• How to clone Wikipedia and index it with Solr « Nimble Books LLC – I have (finally) successfully cloned Wikipedia and indexed it with Solr. In the spirit of documenting my work and helping others, here are the key steps along the way.
• Redux: Inspecting HotSpot JVM Options – There is enormous scope for coarse and fine grained control of JVM behaviour. The option -XX:+PrintFlagsFinal allows comprehensive reporting of the options and their values. The available options vary by build and JVM type (server or client). Recording and auditing this output is an important step in any Java benchmarking or continuous monitoring exercise
• DB Sanity – database consistency and reporting application – DB Sanity performs checks on a database for verifying data consistency and correctness of application deployments or production data. It is invoked by the command line and creates an HTML report with a summary and listings of faulty database entries.
• javasimon – Java Simon – Simple Monitoring API – Java Simon is a simple monitoring API that allows you to follow and better understand your application. Monitors (familiarly called Simons) are placed directly into your code and you can choose whether you want to count something or measure time/duration.
• InfoQ: ‘Denali’ No More: SQL Server 2012 Announced, Focuses on BI and Big Data – At the recent PASS Summit, Microsoft announced that the next version of SQL Server, formerly known by the codename "Denali," will be called SQL Server 2012. Other products were granted official names as well, including Power View (formerly "Crescent") and SQL Server Data Tools (formerly "Juneau").
• » Introducing: Rocketcharts, Open-source HTML5 Financial/Statistical Charts Chase B. Gale – Introducing: Rocketcharts, Open-source HTML5 Financial/Statistical Charts
• Obituary: printf("goodbye, Dennis"); | The Economist – All of his technological miracles, along with a billion others sold by Apple's competitors, would be merely pretty receptacles were it not for Dennis Ritchie. It is to him that they owe their digital souls, the operating systems and programs which make them tick.
• Android and IDEA for the Eclipse Refugee » Canoo RIA Blog – Now that IntelliJ IDEA 11 EAP (Early Access) has a visual layout window, there is almost no reason for me to write my Android apps in anything else. I wrote this post to help other users along their way when converting between the IDEs.
• InfoQ: How REST replaced SOAP on the Web: What it means to you – Meanwhile, the web has essentially become a service oriented platform, where information and functionality is a available through an API; the Web succeeded where the enterprise largely failed.
• How to develop and monitor Thread Pool Services by using Spring | Online Technology Vision – Thread Pools are very important to execute synchronous & asynchronous processes. This article shows how to develop and monitor Thread Pool Services by using Spring. Creating Thread Pool has been explained via two alternative methods
• InfoQ: Simple Made Easy – Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity’s virtues over easiness’, showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path.

Links for October 20th through October 23rd

• YaHP Converter – Yet another Html to Pdf converter for Java – YaHP is a java library which permits to convert an html document into a pdf document.
• Java JSON library tour – In this series of Java JSON tutorials, we focus on three popular third party Java libraries to process JSON data, which are Jackson, Google Gson and JSON.simple
• InfoQ: Why I Chose MongoDB for guardian.co.uk – Mat Wall makes a journey through Guardian’s online history, outlining technologies used – Perl/CGI, CMS, J2EE, Oracle-, and explaining why they chose a NoSQL solution – MongoDB – and its advantages.
• InfoQ: Is REST the future for SOA? – REST can be used as both system design approach leveraging ROA (true REST approach) and SOA design implementation leveraging REST technologies (REST Web Services). Although both approaches have their merits, they do not change the hardest part– defining business services/resources aligned with the enterprise business model.
• disruptor – Concurrent Programming Framework – Concurrent Programming Framework that provides high performance alternative to bounded queues for exchanging data between concurrent threads
• There’s no such thing as big data – O’Reilly Radar – perspective. They’re fearless, because they have less to lose. But big, entrenched incumbents should still be able to compete, because they have massive amounts of data about their customers, their products, their employees, and their competitors. They fail because often they just don’t know how to ask the right questions.
• Video: Getting Started with Spring Data Redis | SpringSource.org – In this video, Redis founder, Salvatore Sanfilippo, introduces the technology, its data structures and the fundamental concepts behind it. Then SpringSource engineer, Costin Leau, discusses the Redis support in Spring Data, and will showcase how easy it is to get started and scale out into a cloud environment such as Cloud Foundry.
• NoSQL – It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like SQL – tecosystems – What is apparent is the demand for query languages within the NoSQL world. The category might self-identify with its explicit rejection of the industry’s original query language, but the next step in NoSQL’s evolution will be driven in part by furious implementations of SQL’s children.
• Try the unconventional alternative – Business of Software Blog – The next time you are faced with a decision that looks like a choice between A, B, or C…. pause for a moment and let your imagination wonder. Is there an option D, E, or F?
• Why GNU grep is fast – The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.

Links for August 9th through August 12th

• Stack Overflow Search — Now 81% Less Crappy – Blog – Stack Overflow – That's why I’m pleased to announce that as of today, we have switched all of our search functionality network wide from SQL Server to Lucene, or more specifically, the Lucene.NET flavor.
• My Experiments on Technology: 10 things to become an outstanding Java developer – If you are a java developer and passionate about technology, you can follow the below things which makes you an outstanding Java developer.
• Java Code Geeks: Best Of The Week – 2011 – W05 – I would like to introduce a new JavaCodeGeeks idea with this post. Every Sunday we are going to provide a list of useful articles and tutorials from the week that passed. They can definitely serve your Sunday morning reading over coffee!
• jsoup Java HTML Parser, with best of DOM, CSS, and jquery – jsoup is a Java library for working with real-world HTML. It provides a very convenient API for extracting and manipulating data, using the best of DOM, CSS, and jquery-like methods.
• How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Computing and Programming – This book is the first book on programming as the core subject of a liberal arts education. Its main focus is the design process that leads from problem statements to well-organized solutions; it deemphasizes the study of programming language details, algorithmic minutiae, and specific application domains
• CouchDB: The Definitive Guide – Three of CouchDB’s creators show you how to use this document-oriented database as a standalone application framework or with high-volume, distributed applications. With its simple model for storing, processing, and accessing data, CouchDB is ideal for web applications that handle huge amounts of loosely structured data.
• Java Image Processing Cookbook – This is a free e-book about digital image processing algorithms and functions with implementations in Java. Some examples use the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) API
• On Leadership, Teams, Success & Happiness | Both Sides of the Table – It’s my belief that through exceptional leadership you attract great teams that do more than the sum of the parts
• Why Netflix Picked Amazon SimpleDB, Hadoop/HBase, and Cassandra « myNoSQL – The reason why we use multiple NoSQL solutions is because each one is best suited for a specific set of use cases
• Blogs for Development: How to add a SOAP header using jax-ws – In this article I will add a security header to the soap request. So I will create a class implementing the interface SOAPHandler and I will override the method handleMessage
• siena project · the scalable persistence tier for Java – Siena is a persitence API for Java inspired on the Google App Engine Python Datastore API

Daily del.icio.us for January 26th through January 30th

• JIRA 4 RC1 – Beta no more – JIRA Product Blog – The JIRA 4 Beta program is now complete. This week we released JIRA 4 Release Candidate 1 which means we're closer than ever to the finish line.
• jrecordbind: JRecordBind – Home – JRecordBind is (AFAIK) the only tool aimed at fixed-length files that's able to marshall and unmarshall. By the way you may be a producer of fixed length files, not just a consumer.

  JRecordBind supports hierarchical fixed length files: records of some type that are "sons" of other record types.

  JRecordBind uses XML Schema for the definition file: that could make your learning curve steeper.

• SOA patterns – Reservations | SOA Zone – Reservations is a protocol level pattern which that involves Reservation involves exchange of messages between service consumers and services. The next pattern is one of the enablers of such message exchange , it is also a one of the confusing pattern since a lot of commercial offerings which include it include gazillion other capabilities – yes I am talking about the ServiceBus
• Agile Architecture, Lean Principles | Javalobby – If we are able to take a seemingly architecturally significant challenge and make it reversible, then we have effectively minimized the impact and cost of change to a point where change is no longer architecturally significant.
• Java Web services: JAXB and JAX-WS in Axis2 – Apache Axis2 supports a range of data-binding technologies, including the official Java™ standard, JAXB 2.x. Axis2 also supports the Java standard for Web service configuration, JAX-WS 2.x, as an alternative to its own custom configuration technique
• JPA Implementation Patterns: Testing | Javalobby – This week I will discuss various approaches to testing JPA code.The first question to ask is: what code do we want to test? Two kinds of objects are involved when we talk about JPA: domain objects and data access objects (DAO's)
• InfoQ: RESTful Approaches To Financial Systems Integration – RESTful architectures are the subject of this presentation, specifically the way they are particularly attractive in solving many financial services integration problem
• AT&T’s Femtocell Coming Soon – Yahoo! Finance – AT&T’s 3G Microcell is designed to improve wireless signal for both voice calls and data applications in home and small business settings and supports up to 10 3G capable cellular handsets
• iPhone Cycling Applications « – Phone, music, email, cycling computer and GPS tracking all in one device. Pretty slick. However before you trash your pricey cycling computer be aware the iPhone has an Achilles heel as a cycling computer.
• Dive Into Python 3 – Dive Into Python 3 covers Python 3 and its differences from Python 2. Compared to Dive Into Python, it’s about 20% revised and 80% new material. The book is now complete, but feedback is always welcome.
• memcached and Grails, Part 1: Installing and using memcached – Caching is an essential part of any high-volume Web application and memcached is a great caching option. I have personally had a ton of success using it. If you choose to leverage memcached as your caching solution, I am sure you will see just how effective it is.

Daily del.icio.us for September 17th through September 23rd

• PhoneGap | Bridging the iPhone GAP – PhoneGap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript. We're trying to make iPhone app development easy and open. For many applications a web application is the way to but in Safari you don't get access to the native iPhone APIs, and the that's the problem we're trying to solve.
• Finextra: Bank of America offers m-banking apps for Google Android – Bank of America has become the first bank to offer a mobile phone application on Google's Android Market, which opened for business Wednesday with 50 apps available for download.
• 2 MILLION MINUTES :: A DOCUMENTARY FILM ON GLOBAL EDUCATION – How do most American high school students spend this time? What about students in the rest of the world? How do family, friends and society influence a student's choices for time allocation? What implications do their choices have on their future and on a country's economic future?
• 2008 Election Results Dashboard – Election Results 2008 – The New York Times – Monitor live election results on Tuesday night with The Times’s Election 2008 Dashboard.
• WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 – The first public beta of WordPress 2.7 is here at last. Join the thousands of people already testing 2.7 by downloading 2.7 Beta 1. As previously mentioned on this blog, 2.7 is bringing a new visual design
• enunciate – Articulate your web api – Enunciate is an engine for creating, maintaining, and deploying your rich Web service API for the Java platform.
• jersey: JSR-311: JAX-RS – Java API for RESTful Web Services. – Jersey is the open source (under dual CDDL+GPL license), production quality, JAX-RS (JSR 311) Reference Implementation for building RESTful Web services. But, it is also more than the Reference Implementation. Jersey provides an API so that developers may extend Jersey to suite their needs
• Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | Do we need WADL? – Everybody's atwitter about WADL, a description file for REST services, and since it's supposed to be RESTful I regularly get questioned about it. For this post I'm going to experiment and adopt Stephen O'Grady's Q&A style.
• BrowserPlus – Break Out of Your Browser – BrowserPlus is a technology for web browsers that allows developers to create rich web applications with desktop capabilities
• The Shallowest Generation – Seeking Alpha – The Baby Boom generation has one last chance to change the course of U.S. history, keep us from wrecking in a storm of debt on the approaching jagged reef and shed the title of “Shallowest Generation”.

Daily del.icio.us for November 2nd through November 4th

• REST for Java developers, Part 1: It’s about the information, stupid – JavaWorld – When you need to invoke behavior in standard, contract-bound ways between disparate partners, SOAP is a good approach. If, on the other hand, you are looking to share information in flexible, scalable, reusable ways, then REST is a great approach
• InfoQ: Business Processes for SOA Governance – Prabhakar Mynampati, an Advisory Architect at IBM, published last week an article detailing 6 SOA Governance business processes. The article includes a BPMN-like process definitions for: Service identification, Service creation, Service testing, Service versioning and change management, Service management, and Service security
• InfoQ: Implementing SOA Governance – Governance is the combination of people, policies, and processes that an organization leverages to achieve desired behaviors. SOA governance is about achieving the desired behavior associated with, or attributed to, SOA adoption
• InfoQ: HP Releases Systinet 3.0 – HP announced the release of HP SOA Systinet 3.00, a market-leading service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance software. HP acquired Systinet as part of its acquisition of Mercury Interactive in 2006.
• InfoQ: Fostering Software Craftsmanship in a Corporate Setting – In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Scott Dillman talks about transforming developers into software craftsmen, people responsible for their work, continuously learning, taking pride in doing qualitative work, sharing knowledge and respecting professional standards.
• Introduction to WEB4J: Web development for minimalists – JavaWorld – As Java Web application frameworks have become more powerful and flexible, they've also become more complex. John O'Hanley's WEB4J framework in many ways flies in the face of this trend: it offers few customization options, but is easy to learn and work with
• Git Community Book – Welcome to the Git Community Book. This book has been built by dozens of people in the Git community, and is meant to help you learn how to use Git as quickly and easily as possible
• Android Developers Blog: Android is now Open Source – we're making what might just be the most exciting announcement of all: we and our Open Handset Alliance partners have now released the source code for Android. There's a huge amount of code and content there, so head over to http://source.android.com/ for all the details.
• InfoQ: Flex for XML and JSON – Beauty and brains. Flex and Java. Or is it the other way around? Who can say? What I know is that Flex and Java work really well together to create amazing Rich Internet applications (RIAs)
• How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub – In the end, just as Indiana Jones could never turn down the opportunity to search for the Holy Grail, I could no less turn down the chance to work for myself on something I truly love, no matter how safe the alternative might be

Daily del.icio.us for October 20th through October 21st

• InfoQ: Cascading – Data Processing API for Hadoop MapReduce – Cascading is a new processing API for data processing on Hadoop clusters, and supports building complex processing workflows using an expressive API as opposed to directly implementing Hadoop MapReduce algorithms.
• InfoQ: Open Source WS Stacks for Java – Design Goals and Philosophy – Among the most popular open source stacks for implementing a SOAP/WS-* based solution in the Java space are Apache Axis2, Apache CXF, Spring Web Services, JBossWS and Sun’s Metro. I posed a number of questions to the lead developers of these stacks about their design goals, their approach towards Java and Web services standards, data binding, accessing XML, interoperability, REST support, and framework maturity. As was to be expected, the results revealed many similarities and some noteworthy differences
• Enterprise Java Community: Axis, Axis2 and CXF: Surveying the WS Landscape – Axis2 has been around longer but CXF is catching up quickly. My recommendation is this: If multilanguage support is important, Axis2 is the clear choice. If you care about an implementation focused on Java with tight integration into projects like Spring, CXF is a better choice, particularly for embedding web services inside of other programs
• Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure – Wikimedia's move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration of the organization's 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.
• Sun Microsystems: A Lesson in Failed Cosmetic Surgery – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Sun Microsystems, one of the world’s largest server and software makers, finds itself in an awkward position: It might soon have enough cash to buy all of its stock and go private.
• Red Hat boosts open source SOA | InfoWorld | News | 2008-10-08 | By Paul Krill – Red Hat is expanding its open-source JBoss SOA platform with the unveiling Wednesday of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 and JBoss Operations Network 2.1. Enterprise SOA Platform supports small-integration projects to enterprise-wide SOA integration. It features open-source projects like JBoss ESB, JBoss JBPM, and JBoss Rules
• The Financial Crisis, as Explained to My Fourteen-Year-Old Sister — The Bygone Bureau – The following is an actual conversation I had with my younger sister, Olivia. She likes to draw, play World of Warcraft, and now, she’s the only fourteen-year-old girl who understands the U.S. economic crisis.
• Real Time Economics : Sign of the Times: National Debt Clock Runs Out of Digits – The national debt clock, the unofficial tracker of the federal deficit maintained by the Durst Organization in New York, has reached its limits. Last month, as the national debt exceeded $10 trillion for the first time, the clock ran out of digits to record the number.
• RIM’s Impressive BlackBerry Storm – BusinessWeek – RIM has struck again, this time by eliminating the physical keyboard from its new BlackBerry Storm smartphone. The Storm will be available later this fall from Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and from Vodafone (VOD) in Europe and parts of Asia.
• Motorola’s Linux strategy evolves with Android – Reports have emerged indicating that Motorola is hiring developers with Java and Android expertise in preparation for launching a major mobile initiative on top of Google's software platform

Daily del.icio.us for October 8th through October 11th

• Ext JS Ext.ux.YoutubePlayer – The Ext.ux. YoutubePlayer is a user extension that utilizes the Youtube Chromeless API. You can embed any Youtube video into Ext native controls and place it in your application. It's like a mediaplayer built on top of Ext JS and the Youtube API.
• InfoQ: Real World Web Services – In this presentation, Scott Davis provides a pragmatic, down-to-earth introduction to Web services as used in the real world by public sites, including SOAP-based, REST and POX-style examples. While the buzzword density leaves nothing to be desired, the p
• Microsoft and Sourcesense Partner to Contribute to Open Source, Apache POI to Support Ecma Office Open XML File Formats: Companies to collaborate on the development of open source solutions for the Microsoft Office product suite. – Microsoft and Sourcesense announced that the two companies will collaborate on the strategy, development and deployment of open source solutions for the MS Office. One of the initial goals is contributing to the development of a new version of Apache POI
• Watch Out – Adobe Is Slowly Building an Online Empire – ReadWriteWeb – Adobe seems to "get it" – they know that software is moving online, but they're betting on the co-existence of both online software with their corresponding offline apps, like those built with Adobe AIR
• Brian Alvey: The Audacity of Code – Code in the face of difficulty. Code in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of code!
• GigaOM Interview: Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corp. – GigaOM – Fresh from his Mix’08 keynote, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect and industry luminary, Ray Ozzie, spent some time on the phone with me, discussing everything from the company’s services strategy, to the economics of cloud computing, to the relev
• Cobra: Java HTML Parser – The all-Java Cobra HTML Toolkit includes a HTML DOM parser that can be used independently of the rendering engine. The following are some of its features: * It implements W3C HTML DOM Level 2 interfaces. It parses "street HTML", can be used in headless mo
• Coding Horror: Is Eeyore Designing Your Software? – I think sometimes programmers forget how much work it is to create software at large companies. What may seem like a no-brainer five line code change to us on the outside is perhaps five man-weeks of work once you factor in all the required process overhe
• Dabblers and Blowhards – As for the mystical connection between painters and programmers, the famous Lloyd Bentsen put-down keeps coming to mind…. You, sir, are no painter. And while you hack away at your terminal, or ride your homemade Segway, we painters and musicians are goi
• Google’s five-year plan to hit Enterprise continues (Cemaphore helps Google out) « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger – Enterprises will never move wholesale over to Gmail and Google’s other offerings. Users just don’t like that kind of change. There would be revolt at work, if CTOs tried to force it.

Daily del.icio.us for March 26th through March 27th

• 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

• James Duncan Davidson ? Remembering Java Naming Blunders Past – The value of a brand is created by the public that uses it, not by the company that owns it. Brands are funny things. They make us choose products out of a sense of comfort instead of an honest evaluation.
• Raible Designs | Display Tag 1.1.1 Released – Display Tag version 1.1.1 has been released. This is a bug fix release
• Java.net – Unified Expression Language for JSP and JSF – This article looks at the unified expression language (EL), which has been added to the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) specification in order to overcome problems when integrating the JavaServer Pages (JSP) EL with the JavaServer Faces EL.
• Web Tier to Go With Java EE 5: Summary of New Features in JSP 2.1 Technology – The expert groups have worked together on the upcoming releases of JSP 2.1 and JavaServer Faces 1.2 technologies in Java EE 5 to fix these integration issues and make sure that the two technologies work together seamlessly.
• jmockit: Project Home Page – JMockit consists of a single class with a small set of static methods, which allow arbitrary methods and constructors of any other class to be replaced by mock implementations at runtime.
• Mock Objects: Shortcomings and Use Cases – This article looks at Mock Objects, a testing technique from the XP community that offers a way to test our code in isolation by simulating those external dependencies. As with any other tool, we need to be careful and avoid overusing them.
• Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor – Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor, created in collaboration with WebAssist, makes it drop-dead easy to create standards-compliant, two- and three-column CSS layouts and includes 30 of the most common web page layouts, coded the way Eric Meyer would code them.
• IT Efforts: Struts2 + Spring + JUnit – Hopefully this entry serves as some search engine friendly documentation on how one might unit test Struts 2 actions configured using Spring
• InfoQ: The Secret Sauce of Highly Productive Software Development – This article stands as a reminder that the Agile approach already offers many learning practices and mechanisms ? are they all being used to best advantage, to serve your team and your business?
• XFire Creator Joins MuleSource – Diephouse is the creator of XFire, the high performance open source SOAP framework. He joined MuleSource as the software architect focused on expanding Mule’s web services capabilities.
• Introduction To iBatis – This tutorial will focus on using iBatis in a Java application and Abator, a code generation tool
• Spring Web Services 1.0 Released | Springframework.org – After two years of development, we are pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 1.0 is now available. Spring Web Services is a product of the Spring community focused on the creation of document-driven, contract-first web services.

Daily del.icio.us for Aug 25, 2007

• James Duncan Davidson ? Remembering Java Naming Blunders Past – The value of a brand is created by the public that uses it, not by the company that owns it. Brands are funny things. They make us choose products out of a sense of comfort instead of an honest evaluation.
• Raible Designs | Display Tag 1.1.1 Released – Display Tag version 1.1.1 has been released. This is a bug fix release
• Java.net – Unified Expression Language for JSP and JSF – This article looks at the unified expression language (EL), which has been added to the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) specification in order to overcome problems when integrating the JavaServer Pages (JSP) EL with the JavaServer Faces EL.
• Web Tier to Go With Java EE 5: Summary of New Features in JSP 2.1 Technology – The expert groups have worked together on the upcoming releases of JSP 2.1 and JavaServer Faces 1.2 technologies in Java EE 5 to fix these integration issues and make sure that the two technologies work together seamlessly.
• jmockit: Project Home Page – JMockit consists of a single class with a small set of static methods, which allow arbitrary methods and constructors of any other class to be replaced by mock implementations at runtime.
• Mock Objects: Shortcomings and Use Cases – This article looks at Mock Objects, a testing technique from the XP community that offers a way to test our code in isolation by simulating those external dependencies. As with any other tool, we need to be careful and avoid overusing them.
• Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor – Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor, created in collaboration with WebAssist, makes it drop-dead easy to create standards-compliant, two- and three-column CSS layouts and includes 30 of the most common web page layouts, coded the way Eric Meyer would code them.
• IT Efforts: Struts2 + Spring + JUnit – Hopefully this entry serves as some search engine friendly documentation on how one might unit test Struts 2 actions configured using Spring
• InfoQ: The Secret Sauce of Highly Productive Software Development – This article stands as a reminder that the Agile approach already offers many learning practices and mechanisms ? are they all being used to best advantage, to serve your team and your business?
• XFire Creator Joins MuleSource – Diephouse is the creator of XFire, the high performance open source SOAP framework. He joined MuleSource as the software architect focused on expanding Mule’s web services capabilities.
• Introduction To iBatis – This tutorial will focus on using iBatis in a Java application and Abator, a code generation tool
• Spring Web Services 1.0 Released | Springframework.org – After two years of development, we are pleased to announce that Spring Web Services 1.0 is now available. Spring Web Services is a product of the Spring community focused on the creation of document-driven, contract-first web services.
• 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.

Daily del.icio.us for Aug 21, 2007 through Aug 25, 2007

• Enunciate Your Web Service API – From your source code, Enunciate will build a fully-documented, interoperable web application in the form of a web application archive (war file). A consolidated, annotated XML contract is generated at compile-time. Each service class is published as a SO
• Uni-Form – One Form to Rule Them All – Uni-Form is an attempt to standardize form markup (xhtml) and css, "modularize" it, so even people with only basic knowledge of these technologies can get nice looking, well structured, highly customizable, semantic, accessible and usable forms.
• sq1-struts2 – Google Code – ‘Apache Struts 2 from Square One’ is a training course designed for people who want to create Java web applications, not just quickly, but correctly. Training sessions include a technology primer and a coding exercise. This Project hosts materials used by
• Scand Unveils dhtmlxCombo, Ajax Combobox with Autocomplete – Scand LLC announced the release of new Ajax-based UI component dhtmlxCombo v1.0. It’s a JavaScript combobox control which provides suggestion search and automatic completion functionality to web-based applications
• Ultimate htaccess Examples | evolt.org – Here’s my list of the ultimate htaccess code snippets and examples that I use all the time.
• Dr. Dobb’s | Adobe Woos Web Developers With Apollo Alpha | March 19, 2007 – Apollo is something of an anti-AJAX: It brings elements of online interaction to a desktop client application. Like Flash, Apollo includes a free runtime that users will need to download to their PCs. Using Adobe’s free Apollo development kit, programmers

Daily del.icio.us for Mar 21, 2007 through Mar 27, 2007

XML creation, parsing and processing with Java has gotten so much easier with tools like XMLBeans, XStream and many other such tools. I personally love XMLBeans and XStream and I try to use them for all of my XML processing needs. While they both consume XML, they solve different problems. XMLBeans allows you to process XML by binding it to Java types using XML schema that has been compiled to generate Java types that represent schema types. XStream on the other hand allows you to serialize objects to XML and back again using special reflective secret sauce.

I’ve been using these tools for many years now and so you tend to forget just how useful and powerful they are and how productive they make you. Case in point – A friend of mine came to me for help. He was building an application that would allow him to resale items from Amazon on his site and he wanted to use the Amazon eCommerce Web Services to search for products programmatically and update a local database that housed his content. Having played with Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) before, I offered to write up a simple application that would make the Web Services call, process the results and present them back to you.

Amazon’s ECS is an API that allows you to access Amazon data and functionality through a Web site or Web-enabled application. ECS follows the standard Web services model: users of the service request data through XML over HTTP (REST) or SOAP and data is returned by the service as an XML-formatted stream of text. In addition to the WSDL, ECS also provides XML schemas for validating the XML output of REST requests. So I decide to use XMLBeans to create my type system using the XML Schema provided by Amazon. XMLBeans provides you with a utility (scomp) to compile your schema into Java XMLBeans classes and metadata. To generate the Java code, use the following command:

scomp –jar amznws.jar AWSECommerceService.xsd

This generates a jar file named amznws.jar, which will contain all of the code needed to bind an XML instance to the Java types representing your schema. In my application, I use HttpClient to make my REST request and then use the XMLBeans generated jar file to process the result. Here’s a snippet of code from my sample class:

As you can tell, HttpClient makes the REST call a snap and XMLBeans makes processing the results easy as well. In total, I spent 3-4 hours getting the application working and a lot of the time was spent figuring out the data set returned from Amazon and trying to come up with a meaningful example. Here is a zip file with the IDEA project that has all the stuff needed to make this work including a simple JSP and a JUnit test class.

Links of Interest:

• Amazon Web Services
• Amazon ECS WSDL
• Amazon ECS XML Schema
• Localized editions of xsd and wsdl
• XMLBeans
• XStream
• HttpClient

Life is beautiful with XMLBeans and XStream