We’re inviting all of the Java developers out there to an event organized by our sister site, TheServerSide.com, the Web’s largest enterprise Java community. As a member of Ajaxian, you save an extra $100 off the registration fee with the code AJAXIAN. (Register before January 16 to save a total of $400 and get a free book!)
TheServerSide Java Symposium explores current and emerging trends in enterprise Java and how they apply to your daily work. Choose from over 45 technical sessions on new technologies, best practices and practical tips from some of the brightest minds in the industry, including Rod Johnson, Neal Ford, Scott Davis and 35 Java experts.
The latest features of Spring, JSF, Wicket, Tapestry, Google Web Toolkit and more frameworks.
New Java language features, such as EJB 3.1, Glassfish and JavaFX
Popular open source tools, including Eclipse, Maven, Lucene, soapUI, HtmlUnit for testing SOA, Ajax and RIAs.
Expert recommendations on the use of Groovy, Scala and JRuby
Building and maintaining a large-scale SOA
How to create and consume RESTful Web Services.
How and when to use an ESB.
Best practices and tools for optimizing performance and scalability.
And much more!
View TheServerSide Java Symposium agenda to see all of the sessions being presented. Register now with the code AJAXIAN to save an extra $100 and to get a free book while supplies last.
Joe Walker and team have announced the first RC for DWR 3.0. We asked Joe to tell us what is new:
DWR now supports:
varargs
method overloading
typed parameters
binary file upload/download
it has a set of new types it can marshall
DWR will let you use JavaScript to implement Java interfaces (e.g. to register a Listener interface to publish changes to waiting browsers using Reverse Ajax), we now have 3 modes to control resource usage and there is a more scalable Reverse Ajax layer.
There are new integrations with Dojo, TIBCO GI and Aptana Jaxer, and a new DOM manipulation library.
We have special asynchronous servlet support for Tomcat and Glassfish, and our Spring and Guice integrations have been beefed up.
We now support JSONP and JSON-RPC, and there’s a whole bunch of etc thrown in for good measure too.
Jeffrey Sharkey has created OilCan a thin wrapper on top of the WebKit shipping on Android that allows you to install userscripts that allow you to access to Android "Intents".
Intents are very nice abstractions that allow you to access large components and reuse them in different ways. Romain Guy has a nice post on them.
OilCan lets you customize any website by inserting JavaScript to change the website and help it reach into the Android world using intents.
OilCan inserts some powerful buttons into normal websites, and that power comes from Android intents. We didn't write a barcode scanner or the radar app into OilCan, but using intents we can launch those apps with parameters. We can request the Barcode Scanner app to scan something and return the code to us, or launch the Radar app with a specific lat/lon.
Userscripts can do other cool stuff, like hide the navigation columns in Wikipedia to make it easier to view on small screens. This is a proof-of-concept for now, and will probably turn into a binary plugin for the default Browser in the future.
A nice piece from an example shows the intent call out:
It really is plugin week isn't it. We had Flash and Silverlight, so it was time for Java to pop its head up from the shadows, and that is what happened with the production release of Java 6 Update 10. It has to be one of the worst version names, but a solid plugin release it is! We originally sat down with Ken Russell to talk about this version on October 18th, 2007.
When I was in his neck of the woods last, I got the chance to talk with Sun’s Danny Coward, the Chief Architect of Sun’s Client Software (that is, Java SE, Java ME, JavaFX and JavaCard), about Java 6 Update 10. That seems like kind of a narrow topic to speak to, but as Danny and I discuss, it’s a big release for Sun’s RIA and client-side (re-)push.
Along those lines, we spend a lot of time detailing the re-written plugin that’s used for Java applets and JavaFX, the improved installer and update experience, and other client side features like one of the new GUI look-n-feels, Nimbus.
I have seen the GWT team working very hard indeed on GWT 1.5, and they must be very happy to see the final release shipped and complete:
GWT 1.5 delivers what we think are an impressive number of improvements, about four hundred issues if you're counting. We're also happy that one of those is issue 168, our most-requested feature, Support for Java 5.
The high level new feature sets are:
Java 5 language support and enhanced JRE emulation
Performance optimizations and easier JavaScript interop
Prettier widgets, better DOM, accessibility, and bi-di
Dave starts out by detailing why you would want to do this, and how it changes the architecture of your application.
He then gets to a tutorial that has you creating the project correctly, and configuring an actual service. Once you are done with the code, you need to setup hosted mode to point to a nice external tom cat via:
Ignacio Coloma has announced Loom 1.0 RC 1. Loom is an annotation-based java web framework that includes a ton of new features in this release. After some selective process, these are the bits that could be of most interest for Ajax developers:
Generates HTML 5 markup (with data-* fields), including CSS classes
with the property type.
Based on prototype
An ever-growing list of (progressive-enhancement) web components,
including: multiple file upload, tabs, menus...
Dead-simple javascript validation library with i18n support.
...which mimics the process at the server, in case javascript is disabled.
Just give it a try at the demo. Try introducing invalid input, and check the sources by clicking the "View source" link at the top right of the page. Everything in the demo should work with javascript disabled, including multiple file upload.
The framework also includes a libraries repository which pulls debug/optimized javascript from the google CDN:
And now for something a little bit different on a Friday. Greg Brown from VMWare pointed us to the fruition of nearly a year's worth of R&D: Pivot, a new GUI toolkit for Java.
While traditionally Java Applets and the Web have mixed together about as well as concrete and peanut butter, the upcoming revised Java plug-in might give a window for Java-based GUI toolkits to be of interest to Web folks.
While Pivot's source code is still forthcoming, a quick glance at its classes shows an architecture with a strong resemblance to Java's built-in Swing GUI toolkit, but with many of Swing's rough edges smoothed out. As a long-time Swing developer, I'd characterize it as attempt to create Swing++.
Similarities to Swing include a light-weight rendering model (i.e., it doesn't wrap native components), a nearly identical component contract, a very similar system of UI delegates, and a very similar event model. Differences include a cleaner API (by virtue of nixing direct interoperability with Java's ancient AWT toolkit), different approach to layout, fresh implementations of common GUI components, and a new collections framework (inspired by Java's collections framework but... different).
Thinlet is another, older alternate GUI toolkit for Java that draws its own components and targets Applet developers (though a new version is under development).
Joshua Marinacci has detailed how Java SE 6 update 10 supports the same crossdomain.xml that Flash supports, and how you can marry it with JNLP to allow you to do Applet mashups without permission dialogs.
The applet security model, known as the sandbox, only lets applets connect to the webserver they were loaded from. They cannot connect to anywhere else unless they are signed. Signing is great when you need access to more than what is allowed inside the sandbox, but it has two problems: the user will receive an ugly warning dialog about the applet, and the applet will have full access to the user's computer. Full access is overkill when all you want to do is talk to a webservice on another server. Surely there is some middle ground between the sandbox and full access? Well now there is.
The key is supplying a backwards compatible way of tying to the new JNLP version:
, Java
