My new book - Professional Apache Tomcat 5 released recently. I had a pretty good set of co-authors (Sing, Ben, Jon, Amit) to work with, and I think it shows!
This is one of the first set of books from Wrox Press after its acquisition by John Wiley & Sons, and this time around it’s a better quality of books. I’m not saying Wrox’ books were all bad (I am a long time Wrox author myself!), but that Wrox’s drive to bring books to market as soon as possible sometimes lead to not so good titles, and uneven writing across chapters. The multiple authors (sometimes 10+ to a book) didn’t help matters either. Wiley does things the traditional way- smaller teams when there are multiple author books, better cohesion between authors, a uniform writing style; the works.
This is the second edition of the book (Professional Apache Tomcat was the first edition), and some of what's new in the book is listed below:
Those who have bought this book, or some of my other books, please let me know what you think.
Sun announced that the upcoming J2SE release (1.5, aka 'Tiger'), will be officially called 'Java 5', skipping multiple version numbers.
It doesn't give any reasons for this, though David Flanagan, who broke this story, thinks its marketing driven; perhaps 'Java 5' will draw more attention than just a increment from 1.4 to 1.5.
Java 5 does have lot of new things though- Generics (similar to C++ templates), 'Enhanced' for loop, Autoboxing/unboxing etc.
Collaxa was recently purchased by Oracle; Oracle made the announcement over JavaOne this week.
Collaxa's Edwin Khodabakchian gives a lengthy rationale in his blog about why Oracle and Collaxa are a good fit, and I quote-
"
Three reasons: ...
(1) We discovered within Thomas Kurian's Application Server team great focus and entrepreneurial spirit, ...
(2) No "pig with lipstick" to fight with (we saw Sun kill three application servers so we were a little sensitive to internal politics!),...
(3) The database and application server provide a great foundation for delivering our BPEL server. Except for Microsoft and IBM, no other vendor offers that combination.
"
The companies that should be affected by this are not just those with application server products (this Infoworld articles lists IBM and BEA as those affected), but the traditional EAI product companies. Collaxa has a pretty decent BPEL implementation, and coupled with Oracle's software suite and marketing muscle, this standards based approach to application integration will be sweep them out of the market. Eventually.