2009-07-20 Monday - JavaRebel

David Booth (with zeroturnaround.com) pinged me this morning with the link to the recents suvery results they published: Java EE Containers – Heaven or Hell?

2009-07-19 Sunday - JavaScript Resources

I wanted a bit of JavaScript to track how many days until my next voyage adventure begins - and happened to find just what I needed on javascriptkit.com

2009-07-17 Friday - GlassFish, Mule Galaxy, LDAP

I had an incredibly frustrating day today - trying to get the Mule Galaxy Community Edition Registry/Repository configured properly to authenticate via LDAP against an instance of Microsoft Windows 2003 Active Directory.

One lesson learned: Do not try to manually deploy the Mule Galaxy war file via DOS commands to the autodeploy directory - use the GlassFish Web Admin Console to deploy/undeploy

You have to first use a non-LDAP Mule Galaxy instance of the war file to setup your Active Directory groups - and then swap the war for another one that is configured for LDAP.

I have the LDAP / Active Directory authentication working - but I'm still researching an Active Directory Group configuration issue for the authorization features of GlassFish's Group permissions.


Enabling Authentication Through LDAP

2009-07-17 Friday - Java Date and Time

I'm doing some research tonight on various tips & tricks on Date and Time formatting, so this is my blog posting to capture some of the links I find:

The Java Tutorials: Internationalization > Formatting > Customizing Formats

Java Runtime Environment (JRE) - Convert date time local Timezone to GMT

TimeZone (Java 2 Platform SE 5.0)

DateFormat and SimpleDateFormat Examples

What's your time zone?

-Duser.timezone=America/Los_Angeles

Canadian Mind Products > Java Glossary > Time

Convert Local time to UTC and vice versa

Working in Java time

Java Daylight Saving Time: Known problems and workarounds

Supported user.timezone property values...?

Thread: Timezones, Glassfish, Two different systems: How do I change the TZ
of Glassfish?

Internationalization (I18N) - tzmappings and tzupdater

Bug ID: 6743394 (tz) tzmappings must be updated for Windows




I came across Fred Swartz'sJava Notes: Table of Contents - and want to remember to come back and peruse it sometime in the future.

2009-07-17 Friday - Oracle Resources

ORACLE SQL*Plus: An Introduction and Tutorial
Richard Holowczak
Prof. Richard Holowczak
Department of Statistics and Computer Information Systems
Baruch College, City University of New York


SQL*Plus User's Guide and Reference (Release 9.2)

SQL*Plus® User’s Guide and Reference (Release 10.1)

What's New in SQL*Plus? (10.2)

SQL*Plus® User’s Guide and Reference (as pdf) (Release 10.2) - (as html)

Oracle, SQL, Dates and Timestamps

Using Datetime and Interval Datatypes in a Global Environment

Oracle PL/SQL examples


Oracle Tips

Tuning Oracle sorting operations
Internals of Oracle sort operations

2009-07-13 Monday - JUnit 4.6

I spent some time over the weekend upgrading a Java integration project to use JUnit 4.6 - (previously I had JUnit 3.8 installed).

I found these two articles to be very helpful in getting up to speed quickly on JUnit 4 syntax:

• Jump into JUnit 4, Streamlined testing with Java 5 annotations
  - (by Andrew Glover, Stelligent Inc.)


• JUnit 4 in 60 Seconds

2009-07-12 Sunday - Links

No time to dig into these today, but want to save them for future reference:

JavaScript Based Animation Frameworks and Libraries

live-android A LiveCD for Android

Scala Cheatsheet

2009-07-11 Saturday - The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)

The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), currently at release 2.7.0

The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses. The YUI project includes the YUI Library and two build-time tools: YUI Compressor (minification) and YUI Doc (documentation engine for JavaScript code).

I came across this JavaScript library while looking inside the predic8.com Membrane SOA Registry war file.

2009-07-07 Tuesday - Predic8's Membrane SOA Registry

http://www.predic8.com/open-source/soa-registry-repository/
This is a relatively new tool to the Registry space…(also a Java EE Web Application)…and the current release is 0.8

Recent announcment regarding the software:

2009/06/29 - Registry Software Available
The registry software used by service-repository.com is now available for download. The registry is a Java EE Web application that can be deployed into an Java EE application server or in a web container like Apache Tomcat.

Online Demo:
http://www.service-repository.com/

My first reaction? Wow.! - this has some very interesting features(!)

Possible Missing features?
- WSDL validation (?)
- No support for organizing the registry list of services according to a package/application/directory structure (?)
- Governance / Policy (?)



Things that are in this software that Mule Galaxy doesn't support?
+ Direct Anonymous acccess to the WSDL - important
+ Incredibly easy navigation of Schemas
+ Simple view of Service Overview
+ List of Interfaces for a Service
+ List of Endpoints for a Service
+ Recent Events for a Service
+ Service Statistics summary dashboard
+ Dependencies graph for Service
+ Includes a Ping / Availability dashboard
+ Includes an integrated SOAP client for testing / invoking a service
+ Consumer list (?)
+ Host list (?)

2009-07-03 Friday - Beginning Scala Book Review

The following is the review I posted tonight on Amazon.com for David Pollak's Beginning Scala book

If you are like me, you are often hard pressed for getting many things done quickly.

If you want a quick introduction to Scala, this book is just right for the level of information provided to get you up and running quickly.

I enjoyed reading David Pollak's "Beginning Scala" - and found it to be very helpful in several ways:

#1 - It is written from the perspective of an experienced Java programmer - and the parallels between the languages that are cited in the text was a very helpful technique for compressing the time needed to digest the material. Ruby parallels are also frequently covered.

#2 - This book is a great book to have on your bookshelf if you want to become immediately productive. David's writing is direct, practical, pragmatic.

#3 - This book is useful for the application developer, library designer, and architect.

At ~290 pages - Beginning Scala does a good solid job of covering the language, with many interesting examples of Scala code.

Chapters include:
1 - About Scala and How to Install It
2 - Scala Syntax, Scripts, and Your First Scala Programs
3 - Collections and the Joy of Immutability
4 - Fun with Functions, and Never Having to Close that JDBC Connection
5 - Pattern Matching
6 - Actors and Concurrency
7 - Traits and Types and Gnarly Stuff for Architects
8 - Parsers - Because BNF Is Not Just for Academics Anymore
9 - Scaling Your Team

I had the pleasure of meeting David at JavaOne 2009 in San Francisco this year. He is a genuinely nice guy - and a passionate Scala enthusiast.

2009-07-03 Friday - Eben Hewitt, Java SOA Cookbook

I happened to come across Eben Hewitt's blog today.

A link to his blog article: Using SOAP Faults and Exceptions in Java JAX-WS Web Services, was mentioned in a LinkedIn group I joined some time ago (SOA Service Oriented Architecture Technology Architects)

It turns out that Eben recently had his book published, Java SOA Cookbook:

2009-07-03 Friday - IEEE 1471

IEEE 1471 Website

Rich Hilliard: All About IEEE Std 1471

David Emery & Rich Hilliard: Updating IEEE 1471

2009-07-02 Thursday - Links

Courtesy of a Twitter posting by Tim O'Reilly: 50 Successful Open Source Projects That Are Changing Medicine

An interestng web site, also mentioned in a Twitter posting (by Jonas Bonér)
http://hackety.org/

ventureshacks mentioned this article on Twitter: Ten unconventional wisdoms for funding startups

PostgreSQL 8.4 was recently released (July 1, 2009), there are some interesting items in the feature List