Molecular Voices » David Palmer

David Palmer

consultant, technical architect.

Posts written by David Palmer

November 12

Fedora Core 8: The Java Developer’s OS?

Red Hat’s non-profit arm, project Fedora just released Core 8, Fedora’s/Red Hat’s distribution of Linux. Fedora has long been a very developer-friendly operating system (unlike Ubuntu which lacks any developer tools out of the box) has taken further steps to embrace Java development.

Included with FC8 is OpenJDK and IcedTea, the open source version of the JDK /JVM and build tools. With Sun setting Java “free” OpenJDK and the IcedTea projects have become the de-facto open source Java environment.

Also included with FC8 is Eclipse, Maven, Ant, Tomcat5 (this should probably be 6) and Jetty. So we are talking major hardcore Java development right out of the box.

posted to: Technology | No Comments »

October 10

For Real Hot Deploy For Java

by David Palmer

While Java 1.4 promised hot deploy, many implementations of application servers have fallen quite flat on their collective faces in delivering on this promise. Then along comes JavaRebel. A nice little library that actually makes this time consuming and frustrating problem a non-issue. Check out some of the features:

Changing, adding and removing class/interface methods
Changing, adding and removing class fields
Changing, adding and removing class constructors
Overriding existing methods
Creating new classes or renaming old ones (as long as some other class superclass doesn’t change)
Changing method parameter or return types or field type without changing its name
Changing, adding and removing class/interface constant fields is supported, but will not get reinitialized and thus is only useful for primitive types and Strings

(taken, liberally, from their page here)

Yes, there is a performance penalty with this, so DO NOT EVER use something like this is a production environment, but it can make your life as a java developer, especially in a local environment, a bit more productive and a lot less infuriating (but, er, we never get mad at Java, because Java is infallible!)

posted to: Technology | 3 Comments »

August 23

Making the Case: Alfresco

by David Palmer

With the recent release of Alfresco 2.1, this relatively new entry to the “enterprise-class” open source content management system is beginning to show some very real signs of being a major go-to tool for organizations who need all of the enterprise features of your Documentums, or Teamsites or Vignettes, but being completely open source.

Alfresco’s features are impressive, fully customizable workflow, document management, user roles, remote publishing features, as well as easily integrating other applications to create mashups. Built on a JEE platform, and runs in JBoss, Tomcat, Geronimo, it has real promising of being a mainstay in an Java open source enterprise stack.

While OpenCMS is the old timer in the enterprise-class open source CMS, Alfresco is showing remarkable maturity, in particular to documentation (if you’ve worked with OpenCMS I’m sure you know about the weakness in the documentation) and its feature set. There is also a well established organization backing up Alfresco, providing professional services and support, as well “enterprise” versions of their product, while maintaining a “community” edition.

I’m currently giving it a spin, and am incorporating it into our “home intranet” to publish web content to our various project sites, so the back-end content management is completely decoupled from the front-end content delivery (web) tier. So far, it seems to be working like a champ.

posted to: Content Management | 3 Comments »

August 22

Discovery: Groovy

by David Palmer

Scripting languages, or “toy” languages I’ve heard some say, are quite the rage today (and most likely tomorrow). We’ve (at least in the Java community) been inundated with a deluge of scripting languages, so many that Apache’s BSF was built (Bean Scripting Framework) to help us make sense of all of them.

There’s a relatively new upstart on the block, goes by the name of Groovy. Groovy, completely based on pure java, incorporates enclosures, code as data, completely OO, completely and transparently embeddable has really started to take off. Think of it as the best of the Ruby and Java worlds, mixed up together in a single JVM, running as either a stand-alone system or embedded in an existing application. Its that cool.

Why are scripting languages cool? Think of it this way. Imagine having a mountain of messy dirty “if/else” statements in your code, and that code constantly changes, needs to be re-compiled, re-deployed and on and on. Imagine taking (decoupling) that code from your application, dropping it into a script, and letting the script handle that stuff for you? Pretty cool eh? Yeah, I think so.

Yes, this is short on detail, I would urge those interested to simply download the Groovy distro, takes about 2 minutes to get it up and running and begin to discover why Groovy is just that.

posted to: Technology | No Comments »

August 17

HTML 5?

by David Palmer

Well, after, what? 8 years? Looks like the powers that be have decided to brush off the dust of HTML 4 and give our old and dear friend a much needed (?) face lift.

The article on IBM’s Developer Works site is actually long on details, but the question is, will HTML 5 actually look like what is outlined? The W3C and those crazy browser makers can do the darndest things.

Things like <aside>, <nav>, <dialog> and the new embedable objects (audio/video) looks pretty interesting. Also the new structural tags looks like they are finally going to pay more than lip service to a real structure to HTML. That’d be nice.

posted to: Technology, Web 2.0 & Social Media | 1 Comment »