Friday February 24, 2006

Skiing Holiday 2006

Off - I will go skiing tomorrow with my brothers Robert and Gerold (and of course the ladies: Milly, Kathrin and Petra). Italy we’re coming! :-)

Posted on Feb 24, 2006 at 17:31 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment

Wednesday February 22, 2006

Web Office Tools

That’s paradox: I just wrote a post about cool web office tools, and just before I finished I accidentally hit Ctrl-W - and the post was gone. If that wasn’t a good lesson about the downsides of web-based applications…

Nevertheless, I was actually going to post a link to Richard MacManus’ best web office products of 2006 and my favourite JavaScript WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE.

Posted on Feb 22, 2006 at 20:21 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment

Saturday February 18, 2006

4 the Record - Robert’s Blog

Seems like my brother Robert has started blogging. His second post (category: senseless) pointed me to the DHTML version of lemmings - cute!

Posted on Feb 18, 2006 at 10:23 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment

Thursday February 16, 2006

Bean to Bean Transformations

When it comes to transformation data from one format to another, XSLT in combination with XPath are handy tools. But what do you do, if you have an object graph of Java Beans, which cannot easily de-/serialized into XML? In this case Bean (or POJO)-based transformation can do the trick.

Serialization of object graphs to XML (as well as deserialization from XML to objects) may not as easy as one might guess. Arjen has posted a good summary about why some have started to rather use the term Object-XML Mapping (O/X Mapping or, even shorter OXM). Similar to Object-Relational Mappings (ORM), it there are tools like Castor and XML Beans, which can help if properly used. However, it will always be a problem to map complex object graph with cyclic references into XML.

So, what are bean-based tranformations? Until now, bean to bean transformations have mostly been used in web-scenarios, using tools like Jakarta Commons Beanutils or Springs BeanWrapper. However, as this requirements comes up in SOA/ESB environments with more complex object graphs new tools evolve. The following list displays the ones I came across recently:

  • Dozer is described as “a powerful, yet simple Java Bean to Java Bean mapper that recursively copies data from one object to another.” The transformation are described in an XML file. From my first impression this tools looks promising.
  • TopLink 10.1.3 (Oracle’s ORM tool) is support for object-to-XML mapping. Haven’t checked it out though.
  • Jakarata Commons JXPath may be an oldie in this field, but using XPath on object graph is a really good idea and saves a lot of coding. I am currently using it and it work really great even on large object graphs.
  • Opensource-ESB ServiceMix also provides support for other transformation technologies such as rule-based transformations (Drools) and scripting support (like Groovy).

So, if you only need to transform data from ony object graph to another, these tools avoid the need to convert beans to XML and fight with the complications of OXM. In the future we might see tools like Dozer being extended with JXPath support or the like to allow more powerful mappings. Also a transformation builder would be really helpful.

Update: Another Tool is https://otom.dev.java.net which does include a transformation design tool.

Update 2: As Franz pointed out, the Dozer team is also developing an Eclipse plugin. In the SF.net forums is a post how to get a preview.

Posted on Feb 16, 2006 at 20:43 (MET) | Permalink | 4 comments

Sunday February 12, 2006

Displaytag 1.1 released

Displaytag 1.1 has been released today. Among portlet support and better customizability, my favourite JSP taglib now includes external sorting, which allows to display lists to be loaded partially from a database, rather than having to load the whole list upfront. For your reference: full changelog, download.

Make sure to check out the demo, in case you haven’t had a change to see Displaytag in action.

Posted on Feb 12, 2006 at 20:14 (MET) | Permalink | 1 comment

Sunday February 12, 2006

Waterfall is Back

You shouldn’t miss out the Waterfall 2006 conference. The sessions look extremely promising:

  • Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer by Jim Highsmith
  • wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework by Kent Beck
  • Making Outsourcing Work: One Team Member per Continent by Babu Bhatt
  • Unfactoring from Patterns: Job Security through Unreadability by Joshua Kerievsky

Also, don’t miss out the keynote by Brian Marick “Put Testing Where It Belongs–At the End”

Note: It takes place on April 1… ;-)

Posted on Feb 12, 2006 at 20:06 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment

Friday February 10, 2006

Spring Web Services

Just a quick notice that a preview for the Spring Web Services was released today. Major features (from the announcement):

* Object/XML mapping support, adding a unified interface and exception
hierarchy to:
     - Castor,
     - JAXB,
     - JiBX,
     - XmlBeans
* Flexible message dispatching mechanism, resembling Spring-
MVC's DispatcherServlet.
* Various styles of endpoints, including endpoints based on DOM,
SAX, StAX, and XML marshalling.
* Exception to SOAP Fault mapping

As I get back into SOA and had a frustrating experience with webMethods’ Web Services support at work today, I will have a closer look at it soon.

Posted on Feb 10, 2006 at 23:21 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment

Thursday February 9, 2006

SOA (again)

At Bosch service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a big thing. After developing a SOA-style architecture for mobile data services for my first employer MobilCom in 2002, I thought the SOA hype was going to decline. I guess I was wrong…

When browsing the web to get up to date with the latest developments I came across these two articled through Arjen’s blog (who is developing the Spring Web Services framework, btw):

I’m looking forward to dive into SOA (again). :-)

Posted on Feb 9, 2006 at 21:24 (MET) | Permalink | 1 comment

Wednesday February 8, 2006

Javadoc Improvements

Kathy Walrath has requested java developers to take part in a survey about good old Javadoc. I personally think that it lacks in community features, such as PHP’s ‘User Contributed Notes’ (sample), better or easier editing features (maybe wiki-style), or even social software-like approaches. What do you think?

Posted on Feb 8, 2006 at 19:39 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment

Thursday February 2, 2006

AJAX goes Mainstream

(The acronym) AJAX is just about one year old and now goes mainstream. While Matt Raible asks whether Script.aculo.us or Dojo would be the better choice, IBM has proposed the AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) as a part of the Web Tools Platform (WTP) to support Dojo (amongst others).

ATF will be based on Eclipse 3.2 and WTP 1.0 and will provide professional tools like a Debugger, JavaScript editing functionality (w/ syntax validation) and a DOM inspection. They will support both J2EE/JSP and PHP. It seems that the AJAX framework markets will consolidate. And as Matt points out good marketing can make an inferior product succeed.

Update: While Matt seems to favour Script.aculo.us, Jason Carreira describes Dojo as a solid, engineered solution.

Posted on Feb 2, 2006 at 19:49 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment