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Java is now Open Source

Sun today announced that it is releasing the Java source code under GPL 2.

The JDK will be available for download from openjdk.dev.java.net, and (as of today) the HotSpot Virtual Machine and javac are available. The rest of the JDK will posted there in early 2007.

Guns don't kill people, the SOA WS-* stack kills people.

Funny stuff to quote from faced with that earnest consultant pushing their humongous SOA/ESB/TLA stack: www.soafacts.com.

The one I like the best? "Guns don't kill people, the SOA WS-* stack kills people."

Blogging from JavaOne

Well, the JavaOne 2006 is just started and the keynote is underway with a new Sun CEO at the helm. Some interesting things: Sun announced that Java will be open sourced- "the question is how, not if". The key concern for Sun is to maintain compatibility while going open source..

StAX features

I attended a Java by the Bay User Group meeting for the first time yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised by the wide range and quality of the presentations... the free pizza, courtesy Sun, wasn't too bad too!

Coloring book approach to software development

Developing software in teams is not easy. Often you have to use components implemented by other developers, and a lot of time is wasted and nerves frayed in figuring out interface issues, and isolating defects. Over the years, I have used parts of the following techniques to mitigate these risks. These, like most software practices, are not new.

Battlefield earth

Who'd have thunk it- maps being the next battleground after search?It has the usual suspects fighting for mindshare- Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and even Amazon (A9).

Dealing with large data volumes in webservice calls

Once you start sending large volumes of data over a webservice invocation, you often run into performance issue.

There are a range of techniques that can prove useful here:

A tale of two applications

In my recent book 'Beginning JavaServer Pages', I touch upon Web services in a project chapter. It is a JSP/JSTL/Web frameworks book, not a Web services book- so the treatment is introductory.

In this introduction, I mention two application area where Web service technologies are, and will be very significant. However, increasing it now seems that it might not be the same set of technologies.

Yahoo Web Service API

Yahoo joins the growing number of web sites exposing their API as Web Services. Their API is available from Yahoo Developer Network.

My new book: Beginning JavaServer Pages

My new book Beginning JavaServer Pages just released! It was a lot of work - it weighs in at 3.6 lbs, and is over 1220 pages. Other than JSP development, it also covers frameworks, including web frameworks (Struts/Tiles, Spring, WebWork, JSF), persistance frameworks (Hibernate) and logging frameworks (log4j, Java Logging).

One of the project chapters is about a personalized portal that integrates content from other websites and services using RSS and Web services. The chapter introduces good design practices while integrating Web services with your web applications, and where they fit in an typical MVC architecture (Web service invocations update the model etc.), but more on that in a later post.

Google Scholar- a better CiteSeer?

Google launched the 'Google Scholar' this week that searches for 'scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research'. I had earlier used CiteSeer for similar searches, however the results there only included peer reviewed papers.. Google Scholar includes book searches, and *some* web searches.

The Google Scholar FAQ has more information on this.