Geek 2.0

Geronimo, the open-source implementation of Java EE proposed by the Apache group, has passed this week a significant subset of the TCK suite. Its is not certified yet, but this is a good sign that the work is in progress.

Objectives of Geronimo is to become the fourth certified Java EE open-source implementation, following the way traced by Glassfish, JBoss and Jonas.

This is an excellent news for the Java EE community. Like in all other sector, competion is good, it ensures best functionalities for lower prices.

Oh, by the way, did I mention Sun’s Application Server is free and is now open-sourced as well ?

It is now a tradition, the last day of JavaONE, James Gosling is presenting some cool stuffs that you are doing with the Java platform and Java programming language.

We had once again a quick presentation of Matisse, the next generation GUI builder based on the work of the Netbeans team, the SwingLab team and the open-source community. This is aligned with one of our top goal : simplify the life of developers.

The demo was based on Joplin, the open-source, iTunes-like, music player. Check it out today !

We also had a great demonstration of the Java Mobility Pack, a plug-in extension of Netbeans allowing to develop Java ME applications. The cool stuff is that we can now debug applications on the device itself, putting breakpoints, stepping into the code and watching variable, not on the emulator, no, on the device itself !

Did you ever dream to have breakpoints in your pocket ?

Finally, Boeing demonstrated their Scan Eagle unmanned vehicle (airplane without pilot). This is a small airplane primarly designed for military purpose. This stuff is drived by a Java program, running an on board implementation of Java Real-Time System. It receives instruction from the on board GPS system and ground-based flight control. Communication with the ground is made through real-time CORBA communication.

Real-time is the key here, the pilot can not pause 1 sec for garbage collection.

You can read James’ own blog on the subject

I attended last night to a talk named “The 7 secrets of succesful book authors”. A very good presentation that gave not only highlights for book authors but also a general mood and direction for the IT book market.

Things that surpized me :

• IT book market is shrinking : -13% last year
• Programming books is #1 in this market
• Java books market is shrinking even more : -32 % last year
• Average revenue per Java book = $67k
• Average Java book sells less than 2000 copies

Probably not a good timeframe to start authoring 🙁

DTrace engineers are running an entertaining and fun contest at their JavaONE booth.
Bring your real app, they will DTrace it and they guarantee they can improve the performance of the application. Should they not succeed at the task, you win an iPod.
Let’s give it a try. You have nothing to loose.

It’s been a long time since Sun and Microsoft announced their partnership. First resulting are now appearing furing the JavaONE conference.
Beside the traditional web services interoperability, made possible through the use of JAX-WS (formerly called JAX-RPC) and Indigo, I saw a mich more impressive demo : server management through WS-Management
If you are not familiar with Sun hardware, you must know that our machines have a BIOS allowing some basic maintenance and diagnostic tasks as soon as the machine is powered up, before any OS is started.
That being said, WS-Management allows to remotely manage heterogenous hardware using standardized web services interfaces and calls. Using Microsoft’s Operation Manager 2005 GUI, the demo showed how remotely diagnose Sun’s server, stop them, restart them … all this using web services calls.
Very impressive ! I can ensure Sun and Microsoft are serious when talking interoperability.

Waow, what a news !
When this acquisition will complete, it will become for Sun a major move in software area.
Quoting John Loiacono (VP of Software) : “This exciting investment will position Sun to capitalize on our investments in Java and Sun’s Java Enterprise System (Java ES) and propel us into a leadership position in the next big wave of IT spend business systems integration and composite applications development based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)”
Boys, Sun is serious when talking about SOA strategy.
Check the official announcement for more details.

Seven years after its first submission, JSR-001 is becoming a full class Java citizen though the first release of Sun’s Java Real-Time System.
This implementation is based on Sun’s lab research project Mackinac

Netbeans Software Day jumpstarted the JavaONE conference this year. More than 800 attendees gathered in a hotel one block away the Moscone Convention Center. Very impressive for a Sunday afternoon …
Beside traditional demos and social drink event, we had great keynote speakers : James Gosling, Jonathan Schwartz and Tim Bray amongst others.
Netbeans 4.x rocks and future versions will continue to improve the tool. Competition is good, Netbeans is the prove of that. Netbeans would have not evolve so good and so fast without the pressure put by IBM’s Eclipse.
New stuffs to follow in upcoming versions : Matisse, a next-gen GUI builder with powerful Layout Manager. Probably nothing new in the GUI world here, Matisse is largely inspired from Mac OS development tool (Builder), itself inherited from the NeXt era. Nothing new in GUI world but revolutionary in Java GUI world, the demo are very impressive ! No firm date announced yet, stay tuned for more.
Another welcome addition is the developer collaboration tool : allowing developers to collaboratively and remotely chat and modify code. This feature has its root in Java Studio Enterprise and is now backported and opensourced for the Netbeans community !
Based on Netbeans 4.1 : Java Studio Creator 2 was demonstrated in early access version. Beside the fact that it now build on top of Netbeans 4.1, it brings some interesting new features like CSS support, theme-able interfaces, JSR-168 portlet support, file upload facility and a brand new JSF components library, etc …
Netbeans is about community, don’t miss the occasion to be part of it.