IBM - Jazz.net - Collaborative software

Developing software in a team is much like playing an instrument in a band. Both require a balance of collaboration and virtuosity. Jazz defines a vision for the way products can integrate to support this kind of collaborative work, and a technology platform to deliver on this vision.

Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle. We believe Jazz will help teams build software more effectively while making the software development activity more productive and enjoyable.

I used IBM’s Jazz to coordinate my introductory software engineering course at the University of British Columbia. The class had approximately 80 students and twenty groups. I have posted a few entries to share my experience.

.

The Architecture of Mailinator

The most interesting part to me is that the complete set of hardware that mailinator uses is one little server. Just one. A very modest machine with an AMD 2Ghz Athlon processor, 1G of ram (although it really doesn't need that much), and a boring IDE, 80G hard drive (Check ServerBeach's Category 1 Powerline 2100 for the exact specs). And honestly, its really not very busy at all. I've read the blogs of some copycat services of Mailinator where their owners were upgrading their servers to some big iron. This was really the impetus for me writing down this document - to share a different point of view.

Aspect-oriented programming

AOP compliments OOP. It centers on cross-cutting concerns, or aspects - parts of code that are common to many different objects, of which logging is the canonical example. Using an AOP language (such as AspectJ) or libraries (such as Spring), programmers can code this functionality once and then define where to weave it into existing objects.

Java EE meets Web 2.0

A tremendous number of successful enterprise applications have been created using the Java EE platform. But the principles Java EE was designed on don't support the Web 2.0 generation of applications efficiently. An in-depth understanding of the disconnect between Java EE and Web 2.0 principles can help you make informed decisions about using approaches and tools that address that disconnect to some degree. This article explains why Web 2.0 and the standard Java EE platform are a losing combination, and it demonstrates why asynchronous, event-driven architectures are more appropriate for Web 2.0 applications. It also describes frameworks and APIs that aim to make the Java platform more Web 2.0 capable by enabling asynchronous designs.

Java: Linux’s New Best Friend?

The lack of ability to legally play Web-based multimedia content is probably one of the greatest obstacles to mass-adoption of desktop Linux.

Currently, Java isn’t used as the basis for displaying a lot of multimedia content on the Web, but that could very easily change, especially with a Java Virtual Machine re-write by the community to optimize it for multimedia content, and some tweaking of the Sun Java Web Start code. If the codecs ran under an open source JVM and could be licensed legally, a lot of the media problems would be solved. Audio and video codecs would download on-the-fly, and the JVM would handle all of the work required to set up the environment and play the content.

Why Java is Better than .NET, Reasons #66 to #70

66. Predictable Upgrade Cycle

The planned release schedule between major versions of the JDK is 18 months. For C# its not clear, its even murkier for the ECMA standard. For example, the next version of C# will include generics, however it changes some details of the CLI which ultimately means the ECMA standard needs to be updated. The schedule when this will happen is not clear. Even worse, based on past experience, its not clear if Microsoft will continue to support today's technologies (i.e. VB6, DNA).

67. Better Support for Domain Specific Languages

Extensible java parser frameworks like JSE, JacO, Polyglot aid in the creation of extensions to Java to make it easier to build domain specific languages. These frameworks allow a non compiler expert to easily create new language constructs.

68. Security in Java is Proven and Peer reviewed.

Java has proven itself for many years to be an extremely secure environment, unlike Microsoft where its typical to read about viruses and security alerts on a weekly basis.

Open source Java

What Sun's actually done, and what almost no company before them has done, is to bend over backwards to do this right. They've resisted the siren-song of corporate counsel who feel the need to FUD their employer into paying them to invent entirely new legalise, which doesn't interoperate with anyone else's legalise. (My own failure to convince Zawinski that a GPL dual-license was a good thing for Mozilla still smarts; it meant that for the first couple of years of the Mozilla project (until dual-licensing took place, after Zawinski quit), Gnome developers were shut out completely. This experience has perhaps biased me, but to see a major corporate source drop done right is fantastic.)

Further, note that Sun hasn't merely pinned the tail on a politically-correct GPLv2 donkey, they've gone through this in excruciating detail to get it just right. Instead of taking the "obvious" LGPLv2.1 option for the libraries, they've taken note of the existing practice by other open-source Java projects and adopted GPLv2 with "the classpath exception". With respect to the transition period for their own libraries (they hold outright copyrights in the compiler and VM, but the libraries contain encumberances which will take time to remove, so they've not made a library release yet), they've worked with the Software Freedom Law Center to craft a specific exemption that avoids trapping applications atop the standard APIs becoming GPLv2 encumbered when shiped _with_ the open-source Sun VM under GPLv2 and closed Sun libraries.

The legal groundwork that they've done is exemplary; it's really, really impressive. Someone inside Sun has asked some open-source/free-software advocates how it _should_ be done, and then listened very closely to the answer(s).

From Armadillo Reticence

Java Enterprise

Lots of cool things at Java Enterprise Projects.

AppFuse is an application for "kickstarting" webapp development. Download, extract and execute ant new to instantly be up and running with a kick-ass Java webapp running on Tomcat/MySQL. Uses Ant, XDoclet, Spring, Hibernate (or iBATIS), JUnit, jMock, StrutsTestCase, Canoo's WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, OSCache, JSTL and Struts (Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry and JSF are also options). To learn more about AppFuse, its history, goals and future, checkout AppFuse: Start Your J2EE Web Apps on java.net. You can also watch this video, which shows you how to create a project with AppFuse - as well as gives you a tour of its out-of-the-box features.

And more being developed at Java Enterprise Incubator

XGlue is an application framework centered on bean driven development. It will start by providing a glue between Webwork/XWork and Hibernate to allow CRUD database driven applications to be created extremely quickly without code generation. However, it is designed to allow any ORM or custom database solution to be plugged in. It does this by creating default actions for basic CRUD actions such as load, save, update, find and default DAOs to do the work of 70% of most web application code. Then, the rest of the application can be built either by subclassing these actions or simply using the frameworks XGlue is built upon. Future directions are to add pluggable search and workflow capabilities.

J-RAD is a powerful code generation tool that allows developers to start developing at a higher abstraction level "if development required", reducing the complexity of the J2EE platform from the start. Also J-RAD ensures reuse of definitions, portability and reliability. The J-RAD application is generated by J-RAD itself.

Google(™) meets the Matrix. Red Piranha combines Lucene (Searching Ability), XML-RDF (ability to learn), Tomcat (for P2P Power) and Spring (Ease of use) to not only let you find anything, anywhere, but to actually understand what you are looking for.