oracle java blog - netbeans

So Oracle has now finally gotten their Sun. What does this mean for me and the javasphere?

A lot of people have strong feelings about the aqcuisition/merger and some feel strongly against Oracle. I don't. I don't love Oracle, but I think Java will be fine, if not better with their stewardship.

Java

Oracle needs Java, they use it all over their own product line and obviously especially with their former Bea products Java is core to their business. So an evolving, healthy and competitive Java is in their interest.

So Java, JEE, the Java VM platform etc will be fine, with more money available than at Sun. Actually it may be better as Oracle has a lot more funding and marketing capability, and it may revive the ailing JCP?


But what about the other Sun products, and specifically those related to Java?

Glassfish

I don't use glassfish, at least not directly, so personally I have no strong feelings on how Oracle will proceede with Glassfish compared to its more corporate Weblogic.

I use Weblogic at work and either Jetty or Tomcat on pet projects at home.

Kenai

Kenai was to be killed, but read somewhere today it may be saved.
I don't use it. I have a few projects on Sourceforge, and future ones may be on SF or perhaps google code or Github.

Netbeans

Netbeans however I do use.

In the initial press release by Oracle on its plans for Sun's product line they stated it was to be focused as a scripting IDE and leave JEE, java enterprise level, to their own JDeveloper and Eclipse tools.

I use it with Maven and JEE modules so this feature strategy change would affect me very much. I dabled with eclipse for a few years, and still use when forced to at work, but prefer Netbean's cleaner interface (Its not made by IBM...)

However again in an updated press release they have a seperate java tooling page regarding their plans and they may not restrict it to that. Lets hope not.

Cloud

Oracle killed Sun's cloud computing ambitions. Fine by me. They are not into being a hosting provider.

I use Amazon's ec2 a lot, and will not miss it. However I did not know enough about its features compared to ec2 and Google's App engine. It would have to be much better than those to have been worth it. Maybe it was more like Ubuntu's cloud offering with hardware hosting?

VirtualBox

VirtualBox I do use, and glad it looks like it will be kept as is, I think.

Solaris

I have no strong feelings for or against Solaris, but keeping it competitive is probably in their interest.

The hardware and other areas I am not too bothered about. I used Sparc at university, but not since.

Other links:
http://blogs.oracle.com/devtools/2010/02/updated_faq_for_the_developer.html
http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/documents/webcontent/038563.pdf

distributing mercurial to disconnected locations

Having some issues, teething problems with Mercurial. Here is the story:

Started a tiny mini project, a quick currency conversion web app, as typing the extra 10 characters into google is too cumbersome after a while....

Naturally picked new technology to play with, this time it being Grails and Mercurial. Having already played abit with groovy in my recent
wishlist facebook app, the next step to grails was not too hard. With NetBeans excellent support for groovy and grails, getting up and running was quick.

Having followed the story of Mercurial, Bazaar, git and other DVCSes recently. My adoption of them have only been delayed by being busy and not having a new project to test them out with. But now came the chance, and Mercurial being the one I wanted the most to try out, (wish their push back to SVN became usuable soon). It being integrated into NetBeans already also helped.



But I quickly became a little stuck. Mercurial does have a lot of documentation
(2), and many blogs to cover a large set of situations. But nothing quite described (spoon fed) me the steps I needed. Maybe playing a bit devil's advocate, but...

Basically I would develop this app in two places. I do 99% at home, while I'd also use it at work, thus would do the odd tweak there as well. SSH and web shared repositories is not an option due to work policies. So they are two disconnected locations.

So I create a grails app, do hg init. But then how do I get it to the other location??? I can not do a hg clone a b, because they are in different locations. A public shared repository is not an option.

There is not a guide for how distributed groups get started (without a public shared repository), only that it is a very distributed SCM. :0

OK, so what I will have to do is tar up the project, take it to the other location and clone it. Then email changesets somehow, presume with export or bundle.

Actually I see you can pull other repositories into any repository, so I suppose I can hg init a folder in each location, but still need to tar across an initial copy?

oh well. Guess I can document it next week.

groovy netbeans so far

been hacking away at groovy with netbeans as IDE for the past few weeks. Also using it with spring for a facebook application.

Well, I am still coding the java way... Hard to take the red pill. Groovy is nice, but not sure Ill use it for all coding in future applications. It can certainly be partly used, for often changed code. It may however replace my perl scripts.

As for netbeans and its groovy support. It does not seem finished: Its useable with neat tricks, but still fiddly, and some things just dont work. E.g creating a project from netbeans, then wouldnt let you add groovy classes to groovy folders only java source folders. Creating a project from scratch using maven archetype got working, but new java sources arent' happy then...

As in general use of netbeans it is very good, however a nightmare on a low memory machine, especially with encrypted disks. If I type one word, ill have to wait 10 secs before I can type the next word. Infuriating. So notepad++ is my general editor on that machine.

On a still low spec machine but without an encrypted disk it is better than eclipse. However all popups take 10secs before they finish "scanning", so they are irritating.

As for general development with groovy, it certainly increases developer velocity. However I keep flicking back to Java as certain mixture of architecture and technology is not quite there yet.

One thing that does work well with groovy and spring is spring's new annotation based configuration.

One thing I hope will soon work is dynamic beans, which spring has, but does not as yet work with annotations.

groovy maven netbeans jetty facebook spring

Time to rewrite my old wishlist facebook application.

The old one (v3.x) dont work anymore as the web services are gone, I took them offline many months ago. The new application will use the wishlist 4.x web services running on wish.flurdy.com.

Tech stack for this project will be:

Language: groovy.
Build tool: maven.
Web server: jetty (maven plugin).
IDE: netbeans (6.5, with groovy plugin and maven plugin).
Framework: spring (+mvc and WebServices).

So really, only groovy is new compared to the other wishlist projects, but it will be nice to see groovy interact with them.

Already hitting some snags with groovy, maven and netbeans. Seems to be a few posts on how to use netbeans and groovy, or maven and groovy, but not all 3 together.

May at some stage try grails.

Netbeaning again

Return of the lost child...

Been an Eclipse devotee for several years now. But have recently returned to NetBeans. I was using netbeans before eclipse, but changed as eclipse offered more and faster development. (And JBuilder, Kawa, jedit in ancient time before then...)

Been really impressed with NetBeans 6.1, it has really moved on from 4.x range I was using, and the 5.0 version I last checked out.

First impression was how well maven works within netbeans. In eclipse the m2eclipse plugin does somehow works, but is cumbersome, and always something is a pain. In netbeans, the mevenide just works. Plain and simple. It just works as it should do, with full module structure, easy usage, seem fully integrated with the rest of the ide. nice.

In general netbeans is a lot clearer and cleaner, eclipse interface is very messy and cumbersome.

So Ill be a Sun slave for awhile now, till the next new better thing arrive...

( looking through my blog, it is becomming more and more geeky. oh well. :) )