able to modify content on-the-fly. One such incredibly useful example that I’m able to apply often, is adding PDF icons and _newwindow targets to all URLs with .PDF as an extension on all pages in a site without ever touching the source of the pages themselves, but rather just on one common include page.
It’s neat to see technologies such as Hibernate, ORM, and Linq or actual implementations, such a JQuery in this case, span the borders to what I consider the three development realms – Open Source, Java and Microsoft.
Perhaps more concerning and going hand in hand with this is that largely only internal Spring employees are working on the codebase fixing bugs. If the community were allowed to be more involved, perhaps this strange commercialization positioning would not be necessary. Lastly, the venerable Matt Raible can’t even get access to the Spring 3.0 source code. If it is an open source product, where’s the source?
Please offer your comments and feedback. I’m interested to hear even more opinions on this change.
There is a relatively new tool out from Sun call the VisualVM. It is, in short a super new version of JConsole. In fact, it even runs all the extensions you have previously written for JConsole. Nice job Sun! You can profile, take snapshots, and watch in real time, threads, memory usage, and so much more of any local or remote java application.
Now, it takes a little bit of a trick to get it to work on Mac OSX. You need the latest Java 6 JDK installed, though it can monitor apps running on JRE 1.4 through JRE 7.0. But if you don’t set it as your default JDK, which can cause many apps such as Eclipse and CyberDuck to stop working, then you’ll need to use the –jdkhome option when launching visualvm. I set up a shell script to do so. The full invocation is as follows:
There’s an amazing new version of the ECF plugin for Eclipse that allows for remote Collaboration in Eclipse via the XMPP (Jabber, GTalk). Just log in to your GTalk account and start sharing editors with a friend.
A review by Matt Stephens of JavaFX points out exactly what I think are some of its shortcomings. If I were to highlight the craziest part of all that Matt agrees with me on is that the mid-game switch in syntax, after books were being written on the subject, damaged the usability of tools, damaged the value of books (made them near worthless), and damaged the usefulness samples out on the web. Folks pull up samples and they don’t compile. Folks get a book and its syntax descriptions no longer match. Folks pull up tools and either have an old version that won’t compile new stuff or vice versa.
Additionally, JavaFX has seen two JavaOne conferences come and go with no formal release. Take this in contrast to the ever climbing version numbers of Silverlight and Flex and you can see that Sun is late to the game with a weak solution that keeps getting modified and doesn’t have concrete tools or books out yet. Draw your own conclusions based on those facts.
Lastly, if you love to give up your privacy in even more ways, then Project Hydrazine (you know, that deadly gas from the spy satellite that came down unexpectedly last year) will let you spill your usage guts to Sun.
I just read an interesting overview of the JSR-296 Framework. It basically takes away the mundane setup of your main application frame. I think many individuals have been using Eclipse RCP and NetBeans Application Framework to accomplish this in much too heavyweight a fashion. JSR-296 provides a very simple and lightweight way to restore application UI state, set up the main application title, and set the default close operation.
Last Wednesday I had the privilege of being invited to speak about JavaFX at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO. It was a great audience with some very interesting questions. Thanks to Ken Kim and his team for a great speaking experience.
Also, thanks to these folks, the JavaFX Script slides I was presenting got awarded “Slideshow of the Day” on slideshare.net for a second time in just one week. These slides were the most viewed and downloaded of any slides on the site. Very exciting.
