Sunday July 9, 2006

Remodelling

Yesterday, I helped my brother and his wife remodelling their new house. I helped installing two 200kg steel griders, which were necessary, as they removed two stone walls to have a large kitchen-, living-, dining-area (pictures: 4 the record).

Posted on Jul 9, 2006 at 10:20 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment

Thursday July 6, 2006

Java User Forum ‘06

Today I went to the Java Forum Stuttgart, a one-day conference organized by the Java User Group Stuttgart. As usual there was some noise, but there were some highlights as well:

New Features in Java SE 6 (due in October 2006):

  • No language changes, but detail work such as performance, ease of development through improved APIs.
  • Desktop: Tray icons, splash screens, interaction with browser/email client, better HW acceleration, look’n feel (Windows Vista, Native Rendering for GTK).
  • Scripting: Bi-directional integration of Mozilla Rhino JavaScript Engine, other engines available at http://scripting.dev.java.net
  • XML/Web Services: Additional APIs such as StAX, JAX-WS, JAX-B, XML Digital Signature API (they were not bundled earlier, as they weren’t mature enough before), internal HTTP server for web services
  • Internal Improvements: classpath wildcards, Java compiler API, OutOfMemoryError now tells which kind memory was full (there is not only heap space), OnOutOfMemory-Parameter to start script, better heap dump analysis (Web-UI on running JVM!)

SOA Governance is about how to manage an SOA in a large-scale cooperation. Although the presentation was a semi-product presentation, I liked the definition of Service Registry and Service Repository. The registry is like yellow pages, where you get the physical address. It can be implemented with UDDI. The repository is a source of additional information, starting with WSDLs, documentation, technical and business owners, users of the service, etc.

In a presentation about Jakarta Commons I found some interesting functionality in Commons Lang for checking input parameters. So instead of doing

public void doSomething(String param) {
  if((param == null) && (!param.equals("")) {
    throw new InvalidArgumentException(
        "Param is null or empty.");
  }
}

you would do:

public void doSomething(String param) {
  Validate.notEmpty(param);
}

Certainly not new, but neat! ;-)

CMS with JSR-170 was a nice intro to Magnolia, an open-source CMS. Features: i18n, pretty, search engine-friendly URLs, templating in JSP (incl. a custom taglib) and a pretty impressive admin and editing WebUI.

Posted on Jul 6, 2006 at 20:46 (MET) | Permalink | 2 comments