• 5 Reasons Why Administrators Will Love Confluence 3.5 – Over the past few months the Confluence Development Team has been hard at work on a number of exciting new features coming to you very soon with the upcoming release of Confluence 3.5
• Getting started with Spring Data JPA | SpringSource Team Blog – As we have just released the first milestone of the Spring Data JPA project I’d like to give you a quick introduction into its features
• What Programming Language to Learn (Next) – So you’re ready to learn a new programming language? You might be entirely new to the world of application development, in that case, welcome!
• Java EE Productivity Report 2011 | ZeroTurnaround.com – What happens when over 1000 Java developers compare their development environments?
• Setting up Contracts for Java in Eclipse « Geschreibsel – On Friday, Contracts for Java was announced on the Google Open Source Blog. Learning about this at the beginning of the weekend was perfect timing for me: I had time to check it out, and while setting it up was some work, I was hooked right away.
• Nokia Said to Be Near Software Partnership With Microsoft – Businessweek – Nokia Oyj is close to announcing a software partnership with Microsoft Corp., a bet that together the two companies can better challenge Google Inc. and Apple
• Daring Fireball: The Next Six Months – The iPad and iPhone have more market potential than any products Apple has ever released. They have the chance to be both the Microsoft and the Intel of the next generation of personal computing — profiting, wildly, both as the software platform vendor and hardware seller
• HTML5 Is An Oncoming Train, But Native App Development Is An Oncoming Rocket Ship – If HTML5 is an oncoming train, native app development is an oncoming rocket ship. And everyone seems to know that’s not going to change anytime soon. Even if they don’t want to admit it, their native apps speak for them.
• hibernate-generic-dao – Generic DAO implementation: extendable, detailed search, remote service interface – The purpose of this framework is to save the time, tedium and possible inconsistency of hand coding DAO layer objects. This includes all of the basic CRUD methods as well as various "find" or "search" methods.
• Advise the Advisor | The White House – Advise the Advisor is a new program to help senior staff at the White House stay connected to the American people. Think of this as your direct line to the some of the President's senior advisors at the White House.

Daily del.icio.us for February 7th through February 11th

• Fareed Zakaria – Obama’s CEO problem — and ours – The Federal Reserve recently reported that America's 500 largest nonfinancial companies have accumulated an astonishing $1.8 trillion of cash on their balance sheets
• Data URIs make CSS sprites obsolete | NCZOnline – CSS sprites were a solution to the problem of multiple HTTP requests to download multiple images. Data URIs allow you to embed images directly into your CSS files, solving the same problem in a much more elegant and maintainable way
• iPad not eating Mac sales, says analyst – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech – In other words, the lack of a camera or keyboard on the iPad gives customers a reason to keep buying Macs.
• Relax, Java is still #1 | JavaWorld’s Daily Brew – Java is still the number one most popular programming language, according to the most recent TIOBE survey.
• Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs – BusinessWeek – The former Intel chief says "job-centric" leadership and incentives are needed to expand U.S. domestic employment again
• Java Code Geeks: GWT 2 Spring 3 JPA 2 Hibernate 3.5 Tutorial – Eclipse and Maven 2 showcase – This step by step guide will present how to develop a simple web application using Google's Web Toolkit (GWT) for the rich client and Spring as the back – end, server side framework
• A Youthful Market Spurns the Wares of Microsoft – NYTimes.com – In particular, the Kin debacle is a reflection of Microsoft’s struggle to deliver what the younger generation of technology-obsessed consumers wants. From hand-held products to business software, Microsoft seems behind the times
• "1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto (Multimedia artwork) – "2053" – This is the number of nuclear explosions conducted in various parts of the globe.*
• CollabNet Subversion Edge 1.0 Beta – Subversion Edge includes Apache's web server and the ViewVC repository view, which lets you manage your directory through a browser
• Using the Java VisualVM to optimize your Java Applications – Java VisualVM is a tool that provides a visual interface for viewing detailed information about Java applications while they are running on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and for troubleshooting and profiling these applications.
• Confluence 3.3 Sneak Peek – Confluence Product Blog – Confluence 3.3 is just around the corner. Since the the last release, we've been working really hard on making it even faster to build content rich wiki pages using the Rich Text Editor
• GWT 2.1 Milestone 2 is now available – With the release of GWT 2.1 M2, we’re continuing to evolve the integration between Google and VMware that was announced at this year’s Google I/O
• GWT 2.0.4 is now available – There were several reports, both internally and externally, of GWT-based applications unexpectedly crashing when running in Safari 5 (including Google Wave)
• Monet’s Canvas Cathedrals: A Life Study Of Light : NPR – The impressionists broke all the formal academic rules — they used quick brush strokes, changed perspective, made their shadows out of color, not black. And it all started with a young painter, sitting by the water's edge in Le Havre.
• Full Nelson: Behind Cisco’s Tablet Surprise — Cisco Tablet — InformationWeek – The Cisco Cius, an Android-based tablet will push everything Cisco believes in one step further. It will make presence and collaboration and video more mobile, more accessible, and more sexy.

Daily del.icio.us for July 2nd through July 6th

• Evolutionary Goo » Blog Archive » The Next Big Language: For the Enterprise or the Masses? – Although the JVM and Java has revolutionized software with its ability to run on many operating systems, its dominance is only in large enterprise business software.
• SOA@WORK: IT job trends – Which technologies you should learn next – According to indeed.com you are currently the most valuable IT ressource if you are a Java Developer with Spring and Hibernate knowledge
• ScrumBan? « Tales from a Trading Desk – Lean Software Engineering offer a good overview of how ScrumBan differs from Scrum – essentially improving the speed of time-to-market. Agile Management offers a posting on how to start down the road of Kanban.
• Video: ConfluenceFx – Confluence to Your Desktop – Atlassian News – ConfluenceFx is the first enterprise solution that brings Confluence to your desktop. It enables your teams to collaborate more effectively and keeps all your community up-to-date thanks to its real-time notifications and collaborative user interactions.
• extdirectj-s2-plugin ExtDirect struts 2 plugin – A struts 2 plugin for Ext.Direct that allow you to write Ext.Direct Action using annotation:
• InfoQ: Neo4j: Java-based NoSQL Graph Database – After several years of development, the developers from NeoTechnology have released version 1.0 of Neo4j, a Java-based graph database which follows the property graph datamodel. InfoQ spoke with NeoTechnology COO Peter Neubauer to learn more about the current Neo4j release and what it offers to developers
• enhancejs – Project Hosting on Google Code – EnhanceJS is a new Javascript framework designed to improve the application of Progressive Enhancement by first testing browser capabilities for key Javascript and CSS support before applying advanced styles and scripts to the page.
• Clustering Tomcat | Javalobby – In this article, I will show you how to use Apache/Tomcat in order to set up a load balancer. I know this has been done a zillion time before, but I will use this setup in my next article (teaser, teaser) so at least I will have it documented somewhere.
• Senators Kerry & Lugar Introduce the Startup Visa Act in Washington, DC « More Startups. More Jobs. – The Startup Visa Act proposes legislation to modify the existing EB-5 Visa in order to drive job creation in the US and increase American global competitiveness.
• The Apache Cassandra Project – The Apache Cassandra Project develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database, bringing together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model.
• Open Source NoSQL Databases | Javalobby – For almost a year now, the idea of "NoSQL" has been spreading due to the demand for relational database alternatives.  Maybe the biggest motivation behind NoSQL is scalability……… Here are some of the better known open source data stores/models labeled as "NoSQL"

Daily del.icio.us for February 23rd through February 27th

• Amazon Web Services Blog: Setting up a Load-Balanced Oracle Weblogic Cluster in Amazon EC2 – Oracle recently made available a set of AMI images suitable for use with the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform. I found the two images (32-bit and 64-bit) that contain Weblogic (along with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 and JRockit) the most interesting of the lot. This article will explain how to set up a basic two-node Weblogic cluster using the 32-bit Weblogic image provided by Oracle with an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB)
• The Atlassian Blog – Introducing Confluence 3.0 – Meet the Macro Browser – Confluence 3.0 introduces the Macro Browser, a new way for users of all experience levels to build content-rich pages in seconds. The macro browser exposes the macros in your Confluence site – charts, task lists, photo galleries, RSS feeds and more – through a point-and-click graphical interface.
• Google Soups Up Enterprise Search Appliance – Google's plan is to make GSA the most powerful, all-encompassing enterprise search server in the world and the first choice over Microsoft and products from Vivisimo, Endeca and Autonomy.
• Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog: When You’re a Productivity Suite, Everything’s a Nail – Ultimately, this is just one facet of the "which tool to use?" problem I outlined previously, and it extends to most tools in the information worker toolbelt, from using e-mail for collaboration instead of a collaborative workspace to collating changes in Word docs instead of using a wiki
• mockito – simpler & better mocking – Mockito is a mocking framework that tastes really well. It lets you write beautiful tests with clean & simple API. Mockito doesn't give you hangover because the tests are very readable and they produce clean verification errors
• IntelliJ’s Maia shapes up against Eclipse • The Register – Maia will support version three of the Spring open-source Java programming framework, which will be detailed at next week's JavaOne in San Francisco, California, along with support for the OSGi modular Java framework and Apache's Tapestry component-based framework.
• OpenXava – AJAX applications from JPA entities – OpenXava is a productive way for creating AJAX Enterprise Applications with Java. Indeed, it's faster developing with OpenXava than with Ruby On Rails, Spring MVC, or any other MVC framework.
• Distributor – Distributor is a software TCP load balancer. Like other load balancers, it accepts connections and distributes them to an array of back end servers. Distributor is compatible with any standard TCP protocol (HTTP, LDAP, IMAP, etc.) and is also IPv6 compatible. Distributor has many unique and advanced features and a high-performance architecture
• Server Fault – Server Fault is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for system administrators and IT professionals – regardless of platform. It's 100% free, no registration required.
• Gawker – ‘Page’s Law’ Is Google Founder’s Next-Best Shot at Immortality – Larry Page – Page's Law is the inverse: It says software gets twice as slow every 18 months. This helps explain why your computer seems to get slower as it ages, even though the hardware inside remains unchanged.
• Google Declares ‘The Web Has Won’ – InternetNews.com – "The Web has won — it's the dominant programming model of our time," said Vic Gondotra, Google's vice president for engineering.

Daily del.icio.us for May 27th through June 2nd

• Op-Ed Columnist – Cheney Lost to Bush – NYTimes.com – But the bottom line is that Obama has taken a series of moderate and time-tested policy compromises. He has preserved and reformed them intelligently. He has fit them into a persuasive framework. By doing that, he has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure.
• Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O – O’Reilly Radar – If you're like me, you had no idea there was so much HTML 5 already in play. When I checked in with my editors at O'Reilly, the general consensus was that HTML 5 isn't going to be ready till 2010.
• Dwyane Wade, hours before declaring for the NBA Draft. – Those are the words we used to describe Dwyane Wade just months before the 2003 NBA Draft. Wade’s gone through a lot since his triple-double in the NCAA Elite Eight, but you can bet he’s still the same guy—bringing the entire package both on and off the court
• Maia EAP is finally here | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We’ve been blogging about the cool new features implemented in the EAP builds of Maia (IntelliJ IDEA 9) for a while, and now at last you can download and try the new build for yourself.
• Atlassian Developer Blog – Introducing the Atlassian Plugin Exchange – I'm excited today to announce the availability of Atlassian's newest website, the Atlassian Plugin Exchange. The Plugin Exchange provides an easy way to find, download, and review plugins for all Atlassian products.
• New Red Hat Rules Tool Ties Java Developers to Business Users — Application Development Trends – Red Hat yesterday released a new business rules platform that the company said will make it easier for Java developers and business users alike to build policies and processes into their applications.
• Held hostage by the health system – The Boston Globe – The reason our health system is in such trouble is that it is set up to generate profits, not to provide care. We rely on hundreds of investor-owned insurance companies that profit by refusing coverage to high-risk patients and limiting services to others
• Uploading a file with Flex and Java | Adobe Developer Connection – This article shows how to develop a Flex and Java file upload mechanism for attaching images to an employee list. In the process, it demonstrates Flex's ECMAScript for XML (E4X) language extension, custom components, classes, and events, as well as a Java-like properties file
• Flex 3 Video Tutorial: Webservice Create, Update and Delete (CRUD) | 19Nates – This video series shows you how to create, update and delete records in a SQL database through a .NET webservice and have that displayed in Flex through a datagrid. I also have a little form on there. Watch the overview video to learn more
• Google App Engine Support | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – If you are developing a Java application for Google App Engine, try Google App Engine Integration plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. It will be bundled with the first Maia EAP, but you can download it right now and use with IntelliJ IDEA 8.x

Daily del.icio.us for May 24th through May 27th

• Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz Tries to Reassure His Troops in Email – Digits – WSJ – Though profit-minded Oracle is widely expected to cut Sun’s headcount sharply after the transaction, Schwartz insists in the message that Oracle realizes that Sun’s people are its greatest asset and will not harm it.
• Picking Letters, 10 a Day, That Reach Obama – NYTimes.com – He chooses 10 letters, which are slipped into a purple folder and put in the daily briefing book that is delivered to President Obama at the White House residence. Designed to offer a sampling of what Americans are thinking, the letters are read by the president, and he sometimes answers them by hand, in black ink on azure paper.
• Adobe in Push to Spread Flash Video Format to TVs – NYTimes.com – Now Adobe Systems, which owns the technology and sells the tools to create and distribute it, will announce that Adobe is extending Flash to the television screen. He expects TVs and set-top boxes that support the Flash format to start selling later this year.
• Williams and Stone: The Twitter Revolution – WSJ.com – But Twitter is much more than a novel way to share updates of one's daily life with friends. It's now evolved into a powerful new marketing and communications tool. Regional emergency preparedness organizations are looking at Twitter as a way to reach millions of people during a disaster. NASA is using it to regularly update interested parties about the status of space shuttle flights. And one journalist solicited help from fellow Twitterers to get himself out of an Egyptian jail.
• Apache Pivot – Home – The Pivot development team is happy to announce the release of Apache Pivot version 1.1! Pivot is an open-source platform for building rich internet applications in Java. It combines the enhanced productivity and usability features of a modern RIA toolkit with the robustness of the industry-standard Java platform.
• Atlassian Stimulus Package Announced – For the next 5 days, get Confluence or JIRA for $5 for 5 users. All goes to Room To Read – The Goal: To raise $25k to build 5 libraries for children in the developing world in 5 days… all whilst helping stimulate startups and small teams with kick-ass tools.
• JSpring presentation: REST, the internet as a database? :: Andrej Koelewijn – I just uploaded the slides of our JSpring presentation to slideshare: “REST, het internet als database“.
• Oracle Buys Sun – Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash
• The Algebra of Data, and the Calculus of Mutation » Lab49 Blog – With the spreading popularity of languages like F# and Haskell, many people are encountering the concept of an algebraic data type for the first time. When that term is produced without explanation, it almost invariably becomes a source of confusion. In what sense are data types algebraic
• SOASTA, Inc. – The Cloud Testing Authority – SOASTA has harnessed the immense power of Cloud Computing to become the leading provider of cloud testing, which businesses use to test the real-world performance of their web applications

Daily del.icio.us for April 19th through April 21st

• How Google Stole Control Over Content Distribution By Stealing Links – Publishing 2.0 – There is so much misunderstanding flying around about the economics of content on the web and the role of Google in the web’s content economy that it’s making my head hurt. So let’s see if we can straighten things out.
• Performance Anti-Patterns | Haytham El-Fadeel – Remember, the performance work done at the beginning of the project in terms of benchmark, algorithm, and data-structure selection will pay tremendous dividends later on—enough, perhaps, to allow you to avoid that traditional performance fire drill at the end.
• The Atlassian Blog – Wiki Theater – Five Killer Use Cases for Wikis – Since the conference theme was Doing More with Less, attendees were rather receptive to the idea of getting more out of their wiki. Below is one of the presentations we delivered called Five Killer Use Cases for Wikis. We hope it gives you some ideas on how to get more out of your Confluence wiki.
• YouTube – Google App Engine – Early Look at Java Language Support – This video introduces the latest features of App Engine, including an early look at Java language support. Andrew Bowers will walk through the development of a sample Java application, from creation to deployment.
• Google AppEngine uses Jetty! : gregw – Hot on the heels of Google Widget Toolkit(GWT) switching to Jetty, the little server that can has received some more Google luv'n! Google's new App Engine Java service is powered by Jetty! With App Engine, you can build web applications using standard Java technologies and run them on Google's scalable infrastructure.
• Sorting Algorithm Animations – These pages show 8 different sorting algorithms on 4 different initial conditions. These visualizations are intended to show how each algorithm operates, Show that there is no best sorting algorithm, Show the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm.
• App Engine Java Overview – Google App Engine – Google Code – Welcome to Google App Engine for Java! With App Engine, you can build web applications using standard Java technologies and run them on Google's scalable infrastructure. The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache
• New BlazeDS Support Demo | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – We’ve created a new IntelliJ IDEA demo: BlazeDS Support. It shows you how to create, run and debug BlazeDS applications with IntelliJ IDEA, and covers a wide variety of features — project configuration, run and deployment configurations, debugger and the others.
• Google improves Gmail for iPhone, Android | iPhone Atlas – CNET Reviews – Google has released a new Web-based version of Gmail that gives iPhone and Android phone users a more sophisticated version of the online e-mail service, including access to messages that's faster and that works even when offline.
• Fly the friendly skies in Flight Control (review) | iPhone Atlas – CNET Reviews – At first blush, an air-traffic control simulator sounds about as much as fun as a podiatry theme park. But Flight Control is an absolute gem of a game, a perfect five-minute diversion that's perfectly priced at 99 cents

Daily del.icio.us for April 7th through April 12th

• NPR’s broadcast audience surges. Can it do the same online? | The Industry Standard – "At a time when newspapers, magazines and TV news continue to lose readers and viewers," writes Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi, "the audience for NPR's daily news programs, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered, reached a record last year
• Van Couvering Is Not a Verb: Sun gets behind clouds, may be Eclipsed – thoughts from an ex-employee – Sun has had this amazing ability to thrash for a very long time on large and ultimately doomed projects (remember N1?), and they just haven't been able to turn the corner and really reinvent themselves
• Google’s former CIO barely lasts a year at EMI | Digital Media – CNET News – Douglas Merrill, Google's former chief information officer who jumped to EMI Music not quite a year ago, has resigned as chief of the label's digital unit.
• HowTo: EC2 for Poets – The goal is to make cloud computing less mysterious by helping people through the process of setting up a server on Amazon EC2. The title derives from a class that was offered at the University of Wisconsin, when I was a grad student there, called Computer Science for Poets.
• Scobleizer: Technology, innovation, and geek enthusiasm » Blog Archive Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now « – Zuckerberg is a real leader because he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He’s going to do what he thinks is best for his business. I wish Silicon Valley had more like him
• Spring BlazeDS Integration Home – Spring BlazeDS Integration is a new addition to the Spring portfolio, and a component of the complete Spring Web stack. This project's purpose is to make it easier to build Spring-powered Rich Internet Applications using Adobe Flex as the front-end client.
• Command-line Fu < The best UNIX commands on the web – Command-Line-Fu is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.
• Spring Finance Sample Application | StSMedia – Spring Finance is designed to be a simple finance tracker application for the Simpsons family. As some of you might know the Simpsons frequently have financial trouble of all sorts. They borrow money from their neighbour, the Ned Flanders, the local power plant owner, Mr Burns, and others.
• The Atlassian Blog – Comparing SharePoint to Confluence? – Last week Martin Seibert at Seibert Media wrote an interesting blog post where he evaluated SharePoint as an enterprise wiki.
  He posed the question, is SharePoint really a good alternative to a fully developed company wiki? He draws his conclusion early and then presents a list of compelling arguments as to why SharePoint is not a good wiki alternative
• The Big Takeover : Rolling Stone – The global economic crisis isn't about money – it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

Daily del.icio.us for March 20th through March 24th

• History of McCain for President – Post-Election John McCain Biography – Esquire – As Barack Obama takes the presidency, the reporter with intimate access to John McCain for two years takes a somber look back at where man gives way to politician.
• Digg – 700 Covers For Obama From Around The World – 700 newspaper front pages from all over the world, the day after Barack Obama was elected 44th president of the United States.
• AMD, Red Hat demo VM migration between AMD, Intel servers | InfoWorld | News | 2008-11-06 | – In Thursday's demonstration, AMD moves a live VM from an dual socket Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420-based system to one based on AMD's forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core Opteron processor, using Red Hat open-source virtualization software
• Sun shines dimly in Big Blue’s shadow |Fatal Exception | Neil McAllister | InfoWorld – As Rich Green says, the key will be not just delivering products and professional services, but doing so with better ROI than anyone else. Sun needs to convince its customers not merely that it offers an impressive product and service portfolio, but that it can be as valuable a partner as IBM. Until it can do that, Sun is going to have a hard time crawling out from under Big Blue's shadow.
• Change.gov – "Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today." – President-Elect Barack Obama
• Op-Ed Columnist – Bring on the Puppy and the Rookie – NYTimes.com – Promising to also be president for those who opposed him, Obama quoted Lincoln, his political idol and the man who ended slavery: “We are not enemies, but friends — though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”
• Wicket: A simplified framework for building and testing dynamic Web pages – Wicket provides an object-oriented approach toward developing dynamic Web-based UI applications. Because Wicket is pure Java™ and HTML code, you can leverage your knowledge about Java to write applications based on Wicket, dramatically reducing your development time. This article gives you an overview of Wicket and describes how you can use Wicket to rapidly build Web-based applications in a non-intrusive and simplified way
• Reassessing the Dangers of BPA in Plastics – TIME – There's no denying that bisphenol A (BPA), the latest headline-making toxin, is ubiquitous — it's in hard plastic water bottles, the lining of food and beverage cans and, most disturbingly, the plastic baby bottles that most parents commonly use. What's less clear, however, is exactly what effect BPA has on human health
• My Top List of Java Tools | Javalobby – Lack of imagination is one of our worst sins as software developers. We do the same things over and over again, but we rarely modify our ways: me at least. After some years, these are the tools that made it into my tricks box for everyday tasks. Tiresome operations are not my thing
• BBC SPORT | Motorsport | Formula One | Hamilton targets title hat-trick – New world champion Lewis Hamilton has told BBC Sport he wants to claim the Formula One title three times.

  The 23-year-old British driver said he has no intention of chasing Michael Schumacher's record seven F1 triumphs

• JUnit and EasyMock | Refcardz – JUnit and EasyMock are the predominant choices for testing tools in the Java space. This reference card will guide you through the creation of unit tests with JUnit and EasyMock. It contains detailed definitions for unit testing and mock objects as well as a description of the lifecycle of each. The APIs for both JUnit and EasyMock are covered thoroughly so you can utilize these tools to their fullest extent.
• Joe on Computing : A maze of twisty little Java web service standards, all alike – It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the fractal-like Java standards related to web services. As fast as each can be learned, Sun invents another, and a dozen open source implementations appear. For my own sanity I tried to create a rough map of some of them. I tried to avoid making recommendations; my main objective was to sketch out how they fit together. I also focused on the open source options; there are many good commercial implementations of all of these too.
• The Atlassian Blog – Come with me a on Magic Quadrant Ride – Gartner's popular Magic Quadrant for Social Software 2008 is out and Atlassian scored huge on the survey. Atlassian was recognized at the top as a leading company in the market for social software and team collaboration, based on our vision and execution

Daily del.icio.us for November 5th through November 6th

• reForm: CSS Form Design Template for Any Layout (Part 2) | CSS Zone – formReForm is a methodology to style HTML forms without a huge amount of markup (or [gasp] a Table-based layout). Taking it one step further, this article discusses how to use the formReForm javascript library to create usable, accessible and beautiful us
• Seifi.org » Blog Archive » Safari 3.1 Features Review – Apple claims that Safari 3.1 executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 2
• Google about to drop the other Enterprise shoe on Microsoft? « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger – I’m hearing about a few things that Google is planning to do to newly compete with Microsoft’s enterprise offerings.
• The long awaited HTC Shift is now coming to you from Sprint, 140+ hands-on photos | The Mobile Gadgeteer | ZDNet.com – I’ve been using an HTC Shift from Sprint for over a week now and as you can see in over 140 photos and screenshots found in my extensive image gallery I have had a chance to try out most all aspects of the device
• Microsoft working with Eclipse on Vista, ID links – Yahoo! News – Microsoft's much-anticipated revelations about collaborations with the Eclipse Foundation did not include joining the open-source tools foundation. But the two are working together to enable use of Eclipse technology to build Java applications for Vista.
• James Ward – RIA Cowboy » Blog Archive » New Flex Screencast and VideoCoverFlow Component – For Flex 3 I recorded a new version of that screencast. In the new version I used Doug McCune’s CoverFlow component but extended it to easily support playing videos. Check out a demo of the VideoCoverFlow component .
• James Ward – RIA Cowboy » Video: Flex 3 / Adobe AIR 1.0 Pre-release Tour – In case you missed the Flex 3 / Adobe AIR 1.0 Pre-release Tour that went on around the world in January you can watch a recording of the session Serge Jespers and I did in Amsterdam
• Ajax World Conference – Day 1 « dambalah – Yakov believes that Flex is the better technology today, that Microsoft will catch up next year with Silverlight and that Sun still has some work to do before JavaFX becomes stable and competitive.
• The Atlassian Blog – Launching JIRA Studio – After a couple of months in Beta, today JIRA Studio launches into production! JIRA Studio integrates JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, Crucible & Crowd, and then adds in Subversion, Streams, the JIRA Studio toolbar, and makes them all available as a hosted, on-d
• Web Developer 1.1.5 and User Agent Switcher 0.6.11 on Blog on chrispederick.com – New versions of the Web Developer and User Agent Switcher extensions have been released. These releases are mainly to add support for the upcoming Firefox 3, but also contain a few other bug fixes.
• Adam Bien’s Weblog : EJB 3 and Memory Consumption Myths or Is it worth to use POJOs instead of EJB 3 in terms of memory? – I'm often asked about the usage Stateless Session Beans (EJB 3) regarding memory consumption and comparing them to POJOs. The nice Markus Kohler's comment for my recent post made me curious – and I started some evaluation.
• Google Open Source Blog: “Look! Actual Code!” – We recently launched a new source code browsing tool as part of Google Code's project hosting feature. This new tool makes it easy to navigate through a project's SVN repository. Key features include: fast directory browsing tree, syntax highlighting, etc
• Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit – Welcome to the Windows Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit, the first place to look when you’re ready to optimize web sites and applications for Internet Explorer 8. Here is a message from Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect:

Daily del.icio.us for March 16th through March 19th

• enunciate – Enunciate is a Web service deployment framework. It is not another Web service stack implementation. Rather, Enunciate leverages existing Web service technologies to provide a mechanism to build, package, deploy, and to clearly, accurately deliver your We
• Ryan Heaton’s Blog: Web Service Programming for the Masses, Part I: Developing the Web Service API – This is the first part of a tutorial will walk you through developing a Web service API that could meet the requirements of all of the above-mentioned use cases. For the sake of clarity and brevity, we’ll keep the operations simple, but by the time we’re
• Bob Rhubart’s Blog: The SOA Governance Prescription – A significant part of getting your SOA to do what it’s supposed to do is getting the people involved in the SOA to do what they’re supposed to do
• Pinaki Poddar’s Blog: Slice: OpenJPA for Distributed Databases – Slice is a OpenJPA plug-in for horizontally-partitioned, distributed databases. As distributed databases are being increasingly common in enterprise IT ecosystem, I considered extending OpenJPA to transact against a set of databases instead of a a single
• Top 10 SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and DTS tips – Whether you plan to migrate SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) packages to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) or run DTS packages in SQL Server 2005, this expert advice can help
• How to Dynamically and Iteratively Populate An Excel Workbook from SQL Server – SQL Server Central – In this article, I will show you how to create a new Excel output file and populate the file with discrete spreadsheets containing specific data from a database. We will Integration Services for the task
• Application Development Trends – SpringSource Offers Spring.NET 1.1 – SpringSource is offering the final release of Spring.NET 1.1. Spring.NET 1.1 supports the ASP.NET Framework for Web development. It enables dependency injection for pages, controls, modules and providers
• InfoQ: Bruce Johnson discusses Google Web Toolkit – Google Web Toolkit (GWT) tech lead Bruce Johnson discusses the design of GWT, how GWT converts Java into JavaScript, community involvement with GWT, new features in GWT 1.4, and the philosophy behind GWT.
• Book Review: Google Web Toolkit Applications – Google Web Toolkit, by Ryan Dewsbury, is an excellent book for those looking to use GWT to good advantage, covering most areas of GWT functionality in exceptional detail. It covers software engineering, server integration, custom component composition, CS
• Adobe – Developer Center : Using BEA Workshop Studio and Java to create Flex-based RIAs – In this tutorial, I walk you through the steps to creating an RIA using Java for the back-end business logic and Flex for the front-end view of the application. I will use the BEA Workshop Studio (Flex Bundle) to create a simple Java mid-tier and a simple
• smarturls-s2 – Google Code – SmartURLs-S2 is a Struts 2 plugin that provides a rich set of convention based handling for web applications. In addition, it also provides a component framework for developing web application components in separate codebases and the deploying them into a
• Building Struts 2 Apps Without XML Gluecode – In this article, we jettison XML gluecode for “convention over configuration”. Using the SmartURLs plugin for Struts 2, we can autowire Action classes to page templates with search-engine-optimized URIs.
• Embedding Flickr Photos – In this article, I’ll explain how to fetch data from Flickr using a proxy client library and displaying the data in a Visual Web Application page.
• Atlassian Developer Blog – How to build an Atlassian plugin – There’s a single command that will download Tomcat, install Confluence or JIRA, start them up, load sample data, then install your plugin for testing. And once you’ve started the application once, you can just leave it running while you uninstall and rein

Daily del.icio.us for January 9th

• InfoQ: Setting out for Service Component Architecture – SCA is an enhancement to frameworks that offer programming models for components and connectivity abstractions. Those frameworks may be standard offerings, but may also be proprietary technologies, such Remote Function Calls (RFC), SQL stored proc etc.
• Ignite Realtime: Ignite Realtime Video Podcasts: Actionscript, Javascript, and the Future of Webapps – In this video, Jive Software’s David Smith talks about Actionscript, Javascript, and the future of webapps as they relate to his work on Spark.
• Eric Traut talks (and demos) Windows 7 and MinWin – istartedsomething – Microsoft?s distinguished engineer Eric Traut gave a presentation at the University of Illinois about Microsoft?s virtualization technology and also mentioned Windows 7 – the next version of Windows after Vista
• Cairngorm:Cairngorm2.2.1:Release Notes – Adobe Labs – The Cairngorm Microarchitecture is a lightweight yet prescriptive framework for rich Internet application (RIA) development.
• Alfresco Makes Leading Java Implementation JLAN Shared File Drive Interface Available via GPL – Alfresco JLAN is a unique implementation of an embedded virtual file system that offers the only Java client and server implementation of Microsoft Window?s CIFS protocol, allowing content, and rows in a database to appear as a shared drive.
• 1-800-GOOG-411 – Google’s new 411 service is free, fast and easy to use. Give it a try now and see how simple it is to find and connect with local businesses for fre
• Adopting Struts 2.0 – Java World – Struts 2.0 carries much of the power of its predecessor but is simpler for developers to use. In this article, S. Sangeetha and S. V. Subrahmanya outline the changes in Struts 2.0 and offer migration pointers for developers familiar with Struts
• Improve Your Photos 60 Seconds at a Time – If you are tired of reading long explanations and confused by tricky photo techniques, here you can have it short and sweet. Arranged by topics, each subject takes less than 60 seconds to read.
• InfoQ: IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 Adds Spring/Hibernate Support, Eclipse Interoperability, and Maven Integration – Jetbrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 7.0. This version rounds out support for many popular Java technologies while adding support for languages such as Groovy and Ruby. Among its highlights: Spring and Hibernate Support, Ruby/Rails Support, Groovy/Grails
• IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » IntelliJ IDEA: The Magnificent Seven – JetBrains is proud and happy to tell you that IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 is now available! This release is focused on further upgrading performance, usability, and enhancing the user experience with the efficient support for new features, technologies, and tools.

Daily del.icio.us for Oct 16, 2007 through Oct 20, 2007

• Icahn further raises BEA stake to 13.22 percent | News | Mergers/Acquisitions | Reuters – Billionaire investor Carl Icahn further boosted his stake in BEA Systems Inc (BEAS.O: Quote, Profile, Research) to 13.22 percent, according to a regulatory filing.
• If wishes were iPhones, then beggars would call [dive into mark] – Buy it for what it is, or don?t buy it at all. Your choices don?t get any more granular than that. Apple has been unwaveringly clear that the iPhone is theirs.
• Adobe – Developer Center : What’s new in Flex 3 Beta 2 – this article has been updated throughout to reflect Flex 3 Beta 2. However, you can see a summary of interesting changes near the bottom of this article.
• Technology Review: Gibson’s Self-Tuning Guitar – A new line of instruments from Gibson Guitar now promises to banish this scenario to the dark ages with high-tech self-tuning technology built into the company’s flagship electric-guitar models.
• Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT Application Development for the iPhone – In our not-so-humble opinions, we think that the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and the Apple iPhone are two very cool technologies. Our approach was to build an application that primarily targets the iPhone and to use that as a test-bed for new ideas.
• IntelliJ IDEA Plugins Contest – IntelliJ IDEA has inspired many Java developers to write plug-ins from J2EE and code editing tools to games. Now it has a robust plugin ecosystem with 413 available plugins and new ones appearing nearly every week
• Redirect after POST filter – RedirectAfterPostFilter lets you easily implement Redirect after POST pattern in your web applications. You can map this filter to your controllers processing POST requests and after the processing filter will redirect the original request to the url
• Caching Solutions in Java – Even though caching improves performance and makes your architecture work, it can, in fact, complicate design and introduce such complexities as concurrent code and cluster-wide synchronization.
• Daemon : Procrun – Daemon – Procrun is a set of libraries and applications for making Java applications to run as Windows services. It can convert any application to run as a service.
• The Connector released for Microsoft Project / JIRA Integration – The Connector allows users of JIRA to use Microsoft Project for doing planning and scheduling and provides an easy way to synchronize the information in Microsoft Project with the issues in JIRA

Daily del.icio.us for Sep 20, 2007 through Oct 05, 2007

• Bob’s Unit Testing Best Practices – Testing Digitally – Having used Agile programming methods for a number of years now. I have come across some best practices for unit testing that I would like to share with you.
• O’Reilly Open Books Project – O’Reilly has published a number of Open Books–books with various forms of "open" copyright–over the years.
• Ajaxian – YUI Version 2.2.0 Released – YUI 2.2.0 has been released one year after YUI was released into open source.
• Yahoo! UI Library: DataTable – The DataTable control provides a simple yet powerful API to display screen-reader accessible tabular data on a web page. Notable features include sortable columns, pagination, scrolling, row selection, resizeable columns, and inline editing.
• Jump Start Your AJAX Development with the Google Web Toolkit – The Unofficial Google Wiki – A free wiki from Wikia – The Google Web Toolkit addresses the development of an AJAX application in a very methodical manner
• NetBeans Visual Web Pack 5.5 – Tutorials – Using Hibernate With the NetBeans Visual Web Pack – This tutorial shows you how to use the Hibernate framework in a NetBeans Visual Web Pack project. It also shows how to wrap back end data with Option arrays and ObjectListDataProvider objects for binding to JavaServer Faces components.
• James Ward?s Blog – Blog Archive – Faster Flex Applications: Shrink Your RSLs – Here is what you need to do if you want to have size optimized RSLs
• rebelutionary: Enterprise Wikis Replace Shared Drives – Confluence & WebDAV – A lot of people talk about wikis ‘replacing’ email – which I think is too broad a statement – but very few people focus on the impact wikis have on shared drives
• Red Hat endorses KVM virtualization | CNET News.com – Red Hat, the dominant Linux seller, will include KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) in the next version of its Fedora Linux v7
• Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design – Tantek’s Thoughts – Human interface cognitive load is proportional to the number of clicks/keystrokes/gestures

Daily del.icio.us for Feb 20, 2007 through Feb 21, 2007

These are my links for Feb 19, 2007:

• Census Mashups Using StrikeIron Web Services and Yahoo Maps in Flex 2 – Census Dashboard Mashup is a mashup using StrikeIron’s Zip Code Information Web Service, StrikeIron’s Population Demographics By ZIP Code Web Service and Yahoo Maps to give detailed information for a specific US zip code. I find it to actually be a really
• Sun Updates Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 – O’Reilly ONJava Blog – Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 is a package which allows parsing HTML pages into a Java Document object. Wonder how it stacks up against HtmlCleaner (http://htmlcleaner.sourceforge.net/)
• dmiessler.com | study | lsof – lsof is the Linux/Unix über-tool. I use it most for getting network connection related information from a system, but that’s just the beginning for this amazing and little-known application
• chalain: So Beautiful, So Disturbing – She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night.
• Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things – Engadget – When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you’re using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you’ve probably got a a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives
• Raible Designs | Slick looking Confluence sites – Wicket and Cayenne have nice looking websites backed by Confluence. Wicket has a Writing documentation page that explains how it works.
• Upselling your architecture – The Pragmatic Architect – As an architect, you’ll probably need to present to different audiences at different levels. When you do, it’s worth thinking about whether you need to upsell your architecture or not.
• MyEclipse Delivers Tools to IntelliJ IDEA Users – Developers using IDEA are now able to utilize the MyEclipse Visual HTML Designer, XML Editor, Database Explorer and Image Editor SNAPs directly in their own environment.
• IntelliJ IDEA: Inspections by Sections … – Static code analysis doesn’t just improve your code quality, it can also teach you some cool ideas and best practices about programming
• Java Power Tools: Home – "Java Power Tools" is about software tools and techniques that can contribute to improving the SDLC which includes build tools such as Maven and Ant, CI tools, code quality tools, testing tools, collaborative tools, source version control, and more!
• Rod Johnson » Sun’s GlassFish Embracing Spring – I think part of what’s making Sun more relevant in the enterprise Java space is that they are now more plugged into what’s happening in the wider world, and are willing to take the input on board and act on it

Daily del.icio.us for Feb 19, 2007

These are my links for Feb 17, 2007 through Feb 19, 2007:

• Census Mashups Using StrikeIron Web Services and Yahoo Maps in Flex 2 – Census Dashboard Mashup is a mashup using StrikeIron’s Zip Code Information Web Service, StrikeIron’s Population Demographics By ZIP Code Web Service and Yahoo Maps to give detailed information for a specific US zip code. I find it to actually be a really
• Sun Updates Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 – O’Reilly ONJava Blog – Java Mozilla HTML Parser 1.0.1 is a package which allows parsing HTML pages into a Java Document object. Wonder how it stacks up against HtmlCleaner (http://htmlcleaner.sourceforge.net/)
• dmiessler.com | study | lsof – lsof is the Linux/Unix über-tool. I use it most for getting network connection related information from a system, but that’s just the beginning for this amazing and little-known application
• chalain: So Beautiful, So Disturbing – She gets out of bed and stretches, perfect curves sliding under silky lingerie and momentarily making me forget about breakfast, meatloaf, and whoever it was I was married to before last night.
• Massive Google hard drive survey turns up very interesting things – Engadget – When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you’re using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you’ve probably got a a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives
• Raible Designs | Slick looking Confluence sites – Wicket and Cayenne have nice looking websites backed by Confluence. Wicket has a Writing documentation page that explains how it works.
• Upselling your architecture – The Pragmatic Architect – As an architect, you’ll probably need to present to different audiences at different levels. When you do, it’s worth thinking about whether you need to upsell your architecture or not.
• MyEclipse Delivers Tools to IntelliJ IDEA Users – Developers using IDEA are now able to utilize the MyEclipse Visual HTML Designer, XML Editor, Database Explorer and Image Editor SNAPs directly in their own environment.
• IntelliJ IDEA: Inspections by Sections … – Static code analysis doesn’t just improve your code quality, it can also teach you some cool ideas and best practices about programming
• Java Power Tools: Home – "Java Power Tools" is about software tools and techniques that can contribute to improving the SDLC which includes build tools such as Maven and Ant, CI tools, code quality tools, testing tools, collaborative tools, source version control, and more!
• Rod Johnson » Sun’s GlassFish Embracing Spring – I think part of what’s making Sun more relevant in the enterprise Java space is that they are now more plugged into what’s happening in the wider world, and are willing to take the input on board and act on it
• Is Bruce Eckel Right? Maybe not. at Simon?s Blog – Bruce Eckel has written an interesting piece about Java and user interfaces. I?d recommend that you read it, as it?s pretty thought-provoking.
• The Fishbowl: Job Satisfaction – We spend a lot of time at work. If we?re not doing something that we?re passionate about, that gives us some kind of fulfillment, we?re wasting a big part of our lives.
• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » A day at NPR – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my day at NPR. Smart people, but then that?s obvious.
• Coding Horror: The cost of leaving your PC on – So leaving my server on is costing me $200 / year, or $16.68 per month. My home theater PC is a bit more frugal at 65 watts. Using the same formulas, that costs me $81 / year or $6.75 per month.
• The Future Won?t Be Statically Typed « Skunk Works – I’m more and more convinced that statically typed languages will come to an end, replaced by duck typing based languages

Daily del.icio.us for Feb 17, 2007 through Feb 19, 2007

It really is a sad state of affair when it comes to blog server software for Java and .NET. For the last few weeks, I’ve been working to introduce blogs and the concept of blogging internally at work and trying to pilot the use of blogs instead of the standard project portal. To that end, I figured I should really get the latest offerings from all of the blogging server software out there and put them through the paces to see which one works better than the other.

I’ve personally only used Blogger, Movable Type and WordPress in the past 5 years. The primary blog ran on Blogger for many years before I finally moved everything to WordPress. To make sure we’re eating our own dog food, I decided to download Roller and Community Server (formerly. Text) and give them a whirl.

Being a Java guy, I was excited to download and install Roller, as it’s one of the most popular Java blogging software out there. Boy, was I disappointed. I know this is free and open-source but installing and getting Roller running was a royal pain in the neck. The installation is documented fairly well for Tomcat but I have tons of servers running WebLogic and so I tried to deploy Roller under WebLogic. So I configure the appropriate datasources and authentication realms and try to deploy the application. I killed the server before I got a seizure from the fast scrolling stack-trace. Without boring you with all the details, it took me almost 8 hours to get Roller to work correctly under WebLogic. Having worked with J2EE containers for over 6 years, I know the reality of deploy-anywhere but this is ridiculous. How easy is it to create a web application that works on a bunch of different containers? I could not believe the effort it took to get this simple web application deployed. Take a look at Confluence – Java web application that configures itself and runs on every container out there. And other major issue I have with Roller is the lack of support for any other database platforms besides MySQL, PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB. I love MySQL but I have Oracle running internally on big boxes that are backed up several times a day and actively monitored. But I can’t use Oracle with Roller as it only supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB out of the box. With technologies like Hibernate, why do we still have applications written in Java that are so database platform bound? My next mission is to get Roller working with Oracle and then document (and blog) the hacks necessary to get Roller working under WebLogic and Oracle.

Another problem with Roller is the lack of community support and plug-ins. Coming from the WordPress side of the house, there is a plug-in for everything including the kitchen sink. Before you can think it, someone has already written a plug-in for it. (I should really look at Pebble and Blojsom)

Moving to the .NET side of house is not a pretty picture either. The blog engine that used to be named .Text is now rebranded as Community Server. The installation is pretty easy and product looks fairly robust. Telligent Systems is the company that’s taken over development of .Text and the new product includes a discussion system, blogging system, and photo gallery system. The same lack of plugins or add-ons exists here and the 3 listed add-ons require a commercial license. Beyond the base blog functionality, there is nothing available.

Roller and Community Server work well once you get them installed. But anything beyond the basic requires custom development and I just feel that is not a good use of my time. To me, blog server software is a commodity and so I want to find something that’s easy to use and has the most features. I know I am developer and I can sit down and write anything I need but my company pays me to add value in a different capacity.

WordPress on the other hand is unbelievable. It’s written in PHP, which I can hack (if I had to) but all the plugins I’ve downloaded simply work. Download a plugin and just drop it in the plugins directory and you’re off and running. The big deficiency for WordPress in my opinion is that it only supports MySQL as a database platform but the value proposition provided by all the functionality is just incredible. I just hope Roller can catch-up as competition is great and really helps drive innovation.

Sad State of Affair in Java & .NET blog server software