Weren’t we all skeptical when Sun announced their intent to open source Java? But we’ve watched along the way, as they chose a good free/libre/open source software license (the GPL), as they opened the code Sun has a copyright to, and as they have embraced (to varying degrees) the community efforts, such as GNU Classpath and IcedTea.
It should be apparent that Red Hat is looking to put its bread where the open source butter is spread, in the acquisition of middleware powerhouse JBoss. As can happen with an acquisition, that propelled Red Hat even further into the Java camp. Yet is has been several of the long-time Red Hat engineers who are also responsible for leading and coding on open source projects that enabled all this to happen (GNU Classpath, IcedTea, gcj, and all around Eclipse, to name a prominent few.) What may have started as hedging the bet that Sun would follow through, all of this work has resulted in a stronger relationship across Java camps.
In a fair article on the freeing of Java, “Java fully open-sourced ‘by end of year’“, ZDNet quotes Sun that this year is going to see the end of all the remaining unfreeable parts of the JRE. What you think about that has to be balanced with what you believe. And this time, I find I’m believing that Sun can and will do it in 2008.
See you next week at JavaOne and CommunityOne. I’ll be there, on Monday talking about Fedora (and OpenJDK), and the rest of the week in the pavilion at the JBoss booth.
Continuing with the audiocast series from JBoss World 2008, this is EJB3 lead developer Carlo de Wolf talking about EJB 3 for Java developers new to Enterprise JavaBeans. The audio is available in OGG Vorbis and MP3 formats. Slides from the presentation are available.
As an ongoing joint operation, this audiocast is the first that is fed into the JBoss.org podcast channel (ATOM feed.) This is fun, as it allows us to distribute not only a title and rich description, but a thumbnail image full of meaning:
This article is an explanation for why non-commercial use restrictions on free content are contrary to the goal of making it free in the first place. It brings the discussion more clearly into a realm that is understandable for creative people not familiar with what we’ve learned in the free software movements. Think of it like great science writing, able to explain a complicated concept to a layperson … yet still with lessons for the most experienced.
http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
Fresh from Australia, via JBoss.org, this is nearly an hour-long presentation on Web Beans. As the specification lead and originator of the JSR, Gavin has a lot to say on the subject:
Gavin provides an exceptionally nice walk-through behind not just how Web Beans works, but why it works the way it does. He provides comparison to AOP features, and even demonstrates the recursive nature of Web Beans functionality being used to define Web Beans functionality. Meta-annotations are cool. Meta-meta-annotations are even cooler.
We’ve broken the talk into 3 easy-to-digest chunks:
Can’t be much clearer than a free book. Heiko W. Rupp’s publisher has released the book as a free PDF in German, with a small courtesy survey in front of the download. The book is also available from Amazon.de.
Starting with this “Introduction to Seam” by Pete Muir from the 2008 Jboss World in Orlando, JBoss.org and Dev Fu are presenting original audiocasts of technical presentations from various JBoss events and presentations.
The audiocast is available in MP3 and OGG Vorbis formats. You can follow along with Pete’s presentation slides. This introduction is intended for Java developers and anyone interested in learning more about what Seam is, how it got this way, and where it is going next
This audiocast is the first of many, to be released one or two a week as we get through the editing process. That should carry us right up to the Red Hat Summit, where we seek additional relevant and interesting developer audio content.
With so many Java developers enjoying their Mac OS X machines, JBoss Developer Studio is now available for Mac OS X. Product Manager Bryan Che writes:
… now you can get all the benefits of fantastic certified tools and an integrated JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with native Mac support. Many JBoss developers use Macs, and we know that many in our community use Macs, so we’re excited to make this available. And, of course, if you’re a Windows or Linux user, JBoss Developer Studio has been available for those platforms as well.
Bryan also explains why this release only supports Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.x until the next update:
… due to an issue in Eclipse, we are only supporting JBoss Developer Studio on Mac OS Tiger 10.4.x and earlier right now. There is a workaround available for Leopard, but this isn’t a supported configuration. We’ll add formal Leopard support in our next update.
RichFaces 3.2.0.GA is out, requiring JSF 1.2 and JDK 5.0 or above. A demo of new components is available, and the announcement includes a list of the new components, including Combo Box, Progress Bar, File Upload, and Pick List. Enhancements include DataTable Sorting, DataTable Filter, and standard component skinning.
The candidate release 2 of the JBoss Portlet Container project is available. This completes the first milestone for JBoss Portal 2.7, as Project Lead Julien Viet details. Following this, the 2.7 work is focused on integrating the controller module of the JBoss Portlet Container and providing a “JSR 286 Portlet runtime meta data overview through the administration portlet.” The project’s main JIRA page has a roadmap for 2.7.
In reference to the Portlet CR2, Julien writes:
Since the candidate release 1 we added an administration portlet that can manage the life cycle of the deployed applications and containers.
We have also added a very useful event debugger that can help developers to understand the event flow distributed among the different portlets during the interactions an event phase.
Mark Proctor at JBoss World on video talking about how Drools/JBoss Rules fits in to the SOA infrastructure handling business logic. While covering a lot of basics and ground, Mark provides a vision of a fully integrated and tooled platform that includes authoring, service side management, deployment, and a runtime:
Download this video: [Ogg Theora]
(Updated to include more details about the JBoss Portal 2.7 status.)
