Category: Java

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/10/05/what-is-spring.html

Found the first couple of chapters of the ‘Spring: A Developers Notebook’ on ONJava.com today. Finally the mysteries are opening.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-hibern/?ca=drs-

Right now, anything that detours EJB 2 in favour of another persistance mechanism is my friend. (ie EJB3 ;-), hibernate).

The linked IBM developerworks article focuses on Hibernate and this thing I didn’t know existed until a few days ago, Spring.

On another anti-EJB note, I was reading Beyond Java by Bruce Tate. From section 1.3

Keep in mind that I’m a cynic at heart. When it comes to technologies, it takes a whole lot of effort to get me excited. I still have never written a web service, at least with the massive IBM and Microsoft stacks, and I didn’t write my first EJB until 2003. I’ve never written an EJB entity bean unless it was to build a case against them, and never will. I’ve instead preferred simpler architectures, like REST, POJO programming, transparent persistence, and Spring. Even then, I was late to those parties.

Ah. Validation from a respected industry individual.

A plethora of links (mainly tutorials) to get you through the path of J2EE learning. Personally I’d like to shoot EJB’s out of a cannon due to the troubles they have given, however with a little time and patience, (or the willingness to look at other persistance tech such as Hibernate), you too can be a J2EE master.

The Sun Java J2EE Tutorial (version 5)

I learnt using the previous Pointbase one, but this is just as good, if not better.  Very accessible and lots of samples/tutorials.

Eclipse Web Development Tools

Eclipse has a plugin to help develop beans out of the box. It offers things like jsp highlighting, deployment and integration with Tomcat, JBoss and others.

The community section offered some useful tutorials to make the most out of this environment, which looks promising for new and old J2EE developers alike.

O’Reilly Books
Enterprise Javabeans
JavaServer Pages

O’Reilly’s Java Developers Page
Lots of great articles and links to Java and J2EE info.

A great article on EJB3 found through the former link: Standardizing Java Persistence with the EJB3 Java Persistence API, talks about persistence and coming from EJB2.

http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/product/community.html

The guys at work started using a modelling tool known as Jude to help with their design of various projects and enhancements. Jude comes in a community (free) and professional version and the free version allows you to create the following UML diagrams:

• Class (Object/Package/Robustness)
• UseCase
• Sequence
• Collaboration
• Statechart
• Activity
• Component
• Deployment

It also has some Java code generation and importing although it didn’t seem to handle generics at all (claimed a syntax error) so I’m not sure about Java 5 support.

The application appears much more robust than Rational Rose ever did. I wish I knew about it for my System Design and Implementation subject this semester as one of our group members couldn’t get Rose to run on their home PC. The price of Jude community is more student friendly also ;-), as well as benefiting from the platform independence that Java provides.

http://jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html

JDiskReport is a system filespace analyser, that is part of a demo of the jgoodies.com system.

For functionality and ease of use it scores highly with a strong comparison to SpaceMonger without the treemaps. I like its multiplatformness, abiltity to exclude directories (useful for symlinks) and its freeness.

Contract4J is a DbC implementation for Java that uses annotations and aspects to implement the preconditions, postconditions and invariants one has come to grow and love.

I can’t remember the reason it is one up on C#, but I’m sure its a good one.

Something to do with attributes in a class being setup in C# vs some extra freedoms in Java 5. To Maybe Do One Day: Care and fill in the rest of this

I’ve normally avoided the sun product, but whilst looking to download jdk 1.5 for linux I came across these two packages.

For a limited time, Sun are offering these two products for free (Enterprise is normally $1300 US) so I thought I’d look into and download where appropriate.