• Java Native Access – JNA provides Java programs easy access to native shared libraries without JNI – JNA provides Java programs easy access to native shared libraries (DLLs on Windows) without writing anything but Java code—no JNI or native code is required. JNA allows you to call directly into native functions using natural Java method invocation. The Java call looks just like it does in native code.
• The Little Book on CoffeeScript – This book is designed to help you learn CoffeeScript, understand best practices and start building awesome client side applications. The book is little, only five chapters, but that's rather apt as CoffeeScript is a little language too.
• Writing a Sencha Touch Application, Part 2 – In the first part of this Sencha Touch tutorial we started building an app that allows its user to take notes and store them on the device. Having created the foundation of the application we are in the process of building the Notes List view, which at this point looks like this:
• The 3 most undervalued tech stocks: Google, Apple, IBM – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech – The 3 most undervalued tech stocks: Google, Apple, IBM. By the same "PEG" measure, the 3 most overvalued are Amazon, Cisco and Netflix
• Hibernate OGM: birth announcement – Hibernate OGM stands for Object Grid Mapping and its goal is to offer a full-fledged JPA engine storing data into NoSQL stores
• Why the future of IT rests on one person – A lot of those practices will be single-actor practices — practices organized so that one employee, supported by technology, can do whatever needs to get done
• A Django setup using Nginx and Gunicorn « Senko’s Blog – This is a howto on setting up Django on a Linux (Ubuntu) system using Nginx as a reverse proxy and Gunicorn as a Django service.
• Chart.io – Google Analytics for Your Database – Chart.io is Google Analytics for your database. We help you make sense of all the data you collect everyday. Chart.io quickly hooks up to your database and lets you create real time charts of the metrics you care about
• AppleInsider | iOS 5 supports speedy Nitro JavaScript for full-screen Web apps – With the release of iOS 5 for the iPhone and iPad this fall, Apple will bring the Nitro JavaScript engine to full-screen Web applications saved to a user's home screen.
• Git and Subversion – Living together – There are many people who want to use Git, but are forced to stick with Subversion for various reasons. Git-svn gives us the opportunity to migrate away from Subversion, but setting up a two-way sync is less than trivial.
• Sencha Touch enabled us to maximize our development efforts and deliver a superior mobile experience – Sencha Touch has been a joy to work with. It’s enabled us to maximize our development efforts and deliver a superior mobile experience. It’s a complete framework and a massive head start for anyone wanting to build a rich mobile web application. We believe Sencha Touch is the first mobile web framework that is a serious alternative to native apps. We highly recommend it.

Links for June 17th through June 20th

• Mockito – Pros, Cons, and Best Practices | Javalobby – You don't hear about EasyMock much any more, and Mockito seems to have replaced it in mindshare. And for good reason: it is better.
• HOWTO: Setting Up a New Ubuntu GNU/Linux Box for Java/CFML Development – Matt Woodward’s posterous – HOWTO: Setting Up a New Ubuntu GNU/Linux Box for Java/CFML Development
• Raible Designs | RE: Moving from Spring to Java EE 6: The Age of Frameworks is Over – Java EE 6 might be a better foundation to build upon, but it's certainly not going to replace frameworks
• Google’s guava java: the easy parts | Coppery Keen Claws – Google’s guava is one of the best, most useful all-purpose java libraries to come out in a long time. It’s surprising that it isn’t standard in most projects now
• What does IBM joining OpenJDK mean for Java? – Apache Asserts – This week IBM announced it would be supporting Oracle's OpenJDK. At first glance it seems like "Great!" Isn't it good that two big supporters of Java are getting behind a single open source project? Well, in my personal opinion, no. It is bad. Bad for Java. I'll try to explain why
• Spring Roo 1.1.0.RC1 Released | SpringSource.org – We're pleased to announce the availability of Spring Roo 1.1.0.RC1. Spring Roo is a lightweight developer tool that makes it fast and easy to deliver instant results for Java developers. This new release almost 300 enhancements
• MyEclipse for Spring | Spring Development with MyEclipse | Spring Scaffolding | Spring Tutorial |||| – Google Web Toolkit (GWT) scaffolding generates ready-to-run GWT applications from existing artifacts such as database schemas, Java Beans and JPA entities. Within a matter of minutes, automatically create an application that contains a GWT front-end integrated with a Spring (Spring/JPA/Hibernate) back-end
• Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT 2.1 RC1 is now available – Building on the three previous milestones, we're happy to announce the first release candidate (RC1) of GWT 2.1. Along with the new components and features, we've solidified the Activities/Places, RequestFactory, Editor framework, and Cell-based widget APIs
• The PTO addresses Bilski and software patents | opensource.com – The Bilski majority  emphasized that abstract ideas are not patentable, and recognized that allowing patents for abstract ideas could hinder innovation.  Thus there's still room for discussion of the legal standard for when, if ever, there should be patents on software. 
• Project Voldemort – A distributed database – Voldemort is not a relational database – It is basically just a big, distributed, persistent, fault-tolerant hash table

Daily del.icio.us for October 11th through October 17th

• Adobe debuts Flash Platform tools, including renamed Flex Builder – Yahoo! News – Adobe Systems will roll out on Monday a slew of development tools and technologies for the Flash Platform, including a renamed version of its Flex Builder tool as well as an IDE for its ColdFusion platform
• Scaling writes in MySQL – Coincidentally, during Michael Jackson's memorial service, we actually did hit an incoming rate of a little over 8000 records per second for a few hours.
• Google Web Toolkit Blog: The enterprise (apps) in your pocket – Modern mobile phones such Android based devices and the iPhone ship will powerful web browsers which use the same Webkit rendering engine which GWT already supports and increasingly includes great capabilities like geo-location and offline storag
• Comparing Memcache and Ehcache Server Performance « Greg Luck’s Blog – I already knew that Ehcache in-process was around 1,000 times faster than Memcache. But what would the over-the-network comparison be
• no stack trace – /dev/notes – Maybe I’ve been wrong about Javascript – With frameworks like Ext available, the choice of doing a full application RIA-style on the client becomes not just reasonable but quite a compelling option.
• Google Working Toward "Write Once, Run Anywhere" Native Web Apps | Web Builder Zone – Google NaCl is still in the prototype stage with more significant features in the works along with PNaCl (Portable Native Client).  The Portable NaCL variation, Google said, will be able to recognize a machine's hardware and run a Native Client application that is tailored to that machine.  Developers will simply write one PNaCl module that can run on any processor or operating system (NaCl modules already support Windows, Mac, and Linux).
• Obama Quotes Lincoln To House Dems: ‘I Am Bound To Be True’ (VIDEO) – President Obama began his speech by quoting Abraham Lincoln. "I am not bound to win, but I'm bound to be true," he said. "I'm not bound to succeed, but I'm bound to live up to what light I have."
• Op-Ed Columnist – America’s Real Dream Team – NYTimes.com – Because when you mix all of these energetic, high-aspiring people with a democratic system and free markets, magic happens.
• IBM Launches Public Cloud Service — Application Development Trends – Red Hat called the choice of RHEV over virtualization technology from VMware a coup for its hypervisor stack
• Microsoft’s RemoteFX raises the bar for remote connections – With Microsoft RemoteFX, users will be able to work remotely in a Windows Aero desktop environment, watch full-motion video, enjoy Silverlight animations, and run 3D applications – all with the fidelity of a local-like performance when connecting over the LAN

Daily del.icio.us for March 20th through March 22nd

• Sun’s Six Biggest Mistakes – Forbes.com – In the interest of exploring Sun's value to history students, if not its shareholders, we asked analysts and industry watchers where Sun went wrong.
• Protovis – A graphical toolkit for visualization – Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots.
• SitePen Blog » Stocker: Advanced Dojo Made Easy – SitePen is excited to announce Stocker, which demonstrates some of the more advanced capabilities of Dojo, including the newly released DataChart, the DataGrid, Data Store, Comet, Persevere, and BorderContainer.
• Why baseball benched Microsoft Silverlight | Digital Media – CNET News – The thwacking sounds of bats striking balls will once again fill stadiums, as Monday is opening day for Major League Baseball. This year, Microsoft will watch from the sidelines.

  MLB.com no longer uses Microsoft's Silverlight to stream games to its 500,000 subscribers. This season fans will watch live and on-demand video via Adobe's Flash player.

• Internal cloud’s big test: Amazon vs. Cloudera | The Wisdom of Clouds – CNET News – The announcement on Thursday of Amazon's new Hadoop-based Elastic MapReduce service, combined with the introduction of a commercial Hadoop distribution from start-up Cloudera, means that we finally have a reasonable means of watching which directions enterprise IT prefers.
• I.B.M. Withdraws $7 Billion Offer for Sun Microsystems – NYTimes.com – After weeks of negotiations, I.B.M. withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun’s board balked at a reduced offer, according to three people close to the talks.
• Digital Domain – Web-Based Competition for Microsoft Word – NYTimes.com – The best online word processor, however, may be the one from a tiny company, Zoho, a nimble innovator. Zoho Writer is running close enough to Word to imagine that it and other online word processors will be able to do most everything that Word can do, and more.
• Outside the Box() » Ext Core vs. JQuery – Both Ext Core and JQuery are solid, complete base JavaScript libraries. JQuery leans towards simplicity while Ext Core offers enhanced configuration. The choice of which to use will come down to where you are now.
• Ext JS – Ext Core 3.0 Beta Released – the Ext Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of Ext Core 3.0 beta for download. Ext Core provides a cross-browser consistent API for performing the most common tasks in JavaScript development for web pages. Ext Core is released under a permissive MIT license – there is no cost to use Ext Core – it's free for everyone.
• SaveIE6: Help us save the best browser around – These days we are inundated with bloated web browsers that overcomplicate our lives. However, there is one eminent exception: IE6. It has been around since 2001 and is still one of the most powerful and versatile browsers available.

Daily del.icio.us for April 3rd through April 7th

• Switched – Google Chrome from IE8 – JavaScript is 56 times faster on Chrome The genius behind Google’s web browser (re-tweeted by Douglas Purdy from John Lam), V8 JavaScript Engine.
• Good-bye Solaris? The fate of Sun’s top 5 technologies – Computerworld Blogs – By this time next week, IBM will have bought Sun at a cut-rate price. I'd long thought Sun was going to down for the count, so the news that IBM was moving in didn't surprise me. What happens next though? Specifically, what's going to happen to Sun's product lines? As a long-time watcher of both Sun and IBM, here are my best guesses.
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce – Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
• Google uncloaks once-secret server | Business Tech – CNET News – Google is tight-lipped about its computing operations, but the company for the first time on Wednesday revealed the hardware at the core of its Internet might at a conference here about the increasingly prominent issue of data center efficiency.
• Building Rich Enterprise Applications with Adobe AIR – Adobe AIR Team Blog – Adobe evangelist Christophe Coenraets recorded a very impressive demonstration (see below) of a sample application he built using Adobe AIR and Flex. The sample application, called Salesbuilder, demonstrates many powerful features including
• Lean Software Is Agile, Fit-To-Purpose, And Efficient by John R. Rymer, Dave West, Mike Gilpin – Forrester Research – Lean software is emerging as the antidote to bloatware, enabling architects and developers to rapidly assemble business solutions that deliver "just in time" the software capabilities the business requires both today and tomorrow. The trend toward lean software has been building for years, but the worldwide recession is accelerating it. All application development professionals should know why and how to incorporate lean software into their software strategies for the future.
• SpringSource Team Blog » Job Trends: Tomcat, Spring, Weblogic, JBoss, EJB – Forrester recently described a trend that they refer to as "lean software" in their paper entitled Lean Software Is Agile, Fit-To-Purpose, And Efficient. They state that "lean software is emerging as the antidote to bloatware" and that "the trend toward lean software has been building for years, but the worldwide recession is accelerating it".
• Spring Finance > Part 3: DDD, JPA & Transaction Support | StSMedia – Before we start digging into DDD, JPA and transaction management – the main topics of this article, I should note that I am planning to release a new version of the Spring Finance Manager sample application with each article. However, this article is the exception to the rule . The code for this article was already realeased with the previous article on the Google code project website. This was needed to get get the sample application running to show the new Spring 3 REST features.
• InfoQ: Interview and Book Excerpt: Jaroslav Tulach’s Practical API Design – Jaroslav Tulach's latest book Practical API Design covers the topic of API design of software projects. Jaroslav discusses the importance of API design in the modern software applications, what are the different factors that make a good API, and how to go about implementing API frameworks
• Attack From the Left: Paul Krugman’s Poison Pen | Newsweek Business | Newsweek.com – Paul Krugman has emerged as Obama's toughest liberal critic. He's deeply skeptical of the bank bailout and pessimistic about the economy. Why the establishment worries he may be right.

Daily del.icio.us for March 29th through April 3rd

• JPivot – Home – JPivot is a JSP custom tag library that renders an OLAP table and let users perform typical OLAP navigations like slice and dice, drill down and roll up. It uses Mondrian as its OLAP Server. JPivot also supports XMLA datasource access.
• olap4j: Open Java API for OLAP – olap4j is designed to be a common API for any OLAP server, so you can write an application on one OLAP server and easily switch it to another. And built on that API, there will be a growing collection of tools and components
• Mistaeks I Hav Made: Mapping Inheritance Cleanly with XStream – This works with multiple subclasses and with SingleValueConverters. As long as you can determine the concrete type to be unmarshalled from the contents of the marshalled element, you can use this technique to elide the class attribute and get cleaner XML.
• Amazon Web Services: No Open Cloud Manifesto for us | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – Amazon will join Microsoft as two big cloud computing players not signing on to the Open Cloud Manifesto.

  The manifesto, which has raised a ruckus following a Microsoft blog post, is set to be released Monday with IBM as the ringleader. Given the hubbub it was only natural to wonder where Amazon Web Services, one of the premier cloud computing players stood

• MapReduce programming with Apache Hadoop – JavaWorld – Google and its MapReduce framework may rule the roost when it comes to massive-scale data processing, but there's still plenty of that goodness to go around. This article gets you started with Hadoop, the open source MapReduce implementation for processing large data sets
• RSS to PDF Newspaper – This is a free software project to let people create printable PDFs from content found on the web. It is a free alternative to HP's Tabbloid service. It is being developed as part of the Five Filters project to promote alternative, non-corporate media.
• Oracle: If RHEL were free, we wouldn’t compete | The Open Road – CNET News – Now we find out that it's not a question of support at all, but rather that Oracle simply wants Linux to be free. Why? Because that makes its overpriced software seem cheaper.

  At least Oracle is being honest now. Coekaerts' argument is cheeky, but it makes strategic sense for Oracle. It just makes no financial sense for Red Hat.

• Ubuntu promises DIY Amazon cloud • The Register – The Jaunty Jackalope edition of Ubuntu, version 9.04, due in April, will let you take existing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and run them on your own Ubuntu servers.
• Book Review: Pragmatic Thinking & Learning – Andy Hunt, co-author of several titles in the Pragmatic Programmers series, has turned his pragmatic prism on our brains. His new book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactoring Your Wetware, is a delight to read, provided you understand the vocabulary of agile development. It could be a perfect gift for your favorite geek this holiday season.
• jaxb: A JAXB Tutorial – Wolfgang Laun has created an outstanding tutorial. Wolfgang’s tutorial is possibly the most comprehensive (and most current) information on every aspect of JAXB. I highly recommend it both as a getting started guide and a reference.

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

• 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

• The LinkedIn Blog: Grails at LinkedIn – Below is a presentation that my colleagues Alex Vauthey, Borislav Roussev, Jamie Still and I put together for a JavaOne Groovy/Grails Meetup. This presentation tells about our experience using Grails to build our application.
• Raible Designs | LinkedIn’s Engineering Blog – Have you been curious about LinkedIn's architecture or how they're using Grails and Rails? If so, you might be interested in LinkedIn's Engineering Blog. Over the past couple of weeks, a few Engineers have starting writing about our architecture, OpenSoci
• 10 Free Chart Scripts | WebTecker the latest Web Tech, Resources and News. – This week I’ve been working on a project that required data to be shown visually. I needed a Chart Script that was attractive yet gets the data across. The Charts scripts below are built using JavaScript, Flash, Silverlight, and Java.
• InfoQ: Agile Architecture Is Not Fragile Architecture – Architecture is perceived as a heavy-weight activity which does not fit into an Agile process, so many teams start without it, just to find themselves re-doing the software later because the code structure was not good enough to support maintainability an
• Groovy on Grails : Grails at LinkedIn (Brian Guan) – It’s been more than 6 months since the Grails community learned that LinkedIn , an online network of professional contacts, has been using Grails along with custom made frameworks to power their applications.
• www.hazelcast.com – Hazelcast is a clustering and data distribution platform for Java. – Hazelcast is a clustering and data distribution platform for Java. It currently comes with distributed implementation of java.util.Queue, java.util.Set, java.util.List, java.util.Map and java.util.concurrent.locks.Lock.
• IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » Type Migration Refactoring – In addition to IntelliJ IDEA rich set of refactorings, one of the latest EAPs offers a new one, called Type Migration
• Greg Brown’s Blog: Introducing Pivot – Pivot is an open-source framework for building high-quality, cross-platform applications that are easily deployable both via the web and to the desktop. It began as an R&D effort at VMware and is now being made available to the community as an option for
• Open Source Firm Hires BEA Systems Veteran — SpringSource — InformationWeek – The former head of the BEA Systems WebLogic engineering team, Peter Cooper-Ellis, has joined SpringSource to lead the development and product management of SpringSource Application Platform, the middleware additions to Spring's programmer-assistance, Java
• Using Snort: Part 1: Installation and configuration – Web sites are the most vulnerable, and therefore the most hacked, bits of technology on the Internet. Enter Snort, a free and open source Network Intrusion Prevention System (NIPS) and Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) tool for managing and preven
• Creating DSLs in Java, Part 1: What is a domain-specific language? – Java World – If you've ever written a makefile or designed a Web page with CSS, you've already encountered a DSL, or domain-specific language. DSLs are small, expressive programming languages custom designed for specific tasks

Daily del.icio.us for June 12th through June 14th

• SaveTheDevelopers.org :: Making The Web A Better Place – Say no to IE 6! Our current campaign focuses on assisting users in upgrading their Internet Explorer 6 web browser. This campaign will result in former IE 6 users having a more enjoyable experience on the web while (hopefully) creating a less stressful an
• Save the Developers! Stop Using Internet Explorer 6 – There is a scourge on the Web. It is called Internet Explorer 6. Even though IE7 has been around for more than two years, IE6 still represents 31% of all browsers out there (versus only 22 % for IE7 and 36.5 % for Firefox).
• Amazon’s cloud computing service fuels startup’s launch | InfoWorld | News | 2008-03-25 | By Jon Brodkin, Network World – A startup called Elastra is launching Tuesday with software that helps customers build database management systems and other applications that can be deployed on top of Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service.
• Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments to Grow 11 Percent in 2008, Market Could Fall Victim to Weaker Global Economy – Worldwide PC shipments are forecast to total 293 million units in 2008, up 10.9 percent from 2007 shipments of 264 million units, according to Gartner, Inc. However, analysts warned that growth could fall into single digits if global economic headwinds st
• Microsoft partners with open source Jaspersoft, Sourcesense | Open Source | ZDNet.com – Microsoft and Jaspersoft are working together to ensure that Jasper’s business intelligence software suite runs well on the latest editions of Windows and SQL Server.
• The ’80s Video That Pops Up, Online and Off – New York Times – For rickrolling, the duck was replaced with the 20-year-old Astley video, and in the last year it has become a hugely successful “meme,” the Internet’s word for an idea repeated across the Web. The video from yougotrickrolled.com has been viewed mor
• Roundtable: The state of open source | InfoWorld | News | March 24, 2008 | By Jason Snyder – Any endeavor rooted in community is bound to spark passionate debate. After all, without contention, how else to determine the best way forward? Since its emergence, open source has embodied this spirit. Part defiant, part self-reliant, and often outspoke
• ETL for Free-Form Data – SQL Server Central – Would you like to learn a handy little process for extracting, transforming and loading data fields from a free-form source like a web page or word processing document into something structured like a staging table?
• Asynchronous HTTP and Comet architectures – Java World – In this article, Gregor Roth takes a wider view of asynchronous HTTP, explaining its role in developing high-performance HTTP proxies and non-blocking HTTP clients, as well as the long-lived HTTP connections associated with Comet.
• Ext.ux.grid.RowActions – RowActions Plugin for Ext 2.x – Beta1 by Saki – RowActions plugin allows you to add icons in a grid that you want to bind actions to: delete row, edit row, whatever. It displays an icon and fires two events: beforeaction (return false to cancel) and action (here you put the action you want to execute)
• Coding Horror: Paul Graham’s Participatory Narcissism – Loved this comment – I hadn't realized how unhappy I was until I watched Office Space and my wife said, "That seems like your job". I soon switched jobs

Daily del.icio.us for March 22nd through March 25th

• Software bugtraps | Software that makes software better | Economist.com – Jonathan Pincus, an expert on software reliability who recently left Microsoft Research to become an independent consultant, has observed that “the key issues [in programming] relate to people and the way they communicate and organise themselves.”
• FAQ – Grid – Ext JS Forums – Here is some lessons learned / compiled questions from some of the repetitive questions posted in the forums about grids. Typically people ask the same line of questions (I guess they don't search the forums) and the responses are typically fairly similar
• Google Calendar Sync: Getting Started – Google Calendar Sync allows you to sync events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. You'll be able to determine the direction of information flow, as well as the sync frequency. Staying on top of your Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlo
• Data Warehousing – I'm going to explain OLTP, data warehousing, and OLAP. Kiss that ghetto post-doc goodbye and watch big companies line up to pay you $300/hour to romance their most critical data.
• Optimize A Fresh Ubuntu Installation – Wired How-To Wiki – You've just download the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu Linux and it didn't cost you a thing. You breezed through the installation and a brand new desktop is staring you in the face — now what?
• Adobe Floating on AIR – eWeek – At the Adobe Engage 08 event in San Francisco Feb. 25, eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft spoke with Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch about AIR and a host of other issues.
• Google Gears on Mobile Devices – Google Gears API – Google Code – Google Gears is now available on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices. Google Gears works in exactly the same way on a Windows Mobile 5 or 6 device as it does on a desktop PC. If you've already written an application that uses Google Gears, your application wil

Daily del.icio.us for March 4th through March 7th

• Prototype 1.6.0.2 cheat sheet – Juriy Zaytsev just released a brand-new Prototype 1.6.0.2 cheat sheet that is a great time-saver for development and also makes a nice wall poster
• Tech’s Bottom Line | Bill Snyder | InfoWorld | Move over, Red Hat. Open source ain’t what it used to be | January 24, 2008 03:00 AM | By Bill Snyder – The market will see a convergence of closed and open source software such that the terms will eventually become meaningless from a research perspective
• Massive Java Update Includes Security Fixes – Security Fix – Sun has released another update to its Java software that brings some 370 bug fixes, including a number of security updates.
• Ext JS Blog – » Ext 2.0.1 Released – The Ext team is happy to announce the release of version 2.0.1 of Ext JS. This is a maintenance release that fixes several issues with the 2.0 release
• An Introduction to OSGi on the Server Side – This article addresses the reasons OSGi has stepped into Java/SOA server-side initiatives, including its main benefits and constraints as Java vendors shift their SOA focus to OSGi.
• James Carr » Blog Archive » Making extJS More Accessible to Java Developers – I randomly came across ExtTLD this morning while sifting through my rss feeds, and I must say I am rather impressed.
• Ajax and XML: Ajax for forms – You can do so much with Ajax to enable HTML forms, and this article just scratches the surface. However, it should give you some ideas and practical examples of what you can do in your own applications with relatively easy modifications to your page code.
• ScalaTest 0.9 Released – Today I released a testing tool written in Scala, which can be used to test Scala/Java code. It is a tool for testing Scala code, but can also be used to get started programming in Scala, by writing tests in Scala for production code written in Java.
• Ext JS Blog – » Ext Growth and Server-Side Community Projects – An excellent barometer of a project?s growth and acceptance is the creation of community extensions that compliment the project. It?s demonstrative of how users are embracing Ext and in some cases, need to go past what the core framework provides

Daily del.icio.us for January 22nd through January 25th

• The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 1.1 RC 1 – JRuby – Codehaus – JRuby 1.1RC1 is the first release candidate of JRuby 1.1. JRuby 1.1 represents a concerted focus on speed and refinement. Ruby code can completely compile in an Ahead Of Time (AOT) or Just In Time (JIT) mode; yielding a faster Ruby
• Raible Designs | FreeMarker vs. JSP 2 – I’ve been doing quite a bit of prototyping with Spring MVC and Struts 2 with both JSP and FreeMarker in the last few months.
• Mastering Grails: Build your first Grails application – Grails gives you the development experience of Rails while being firmly grounded in proven Java technologies. But Grails isn’t just a simple “me too” port of Rails to the Java. Grails takes the lessons learned from Rails and mixes them with Java.
• Software Secret Weapons: Lessons learned while moving from JSPWiki to WordPress – Last weekend I decided to move Software Secret Weapons web site from Java onto LAMP! It was a complete success that I want to share with you
• Dave Woods – HTML, CSS, Web Design » IE6 – CSS Bugs and Fixes Explained – In this article, I?ll hopefully cover the main problems that developers experience with Internet Explorer 6 and explain the solutions for these bugs.
• Firefox DataAnalytics Help center – DataAnalytics is a Firefox extension that enables importation, manipulation, analysis and graphing of data. Often websites lock their information in static tables. Have you ever wanted to sort or manipulate a product list sorted by name by price?
• Anyterm – SSH via web – Have you ever wanted SSH or telnet access to your system from an internet desert – from behind a strict firewall, from an internet cafe, or even from a mobile phone? Anyterm is a combination of a web page and a web server module that provides this access
• Understanding the Java Persistence API, Part 1 – Java World – In this article, you will see how elegantly data persistence can be handled in an object-oriented manner just with the help of JPA annotations.
• Sun To Acquire MySQL – Anyone who follows this blog or has heard my talks will have seen me say “Data is the Intel Inside” of the next generation of internet applications, the very heart of Web 2.0
• Sun buys MySQL for $1 billion to take centerstage in the web economy | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET Blogs – An acquisition by Sun means that MySQL gets to continue being a pureplay open-source company and won’t need to sacrifice the ideals or the benefits of open source to suit a halfway (and half-baked) stance on open source.
• Open Source Unleashed: Book Review: JasperReports for Java Developers – “JasperReports for Java Developers” proved to be a well put together title that provided sufficient support for a JasperReports newbie, like me, while also making good as a source of reference content that might be useful for non-beginners
• GWT vs. FLEX – This article would compare Google GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and Adobe Flex 2 and would describe the advantages and disadvantages of each of these technologies.
• The Forrester Wave: Application Server Platforms, Q3 2007 by John R. Rymer – Forrester Research – Sun Microsystems revealed itself to be a Strong Performer, approaching the status of established player BEA Systems in that regard

Daily del.icio.us for January 18th

• alphaWorks Services | IBM Web Highlights | Overview – IBM Web Highlights is a social Web 2.0 application that allows quick creation, sharing, and discussion of Web snippets and Web pages. The snippets are in the form of highlights that can be independently created and then discussed between member.
• Top 3 SSIS Dataflow Mistakes – Brian Knight – There’s an old saying that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the SSIS data flow is your hammer, too many people thing treat the components in the data flow like nails and don’t follow best traditional ETL practices
• [Component] CForm v1.0 « Flexed – CForm is all about creating data entry screens. This component allows developers to create standardized forms/CRUD screens in their applications. The CForm component is a Data Entry component that can be very useful
• Thin – A fast and simple web server « Marc-André Cournoyer?s blog – Thin is a web server that glues together 3 of the best Ruby libraries in web history: the Mongrel parser, Event Machine: a network I/O library with extremely high scalability, performance and stability and Rack
• http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=205100034 – The list of financial firms deploying Web 2.0 applications, both within the enterprise and externally, is growing. TD Ameritrade, Bear Stearns and Wells Fargo all have announced new 2.0 applications in the last few months.
• Amazon?s EC2 Open Source Firefox Plugin – Developers using Amazon?s EC2 API might find this interesting: Amazon has created an open source project on SourceForge for ElasticFox, their Firefox extension that lets you create and manage EC2 instances from a GUI in the browser.
• PragDave: Two New Groovy Titles – Just to prove we’re not totally Ruby-centric, we just took two books on Groovy into beta. Venkat has written Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer, a wonderful introduction to the language. And Scott Davis complements it with Gr
• Bruce Eckel: Java, Evolutionary Dead End – Bruce Eckel says that Java should not change much any more, that maybe “the right thing to do is just not add the feature at all (what fun is that?). That if you can’t do it right then maybe the language should stop growing and become stable.
• The Myth of Stored Procedures Preference – Developer Pills – So with no pre-compilation and caching for both SPs and SQL statments there is no advantage for SPs here, in some other databases the SPs compiled into C or C++ but this isn’t the case in SQL Server 7.0/2000.
• GWT Site » Getting started with GWT and Google Gears – Google Gears is a library that enables your web applications to work offline. Currently it consists of three modules: LocalServer for caching and serving up your web app resources (ie. html, javascript, images), a SQLite Database for storing offline data

Daily del.icio.us for January 7th

Daily del.icio.us for for January 2nd:

• Redmond | Feature Article: Google’s Secret Weapon – “Open source is a software capitalist’s supreme tool,” says Matt Asay, VP with Alfresco. It enables vendors to align closely with their customers & prospects while simultaneously undermining competitors’ efforts to charge license fees for their own produc
• JavaScript: It?s Just Not Validation! – Colin Morris, author of Y-Validator, has written a piece on JavaScript: It?s Just Not Validation! which discusses JavaScript validation, and input assistance
• Runscanner: Free system utility to find all running programs on your computer – Runscanner is a free windows system utility which scans your system for all configured running programs. Runscanner will detect all programs that start automatically, including spyware, adware, and homepage hijackers.
• What Every Programmer Should See On YouTube? – Are you aware of the wealth of YouTube material available around Java, as well as programming in general? Everything’s out there, courseware, technical presentations, Google talks, interviews, ad-hoc info sharing, and obscure tips and tricks
• Ajaxian » Ajaxian Roundup for December, 2007: It?s the end of the year as we know it – In 2007, the Web development community has jumped a lot, but at the same time, hasn?t changed at all.
• JavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language – Douglas Crockord’s Javascript site – Despite its popularity, few know that JavaScript is a very nice dynamic object-oriented general-purpose programming language. How can this be a secret? Why is this language so misunderstood?
• John Resig – Untold JavaScript Secrets – I might as well come right out and say it: I’m starting work on my second JavaScript book. What are the greatest untold secrets of JavaScript programming that you wish were thoroughly debunked and explained?

Daily del.icio.us for January 2nd

• Programming Resources, News and Ideas: Red Hat Developer Studio – Introduction – The beta version of Red hat Developer Studio has been released recently. RHDS is a based on eclipse with set of pre-configured tools from JBoss IDE and Exadel Studio. RHDS gives us out of box and 100% open source platform for enterprise-level….
• Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Building a Flex DataGrid – This week, we?ve got a nice one for all of you Adobe Flex aficionados. The boys over at Paranoid Ferret Productions have a good introduction on how to build one of the most useful of components, a DataGrid, Flex-style.
• Eulerian Technologies – DatePicker using Prototype and Scriptaculous – DatePicker using Prototype and Scriptaculous. You’ll find here the code and instructions for a datepicker widget using Prototype and Scriptaculous librairies.
• Apache News Online: 24 August 2007 – Apache FOP 0.94 Released – The Apache XML Graphics team is pleased to announce the release of Apache FOP version 0.94. FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) is a print formatter driven by XSL Formatting Objects [1] and an output independent formatter.
• Apache News Online: 29 August 2007 – Apache OpenJPA 1.0.0 Released – The Apache OpenJPA community is pleased to announce the release of Apache OpenJPA version 1.0.0. Apache OpenJPA is a feature-rich implementation of the persistence part of Enterprise Java Beans 3.0, also known as the Java Persistence API (JPA)
• 10 Candidates for Extreme Makeover, Ticker-Edition « GigaOM – Sun Microsystems is changing its ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA in order to better reflect the company?s role in new network infrastructure. Here?s 10 companies that we think could use an extreme ticker makeover.
• Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT 1.4 release and out of beta – It’s a really big day for Google Web Toolkit: GWT 1.4 is now available — and, with more than a million downloads under our belt, GWT is no longer in beta!
• InfoQ: Availability & Consistency – When we move to distributed architectures for scalability, fault-tolerance reasons we are also introducing additional complexities. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels dives into the different parameters that play in the tension between availability and consistency
• InfoQ: Patrick Linskey discusses OpenJPA and the JPA specification – At The Spring Experience conference, InfoQ caught up with Patrick Linskey of BEA to discuss the current status of the Apache OpenJPA project. Linskey explains where OpenJPA came from, how it fits into the OR Mapping space, the features it provides
• Ajax programming with Struts 2 – Java World – In this article, Oleg Mikheev shows you how to use Struts 2, Dojo and JSON to display data in an Ajax-style table. In the process, he introduces some Ajax-friendly features of Struts 2, including its integration with WebWork, Guice & the Dojo toolkit.
• JLINQ: IBM’s new paradigm for writing Java database applications – The project code named Java Language Integrated Query (JLINQ) gives database application developers an easy, GUI-based means to significantly increase productivity in both the design and implementation phases
• start – MUScoop Wiki – The primary purpose of this Wiki is to archive Marquette sports information and history. In time, this wiki will become the one-stop-shopping repository for records, player statistics and biographies and team results for all MU sports teams.

Daily del.icio.us for Aug 27, 2007 through Sep 01, 2007

• Struts2 Tutorials – Several tutorials are available to help you get started with the framework, from all-purpose “soup to nuts” tutorials to specialty tutorials on portlets and database access.
• GnilronEye 1.1, system monitoring solution, released – GnilronEye 1.1, a java-based system monitoring solution, is now available for download. GnilronEye 1.1 introduces an advanced http-monitoring feature and a new report feature that include sgraphs of the monitored items.
• A CSS styled table version 2 | Veerle’s blog – In 2005 I wrote an article about styling a table with CSS. After receiving so many requests I finally decided to give in and write another tutorial.
• Scrollovers – A New Way of Linking – Scrollovers are a way to quickly and easily add flair to your web pages, giving your users an experience they weren’t expecting.
• Death by numbers – Los Angeles Times – We’re obssessed with plane crashes and bridge collapses, yet we pay little attention to the stuff that kills the rest of us.
• Sun set on server business? | Open Source | ZDNet.com – In all the hullaballoo over Sun?s agreement to support Solaris 10 on IBM hardware I have yet to read one obvious fact. This is part of Sun?s exit strategy from the server business.
• Ajaxian » YUI Compressor: The latest minification tool – The YUI Compressor is a new JavaScript minifier. Its level of compaction is higher than the Dojo compressor, and it is as safe as JSMin. Tests on the YUI library have shown savings of about 18% compared to JSMin and 10% compared to the Dojo compressor
• Tutorials – Using Java Persistence API Within a Visual Web Application – Using NetBeans IDE 6.0 and the Visual Web tools, you can write applications that connect to database tables using the Java Persistence API (JPA) in addition to the Visual Web data provider components.
• Enterprise Java Community: Manage test data for integration tests using Spring and DBunit – This article will look at configuring integration tests using Spring and DBUnit so that test data is inserted into the database before every test. This article also looks at a utility to export/import test data in the database using DBunit.
• How to Get the Best Performance Out of a Java Persistence Implementation : Enterprise Tech Tips – If you are switching over to the Java Persistence API, be aware of the numerous options and decisions you have to make to boost your application’s performance. From Cache size, Pools to modes of operation, Rahul Biswas takes you through the steps. (via Th
• Prototype JavaScript framework: Prototype 1.6.0 release candidate – The first release candidate of Prototype 1.6.0 has arrived! The core team is continuing its tradition of bringing thoughtful incremental upgrades to the core APIs in addition to performance improvements and bug fixes. Keep reading for some of the highligh
• Citrix makes bold virtualization move with XenSource acquisition, muddies waters with Microsoft | Dana Gardner’s BriefingsDirect | ZDNet.com – Citrix Systems Inc. today roared full throttle into the ever-expanding desktop virtualization arena, when it announced its intention to acquire XenSource, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. The news comes right on the heels of VMWare?s huge IPO pop.

Daily del.icio.us for Aug 16, 2007 through Aug 21, 2007

I first saw this on CNET in an article entitled – BEA jumps on security bandwagon. In a nutshell, the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Security product is an application security infrastructure solution that uses a service-oriented approach to enable security services for your applications.

The product is based on most of the stuff that came over as part of the CrossLogix acquisition. The interesting thing for me on this whole story was how security is playing an integral part of the application development process and how companies like BEA are jumping in this market. IBM has also been buying companies to complete its security/identity story in the Tivoli suite of products with TIM & TAM.

Another interesting part of the press release was that JAAS was not mentioned once. JAAS or the Java Authentication and Authorization Service is a package integrated into Java 1.4 that enables services to authenticate and enforce access controls upon users. It implements a standard Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) framework, and supports user-based authorization.

JAAS was a good first step for authentication and authorization for Java applications, but there are several limitations of the framework and I’m not sure what the future holds. It seems odd to write all this JAAS code for applications that are running inside a web/ejb container when the container has all of these services.

I haven’t been lurking in the comp.lang.java.security newsgroup and so I don’t know what the future holds for JAAS. I guess I’ll have to go through the 15,000+ posting that are waiting in my newsreader.

BEA jumps on security bandwagon