Antonio's Blog

A few days ago I‘ve blogged about Why are we not using Java EE 5? This post had a few comments. I’ve then been contacted by Matthew Schmidt from DZone asking me if they could reproduce the post and let people add more comments on it. So, to keep on talking about this topic, go to Java DZone. By the way, talking about confusion, I‘ve found this really interesting article called Is Tomcat an application server?

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Believe it or not, in a few months the Java EE 5 specification will be two years old (Final Release on the 11 May, 2006). And nobody is using it. We have all read about how easier the development model is in Java EE 5 compared to J2EE 1.4. Complexity reduced, less XML file descriptors, less code, injection and so on. Despite all these good things, Java EE 5 projects are not taking off. Here are some reasons why : Java EE 5 is a rupture more than a continuity. J2EE 1.4 and Java EE 5 are really different. That means development teams have to be trained to something new and develop new projects leaving behind years of EJB CMP or JAX-RPC. Some teams have invest a lot in J2EE 1.4 and are willing to wait a little bit more and see. And what is Java EE 6 was another big rupture again ? Java EE 5 is based on Java SE 5 (heavy use of annotations). But JDK 1.4 is still widely use in projects, making it impossible to migrate to Java EE 5 Even if Java EE 5 is much simpler than its predecessors, it is still too complicated and has many specifications. With profiling in Java EE 6 the number of spec will be reduced, but until now, to be Java EE 5 compliant, application servers have to implement 23 specifications. Today the application server race is […]

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In IT, it‘s never the right time to choose a software. Either a technology is too old, or it‘s too new or it‘s still in beta. But I think that November 2007 is a critical time to choose a portal platform. I‘m not an expert on portal (as a former BEA employee I‘ve used Weblogic Portal but that was many years ago and things have changed) and I’ve been asked to short-list portal implementations. The first issue I have is with the version of the spec that the portal should implement. “JSR 168”: http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168 (Portlet V1.0) has been released in October 2003 and most of the portals implement it. But “JSR 286”: http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168 (Portlet V2.0) is nearly out. Same thing with the JSF bridging. The JSR 301(Portlet Bridge Specification for JavaServer Faces) is still in early draft but nearly there. Same thing happens with WSRP V1.0 (Web Services for Remote Portlets) (August 2003) and the V2.0 still in draft 4. It looks like portal specifications haven‘t changed much since 2003 (Portlet V1.0 and WSRP V1.0). And suddenly three specifications are nearly getting published (Portlet V2.0 and WSRP V2.0 and Portlet bridge for JSF). What should I look into ? A JSR 168 implementation that would be obsolete really soon or a JSR 286 beta implementation that will be buggy ? The project will be using JSF and WebServices, so I need to take that into account. Any advices ? Any […]

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I‘ve been thinking about creating a Java User Group in Paris (France) for a long long time. That‘s done now !!! Well, just the first steps : I‘ve created a JUG project at dev.java.net (the project is still pending) Mailing list at users@parisjug.dev.java.net Bought the parisjug.org domain name Looking for a meeting room (either at the Cnam university or with a partnership that I have with the Port Parallelecooperation) I‘m having a diner at JavaPolis with all the other JUG leaders and will attend the BOF so I can get a maximum information I‘m aiming to have the first meeting on Tuesday the 12th of February (monthly meeting on the second Tuesday of every month except in August) And, of course, I will need some good speakers to come and do some technical presentations So, stay tuned, I will post more information on that.

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The other day I was presenting Java EE 5 to a customer‘s team. There was a guy who had read my book and at the end of the presentation asked me : “You are involved with open source, how come in your book you use Intellij Idea and not Eclipse or Netbeans ? Is it because JetBrains gave you a license ?”. Indeed. When I started writing my book I asked JetBrains and Visual Paradigm if they would offer me a licence. And they both did. But, I‘ll say it again out loud : I LOVE INTELLIJ IDEA !!! I‘ve been using this IDE for 6 years now and I think it‘s a really good one and worth spending some money on. I‘ve never been attracted by Eclipse. On the other hand, I have to say that I‘m quite impressed by NetBeans and use it more and more.

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Looking for a contract in Java EE ? You will not find any. What about J2EE ? Yes but, be careful, only with Java 5, not Java 1.4. What ? You are only using Java EE 5, we already use the 6 version… For techies, things are getting clearer. We know that there is a EE, SE and even ME edition of Java. We also know that the versionning of these platforms are not the same, and it doesn‘t really matter (EE 5 works with SE 6). So a sentence like “Java EE 5 project using Java SE 5” makes sense for us. But not for the marketing. When a company wants to advertise a job about EE, they still use the good old J2EE symbol. And not because they know they are using J2EE 1.4 but because they don’t have a clue of what EE is. They just know that they are doing Java 6, and 6 is higher than 5, so if you talk to them about Java EE 5, they will look at you with superiority thinking how could you use such an old technology.

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Very often you can read ” xml descriptors are dead with EJB 3 “. Well, it’s not exactly true. XML descriptors are not dead, they are optional (thank god). But there is still a very good and legitimate use for them when you want to configure an EJB. When you have an attribute in an EJB which value can change at deployment, you don’t want to change your code, recompile it, package it and redeploy the EJB. No, you just want to change an XML file (ejb-jar.xml), package it with your classes and deploy the EJB. So, how do we do that with EJB 3 ? Still using ENC ( environment namming context also sometimes called enterprise namming context ) but in a much easier way. ENC has been around since EJB 1.0 and can be seen as a local JNDI namespace specific to the container. You can bind many different items in the ENC (EJB references, JMS queues, topics, data source, user transaction…) but I will have a look at how to bind and use primitive values. Anything registered in the ENC can be looked up by name under the java:/com/env context ( comp means component ). Let’s take a simple stateless bean which defines a String str initialized with Hello World !!!. @Stateless public class ABean implements ABeanRemote { private String str = "Hello World !!!"; public String sayHello() { return ">>> " + str; } } Now, […]

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More and more customers are using wikis for collaborative work… and universities too. At the Cnam, where I teach, we felt the need of using a wiki. Our department installed MediaWiki last year but the administrator didn‘t set up the rights properly so it was a real nightmare for teachers to have access to the right resources. A couple of month later, nobody was using MediaWiki anymore. I then had a look at other different wikis and found XWiki. It’s really good for exactly what we want : a fine use of groups, users and access rights. To get use to it I’ve used XWiki for my personal web site and proposed it to the university administrator. In the meantime I’ve decided to write a tutorial to share my experience of installing and using XWiki… sorry, it’s in French and it is called Créer un site associatif avec XWiki. You can find this tutorial on developpez.com web site. I would like to thank Sergiu Dumitriu, François Le Droff and Pascal B for reading the early draft and giving me their inputs. Enjoy.

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