Spring Framework 3.0 RC1 released

Juergen Hoeller announced the availability of the newest Spring Framework 3.0 RC1 release.

This release completes the key Spring 3.0 feature set. Beginning with the original themes REST and EL the feature list have been expanded significantly:

• Fully Java 5 based
• Spring expression language (SpEL)
• Extended support for annotation-based components
• Powerful stereotype model
• Standardized dependency injection annotations
• Declarative model validation based on constraint annotations
• Enhanced binding and formatting facilities
• Comprehensive REST support
• Object/XML Mapping (OXM)
• Portlet 2.0 support
• Next-generation scheduling capabilities
• Early support for Java EE 6

More words on the JEE6 support. Spring 3.0 already supports the use of JSF 2.0 and JPA 2.0 in a Spring environment, in addition to JSR-303 and JSR-330 support. Further Java EE 6 related specifications such as Servlet 3.0 will be fully supported as they become available in concrete products; this is scheduled for the Spring 3.1/3.2 timeframe.

You can grep the build from the community download page.

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List of GlassFish related Sessions at Oracle OpenWorld and Oracle Develop

Have a look at the GlassFish Conference Wiki for an updated list of GlassFish related Sessions at Oracle OpenWorld 09.
Oracle OpenWorld is Oracle's premier conference. It is held mostly at Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA, October 11-15th 2009.

At the moment there are 13 sessions planned. I am looking forward seeing Linda DeMichiel and Ed Burns in action :)

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PrimeFaces UI 0.9.3 Trailer

PrimeFaces UI 0.9.3 is coming on 05.10.09 with many new features and improvements, here’s the video of the trailer:

PrimeFaces UI-0.9.3 Trailer from cagataycivici on Vimeo.

Know Feature-List:

• FileUpload
• DataTable Lazy Loading
• Keyboard Component
• Picklist
• Portlet Support
• iPhone Support

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27 of september - #vote in germany

This is a special date this year. Not only that it's my birthday where I get ((58647 - 45678 + 4758 - 324 + 589) * 0,54) - 715,68 - 8967) years old.
It is about the elections to the Bundestag in Germany. I have never been too much into politics. My main interest always was about environmental protection
and a safe place to life. Both grew again since I am a father :) This year another topic appeared on the map. It is all about freedom.
Freedom to protect what is called privacy. Freedom to access information and to restrict copyright laws to a practical level.





Whatever party you are going to choose next sunday. Make shure to spend the few minutes and vote!

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The Java EE Container Redeploy & Restart Report – measuring Turnaround Time

The Java EE Container Redeploy & Restart Report comes from a survey with over 1100 Java EE developer respondents. It analyzes time spent on the Redeploy and Restart process, and compares the following containers:

• GlassFish
• Jetty
• Tomcat
• WebSphere
• WebLogic

Among other results, this report shows that Java EE developers are spending three to seven work weeks a year on redeploys and restarts, depending on their container of choice.

Which Container is used most often?

Organized By Container, How Much Time is Spent Redeploying?

There are few surprises here. Jetty is leading the pack with only 5.8 minutes per hour spent redeploying and IBM WebSphere is trailing with more than twice more — 13.8 minutes per hour. One thing to note is that although Jetty startup is undoubtedly faster than IBM WebSphere it is likely that most of the difference is due to the size of the applications deployed and the technologies used in them.

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A Tribute to Sun Microsystems

For more than 27 years, Sun has led the way in network computing innovation. And while oftentimes taking the road less traveled, the journey has delivered some of the most revolutionary — and evolutionary — ideas, business practices, and products. From Solaris to Java, open standards to open source, high-performance computing to eco computing, and everything in between, they have created a vibrant culture and a rich history. This was shared with partners, developers, students, universities, and of course customers.

Sun employees from around the world share some of their favorite anecdotes about their experiences at Sun. Take a look back at some of Sun's more memorable moments and celebrate the unique culture that is Sun.

Seems as if the employees finaly say good by to sun ... and hopefully they all welcome Oracle on their way :)

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Customizing the Look and Feel of the Weblogic Server Admin Console

Did you ever wonder, if you could customize the look and feel, that comes
with the weblogic server admin console? You can :)
The administration console is a weblogic portal application that uses skins and skeletons
like they exist in the weblogic portal.

If you need to make changes to it, you now only need to know where to do them.
The consoleapp is located in your <middleware_home>\wlserver_10.3\server\lib\consoleapp.

Before making any changes: Make a backup of the original consoleapp!!!

Now you have to look through it and search for the basic skin that is used. It is called
wlsconsole and you can find it in webapp\framework\skins\wlsconsole.
Next stept is to open the css files and change the desired parts. You can also have a look
at the provided images and change them.

If you are finished with the basic changes, you can possibly make more detailed changes.
Look at the main webapp directory. There you can find another interesting file. It is called console.portal
and contains the basic definition of all console related ui elements.

More tweaks in next posts.

Links to read:
BEA WebLogic Portal 10.2 Documentation:


Customizing the Administration Console


User Interface Development with Look And Feel Features

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User Experience Interaction Guidelines

"Everything is best for something and worst for something else.
The trick is knowing for what, when, for whom, and why."
(Bill Buxton)

The Windows product team released the official Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines as PDF.

The goals for these official Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines (or "UX Guide" for short) are to:
- Establish a high quality and consistency baseline for all Windows-based applications.
- Answer specific user experience questions.

Download the UX Guide in PDF format (35MB).

Even if the guidelines focus on Windows, they are worth a click. As most of you already came across some user demands like "have it like in the explorer ..." ... it could be worth thinking about the basic design principles behind on of the most popular operating systems.

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We're in it to win it. (Larry Ellison)

(Source: http://www.oracle.com/features/suncustomers.html)

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PrimeFaces UI Component 0.9.2 and Optimus 0.8.0

PrimeFaces released two new versions of their components.

UI Component 0.9.2
This includes performance updates, new components and improvements on Partial Page Rendering. Most important changes:

* New components : Wizard, Layout Framework, Growl, Stack, Collector
* YUI compression of all supported resources.
* Plain Html is now supported in partial response with Facelets.

Also see the full changelog.

Optimus 0.8.0
Entire persistence support is rewritten to support warp-persist. Optimus orchestrates the JSF-Guice-JPA technology stack.

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Integrating jQuery AJAX and Spring MVC with XStream/Jettison and GAE

I wrote a small howto about putting Spring 3.x to work with Google Appengine earlier the year.
This is the basic starting point for this extended howto.

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#Maven: The Definitive Guide

While there are a number of references for Maven online, there is no single, well-written book that can serve as both a well-worn reference and an introduction.

Sonartype is going to change this, whith their online book "Maven: The Definitive Guide" It is a comprehensive reference and a narrative introduction to Maven. The Definitive Guide is written for both new and season Maven users.

The Definitive Guide is also an open source project and you are welcome to participate and contribute to the ongoing development of the book's content.

More information can be found on the maven defguide website.

Download your copy from here:

• English: Read Online or Download PDF.



• German: Read Online or Download PDF.


• Chinese: Read Online or Download PDF.

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PragPub: Responsive Design: Coming to Grips with the #Chaos That Is #Software #Design

The Pragmatic Bookshelf presents a monthly free magazin, compiled by their editor Michael Swaine.
It brings you a magazin packed full of interesting articles, features, and departments. Download it in PDF, mobi (good for the Kindle), and epub (great for Stanza on the iPhone).

The Issue 3, September 2009 contains an interesting article by by Kent Beck about "Responsive Design: Coming to Grips with the Chaos That Is Software Design".
Beside the fact, that we both seem to share the same BASICs :), Kent made some statements I fully comply with.

Design is good. Design is central to effective software development.
Programmers can add features steadily to well-designed software. Programmers
can easily test well-designed software. Well-designed software is easy to tune
for better performance. Most of the hard problems in programming turn out
to be design problems.
But design has a dark side. While there isn’t a single best design for any system,
there are many poor designs for that same system. The more experience a
programmer has, the more design ideas he knows.

The word "responsive" in the name of the project reflects this need for balance.
Some design needs to be done in advance of coding, but over the life of the
project most design will be done in response to the changing needs of the
system and the changing and growing understanding of the developers.

He provides a brief overview of the lessions he has learned so far:
1) Beneficially Relating Elements.
2) Design is Fractal.
3) Safe Steps.
4) Isolate Changes.
5) Embrace Ambiguity.
6) Cultivate Confidence.
7) Cultivate Humility.
8) Exploit Symmetries.
9) Trust Succession.
10) Design Is a Team Sport.
11) Play with Words.
12) Play with Pictures.
13) Clear Strategies.
14) Inside or Outside.
15) Toss It.
16) Keep It.
17) Both.
18) Suit Design to Needs.
19) Use Tension.

Design is not a rational process.
Much as we like to think we are making design decisions, much of the structure
of our systems emerges from the nature of the problem and the nature of the
tools we use. Our designs shape us as much as we shape our designs.
[...]
The challenge is to embrace responsibility
and at the same time take an appropriate role in designing. Learning to achieve
this balance is the next goal of the Responsive Design Project.

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CONFIRMED: EC #delays #Oracle-Sun #deal

The European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation under the EU Merger Regulation into the planned acquisition of US hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation

Read the press release

Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said:

The Commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world's leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world's leading open source database company. In particular, the Commission has an obligation to ensure that customers would not face reduced choice or higher prices as a result of this takeover. [...] The Commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.
[...]
In its in-depth investigation, the Commission will therefore address a number of issues, including Oracle's incentive to further develop MySQL as an open source database.

You can find even more information.

This makes the deal impossible within this year. The commission now has a final deadline to decide about the merger until 19. Januar 2010.

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Gartner Identifies Ten Enterprise Architecture Pitfalls

"Selecting the wrong person as lead enterprise architect, and not engaging business people are two of the biggest pitfalls organisations face when trying to establish an effective enterprise architecture (EA) programme, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner analysts have identified the ten biggest EA pitfalls, as well as practical advice on how organisations can avoid them." - From Gartner Press Release

Read the complete press release.

The ten pitfalls:
1. The Wrong Lead Architect
2. Insufficient Stakeholder Understanding and Support
3. Not Engaging the Business People
4. Doing Only Technical Domain-Level Architecture
5. Doing Current-State EA First
6. The EA Group Does Most of the Architecting
7. Not Measuring and Not Communicating the Impact
8. Architecting the ‘Boxes’ Only
9. Not Establishing Effective EA Governance Early
10. Not Spending Enough Time on Communications

To me most of the points already apply to a normal enterprise software project. It realy does not need to be a full blown EA project.

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Rumor: EC could delay Oracle-Sun deal

Reuters reports on rumors on Oracle/Sun/EU.

The commission antitrust authority is debating whether to approve the deal by Thursday's deadline, amid concern about Oracle getting its hands on Sun's MySQL database, the sources told Reuters.

Update: Matt Perez wrote a nice article about MySQL and GlassFish: Open Source in Oracle-land.

BTW, the value of the acquisition is not primarily in the technology Oracle is getting, but rather in the people that come along with it. These are world-class, talented and innovative engineers, product managers, etc., who understand the OSS space really, really well. I hope Oracle listens to them, carefully, and take their message to heart. It will be good for all involved.

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Oracle OpenWorld The OTN Guide to Oracle OpenWorld 2009

Just today Oracle published the OTN Guide to Oracle OpenWorld 2009, a quick summary of all the goodies you can look forward to in October (something like 60 days away - wow).

My flights are booked, and I am quite excited about visiting SF :) Hope, to be able to blog and tweet a lot during the OOW.

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edocs updated links to weblogic server documentation

Edocs.bea.com vanished away. Here are the new links to the Weblogic Server documentation.


WLS 10.3.1
WLS 10.3.0
WLS 10.0
WLS 9.2
WLS 9.1
WLS 9.0
WLS 8.1

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Links for Sept 1, 2009

• The Future of Content Management



by Kas Thomas via assertTrue( )



• RichFaces 4.0.0.ALPHA1 Released!!



by Jay Balunas via In Relation To - Bloggers



• Using Compass and Sass for CSS in your Next Project



by Alex Coomans via Nettuts+



• Using the Console to Create Repeatable Configuration Scripts



by tom.moreau via WebLogic Server



• Notes on Leadership



by Srihari Srinivasan via Planet TW



• Update on the schedule for the Java EE 6 Platform



by robc via robc's blog



• Ease of development in the Java EE 6 Platform



by robc via robc's blog



• Software development: It's all about trust ...



by Jonas Bandi via CLOSED-LOOP

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