A flashback to IntelliJ IDEA open-sourcing one year ago, plus addition of Android development support to the free IntelliJ IDEA 10 Community Edition. In short: * There’s been no drop in sales of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate * A 25% increase in new customers over the same period last year * IntelliJ IDEA 10 is planned for release later this fall, with more functionality available in the free Community edition * Android development plugin available in free IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition * IntelliJ IDEA Community Wiki at wiki.jetbrains.net opens and welcomes your contributions
In a surprise-to-many move, IBM, which always seemed to have more skin in the Java game than Sun, the technology’s nominal creator, has abandoned Harmony, the independent, breakaway, duplicative and competitive Apache Software Foundation open source Java project, to back Oracle, Java’s new owner, and OpenJDK, a peace-in-our-time move that looks like it leaves Google in the lurch. Oracle is after all – to the consternation of many – suing Google for using Harmony or a subset of it in Android – including the infamous Dalvik Java Virtual Machine – rather than Java Mobile Edition (ME) and IBM has been the mainstay of Harmony development. Now IBM is pulling out of a potentially litigious situation for it, throwing in its lot with Oracle and probably killing Harmony absent Google jumping in. My. My. My.
Seeking an explanation for Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s recent colorful outbursts dissing the HP board BusinessWeek went to industry analyst Rob Enderle who believes Larry had once hoped HP would sell him some of the pieces he’s missing to give IBM a run for its money. “HP is the only property out there that would allow him to take on IBM in what remains of his working lifetime,” Enderle told the book. “The only thing that makes sense is that he is now trying to drive the value of HP down or force HP’s board into a more collaborative position.”
Hey, loonier things have happened. Remember Symantec buying Veritas? Anyway, the desperately-seeking-M&A punters bid up EMC (which owns the lion’s share of VMware) 4.5% Thursday on the back of noise evidently emanating out of the UK press (warning flare) coupled with Citigroup speculation that Oracle might want to buy EMC, forcing even the Wall Street Journal to report it. EMC would cost about $50 billion–$55 billion. NetApp was offered as an alternative
Database rival companies, Oracle and IBM, will be working together to allow developers and clients to enhance existing Java investments and the Open Java Development Kit reference implementation. Java is a general-purpose software development platform that is specifically designed to be open and enable application developers to "write once, run anywhere". The platform is most widely used in business software, web and mobile applications. The collaboration between the two companies will be centered around the Java language, JDK, and Java Runtime Environment. The duo will particularly join forces to support the OpenJDK development roadmap and accelerate the availability of Java SE [Standard Edition] across the open source community. The OpenJDK community will act as the "primary location for open source Java SE development." The Java Community Process (JCP) which will be enhanced will continue in its role of setting the standards for the Java specification.
A recommended ADF development best practice from Oracle is to check your applications are Activation Safe. In recent testing of an ADF 11g application we discovered the following scenario where our application failed Activation Safe testing, documented for others to read-but-not-experience-first-hand.
Problem Scope
Consider an application displaying employee details. The first screen contains a table of employees, and on selecting a specific row, the 2nd screen shows the details of the selected employee.
Note in the screen shots, selecting employee ID 106 in the table, displays employee ID 106 in the form screen. Essentially the expected behaviour.
In this example from the ADF BC point of view the employees data is backed by a Read Only View Object (VO) based on the employees table from Oracle's HR schema. By default the employees VO contains the following attributes. Note the PK employee ID:
By chance if we disable the PK and run the application, it performs in the same way as described in the first picture above on the developer's PC. Selecting employee ID 106 in the table results in the same record 106 shown in the second page.
Interestingly in the JDev console, as we select the employee in the table, the following message is displayed:
<CurrencyRowKeySet><_computeCurrentRowKey> ADFv: Rowkey does not have any primary key attributes. Rowkey: oracle.jbo.Key[], table: oracle.jbo.server.ViewObjectImpl@e48114.
Yet as stated the application works correctly. Can we ignore this error?
Activation Safe testing teases out the problem in more detail. Activation Safe testing requires us to right click the Application Module -> then select Configurations -> AppModuleLocal -> Pooling and Scalability, and then *disable* the Enable Application Module property:
On re-running our application we see the following behaviour:
...that is on selecting employee ID 105, and navigating to the next page, oddly the record shown is employee ID 100. Selecting the back button, on returning to the table page, it still shows employee ID 100 as the selected record regardless of our original selection.
On looking at the JDev console window when selecting employee ID 105, we see that the log message has expanded:
<CurrencyRowKeySet><_computeCurrentRowKey> ADFv: Rowkey does not have any primary key attributes. Rowkey: oracle.jbo.Key[], table: oracle.jbo.server.ViewObjectImpl@9ddef9.
<FacesCtrlHierBinding$FacesModel><makeCurrent> ADFv: No row found for rowKey: [oracle.jbo.Key[]].
If you turn on the -Djbo.debugoutput=console option when running the program the problem is revealed in more detail:
Conclusion
From identifying this problem the natural conclusion is in order to build an Activation Safe application, amongst other issues your View Objects require a primary key. Typically this isn't an issue as most VOs are based on EOs, where the IDE enforces each EO has at least one primary key attribute that is shared to the VO. But in the case of Read Only VOs not based on an EO, it's fairly easy to create a VO without a PK attribute. In the simple example from this blog, of course the employees table has a PK attribute, but, if we're building a customised VO based around some complex query, in particular if we use the expert-mode VO option, no PK is defined by default. Thus our application becomes Activation unsafe.
Addendum
Tested under JDev 11.1.1.2.0 build 5536.
The one and only Jack Welch, GE’s old CEO and Fortune’s “Manager of the Century,” has followed Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in holding the HP board’s feet to the fire for canning Mark Hurd and naming Léo Apotheker CEO. Jack’s got a dog in this race. Todd Bradley, HP’s PC chief, the former CEO of Palm who was HP’s obvious internal candidate, used to work for Jack. In a series of interviews Tuesday at the World Business Conference Welch called the HP board “dysfunctional” in how it handled Hurd’s exit, telling Bloomberg TV “There’s another agenda with Mark Hurd and it hasn’t come out. It’s clear this was not a performance issue. This was a dynamic between a board, which appears to be somewhat dysfunctional, and Mark Hurd.”
Add Java to the list of rebellious Sun properties bucking Oracle hegemony. According to the Register, before Oracle OpenWorld the Java Community Process (JCP), the only entity that's supposed to be able to approve changes to Java, quietly passed a resolution demanding that Oracle spin it out an independent, vendor-neutral legal body like Oracle had demanded Sun do back in late '07. Reportedly only Oracle abstained from the otherwise unanimous vote by such as IBM, Red Hat, Intel, VMware, Nokia, RIM, the Apache Software Foundation and of course Google. Oracle suing Google over Java probably guaranteed this would happen now. The Java executive board apparently discussed a "symbolic vote distancing themselves from Oracle's prosecution" of Google but didn't.
RightScale, the cloud manager, has moved into development and test with a cloud management solution that software development and testing teams can use to provision and use cloud computing resources. The new RightScale Development & Test Solution Pack supports four development languages, PHP, Java, Ruby and .NET, and includes Java and PHP solutions from RightScale’s buddies IBM and Zend Technologies. The IBM Java stack includes the IBM DB2 database and its WebSphere application server, available either in the freebie Community Edition or the commercial Enterprise Edition.
In this step, you will configure the project to use Spring framework and generate Spring ORM classes to access the entities created earlier. The tasks you will complete in this step are: Add Spring Facet to project, Generate Spring ORM classes, Review the Spring service beans and configuration, and Add Spring Facet to project. 1. Right click on the project oepe-jpa-tutorial. Select Properties, click Project Facets, and check Spring Facet. Click Further configuration.. link. Select the Spring library that will be used with this project and click finish to install Spring Facet.
I'm currently writing a REST Web Service presentation for the Australian Oracle User Group, and thought it would be useful to document in 10 quick steps how to enable REST Web Services in Oracle's JDeveloper using the Jersey implementation of JAX-RS (JSR311). This is documented in Oracle's online documentation, but that's never stopped me writing a blog entry before in my usual succinct manner.
HTML5 WebSocket is an important new technology that helps you build engaging, interactive, real-time web applications quickly and reliably. Sure, HTML5 WebSockets may be the best thing since sliced bread, but is this new technology right for you? This article identifies five types of web applications that will benefit from HTML5 WebSockets. So, without further ado... give me five! 1. Your web application has data that must flow bi-directional simultaneously. 2. Your web application must scale to large numbers of concurrent users. 3. Your web application must extend TCP-based protocols to the browser. 4. Your web application developers need an API that is easy to use. 5. Your web application must extend SOA over the Web and in the Cloud.
Enterprises today are implementing agile development methodologies, to ensure that their software reaches the user as quickly as possible. Getting this application tested thoroughly is a very important. Frameworks and newer IDE's have made the task of the programmer easier and have tremendously increased the speed to the testing phase. A lack of agile testing methods and frameworks, is hurting this speeds. Many applications stagnate for too long in the testing phase, costing the company time, money and resources. Enterprise Test Manager is an effort to address this niche, with a enterprise based tool, that is scalable, platform independent and machine independent.
Adobe said Wednesday that’s it’s not going to put any more money into developing the Linux version of Flash Builder, once called Flex Builder, because there’s no money in it. The move could be a harbinger of other companies re-evaluating their Linux investments given the still nasty economic environment and the Linux community’s notorious proclivity for not being a revenue generator. Oracle, for one, which sees software as a business it controls, recently pulled the plug on OpenSolaris.
Java under Oracle – and no, it’s not clear how all-fired open it’s going to be – and no, it’s still unclear whether or not the vaunted Java Community Process (JCP) supposedly responsible for the technology can put in for early retirement – but Oracle has figured out that waiting for two years to upgrade the Standard Edition of the Java Platform – the thing used to deploy Java on desktops and servers as well as real-time and embedded environments – may not be altogether smart, especially since it wants it for “new application models and hardware.” So it’s going to split the difference and do two upgrades, one next year, one the year after. It claims “the decisions regarding the features to be included in the JDK 7 and JDK 8 releases were made with the active participation of the Java community.” It’s merging HotSpot JVM and JRockit JVM and plans to kick the thing into the OpenJDK project, which – in case you were wondering – will still be free along with Java Runtime Environment (JRE).
Tonight I’m going back home after attending JavaOne 2010. These are my fresh notes about this event. If you are reading this, you know something about Java. At the very least you know that this is a case-sensitive programming language and the HelloWorld is not the same as helloworld. If you don’t know this much, consider listening my new audio podcasts “Java for Blondes". On the same note, Sun’s JavaOne was not the same as Oracle’s javaone. This year it’s a small conference. It felt small. Even though it’s a part of the huge Oracle Open World conference (41 thousand attendees), JavaOne crowd was modest. I don’t have the numbers, but based on my past experience. It seems that only between three and four thousands of Java people are here. At the end of 90th, the peek attendance at JavaOne allegedly was around 15K, and in 2006 - 12K.
Cloud computing is one of the emerging paradigms in today’s computing world. One of the main advantages of migrating to the cloud is its elastic nature. Elasticity allows dynamic provisioning and de-provisioning of resources according to the application’s workload requirement. In a traditional on-premise J2EE infrastructure, information about the application server and web server resources are available during deployment. Clustering of such an infrastructure to achieve scalability is much simpler since the information about resources is known beforehand. But in a cloud environment, because of its elastic nature, resources get provisioned and de-provisioned dynamically based on the workload. So a j2ee cloud environment has challenges like reconfiguring automatically for the addition/removal of application server instances to/from the cluster. One solution from the open source space is to use Apache Httpd web server with mod_cluster load balancing module and JBoss application server. The article will discuss the features of mod_cluster which enable it to operate in a cloud environment and also the steps to set up a highly scalable j2ee cloud environment in your lab.
IBM said Monday morning that it’s buying Netezza, the data warehouse appliance company that competes with Oracle’s vaunted Exadata widgetry, for roughly $1.78 billion net of Netezza’s bank book. IBM timed the announcement to coincide with Oracle’s OpenWorld festivities which are just getting off the ground. It said it would pay $27 a share cash, close to a 10% premium, modest compared to the recent HP–3PAR deal. Wall Street evidently thinks IBM’s bid may be challenged like Dell’s was for 3PAR because the punters, probably thinking of Oracle, immediately bid Netezza’s stock up over $27 on the news.
The use of transactions is a cornerstone when building database applications. However in our daily work, we often do not really care much about them. In many cases they are handled implicitly for us by the (J EE) container or application framework – such as Spring – we are using. We rely on these frameworks to do a lot of the heaving lifting around transactions. At a pure JPA level there is a lot of transaction-related logic going on under the hood. This article discusses transactions at the JPA and database (JDBC) layer and how they play together and affect the functionality and performance of our applications.
Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, an integrated middleware machine, was announced on Monday at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is an integrated hardware and software system engineered, tested, and tuned by Oracle to run Java and non-Java applications with extreme performance. It provides a complete cloud application infrastructure, consolidating the widest possible range of Java and non-Java application types and workloads and meeting demanding service-level requirements. The software has been tuned to exploit the I/O fabric in the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud machine in order to deliver performance results 10x better than a standard application server configuration.
It says in the Register that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Autodesk’s position that it can stop an eBay trader from trafficking in second-hand copies of its software because they were licensed, not owned, by their original users. The eBay merchant argued the first sale doctrine, which says sellers can only control the distribution of their goods up to the first time they’re sold. Autodesk’s license reads non-transferrable.
Intel has tucked some money into Utah-based already-profitable Adaptive Computing as lead investor in a $14 million A round joined by Tudor Ventures and Epic Ventures. The money is Adaptive’s first outside backing since the company started nine years ago as Cluster Resources working in HPC. It took the funding to capitalize on current demands for cloud automation intelligence beyond its organic revenues and will use the money to hire more people to service customers.
Neon Enterprise Software, the Texas mainframe ISV suing IBM for antitrust, isn’t exactly leaning back in the saddle waiting for the trial to start next June, thanking its lucky stars that the district court – sua sponte – moved the proceedings up nine months. Nope. It’s just asked the court for a partial summary judgment in the case as a matter of law based on evidence it collected during discovery. Now, unfortunately, because there’s one of those consarn confidentiality agreements between the parties – you know how companies love to hide all the juicy embarrassing bits – the 10-page motion and all its attachments are under seal and the seal is so big nobody’s even supposed to know what part of the multi-charge case Neon thinks can be resolved without troubling to empanel a jury.
Novell, which was put in play in March when Elliott Associates, a hedge fund, offered to buy it for $2 billion, has struck an agreement-in-principle to break in two and spin off SUSE Linux to a strategic buyer with most of the rest of the company going to a private equity house, the New York Post said Wednesday. The Post said it got it from “people close to the process” but the paper couldn’t shake the names of either potential buyer out of them only that the deal was at a “sensitive stage,” still three or four weeks away from being signed, and could fall apart at any minute. Both sides of the deal are supposed to close simultaneously.
September 21st, JetBrains will host a free community party at the 21st Amendment Brewery Restaurant in San Francisco. Meet with friends and enjoy lively conversation in a relaxed atmosphere over free food and drinks, just a few blocks from the Moscone Center. The party begins at 8PM and we welcome all JetBrains fans to join in the action, as you do not need to be registered or attending JavaOne to take part.
