Free Book! Servlets and JSP
The Server Side has a free book on servlets and JSP… Sometimes they disappear so download it!
Java
Open Source Java
Wow. Is Sun giving gifts away before they fold? Open Sourcing Java? They also announced Solaris. Last week their leaders said hardware was going to be free (uh, isn’t that Sun’s bread and butter?).
Eclipse RCP and Swing
To say the documentation for Eclipse release 3 is sparse would be generous! I was able to get existing swing code working as a plug-in by creating a view, and then using the SWT_AWT class to create an AWT frame I could add my existing swing code UI to. Worked like a charm save a few null pointer exceptions in the console that had no effect on use. Cool stuff but….
Eclipse RCP
The Eclipse IDE has made a big change in the 3.0 release. The framework used for the plug-in model, and the system services have been “unbolted” from the IDE. This new layer is called the Rich Client Platform (RCP). After spending a few days going through the plug-in class material, reading doc, and writing sample code I’ve convinced of one thing – it could be easier. The documentation is lacking. The only online tutorials for RCP are not real useful, but they do show the most complicated Hello World sample I’ve ever seen! That being said, I like it and am starting to use it for the card game platform. Is it better than NetBeans for RC? I don’t know. So far the widget library (SWT) has made me want to use the Swing widget library, which I’ve never liked. Time will tell…
Best way to learn is to teach?
Busy last several days teaching a 5 day Java Programming Class Even though I’ve used the language for 7 years I still learned things by having to teach a class on it. Was a lot of fun and got positive feedback from students.
Prepackaged Goods
Wow, PHP, Apache, MySQL, and other useful stuff all prepackaged and configured for multiple platforms. I love open source.
http://www.apachefriends.org/xampp-en.html was easy to install on XP. I ran an install script and started the server. I installed OSCommerce in 5 minutes! server, database, and shopping cart platform all installed in under 10 minutes. Wow. And with PHP I can take the site back and forth b/w Linux (where my web hosting is) to my machine. And it’s not even written in Java!
Tiger!
Met with Calvin Austin today who is the spec lead for J2SE 1.5. Gave a presentation at work and spent time discussing the JRE and 1.5. with him A lot of interesting features in 1.5. Some like autoboxing should have been added years ago. Others like metadata look a bit dangerous but I like the ability to have something like this:
public String @remote getName() {}
The @remote is a metadata tag that could be used to automatically create web services proxy/stub code. This would save going through wizards, or implementing bizare interface classes to hook into a middleware framework. While simple, I think this will revolutionize a lot of Java.
More on Tiger at… http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5/