ADF

OpenLaszlo – Cool Flash for Clunky Java people

Posted on by paulbrowne

Flash is created by cool people who wear black and use Apple Macs. If you’re not sure as to what flash is, the chances are that if you’ve seen something on the web recently that made you go ‘wow’ for it’s coolness, then it was built using Adobe Flash.

To add substance to this froth Java people can use Flash (instead of normal web pages) to create cool pages that do useful stuff. For example Google Analytics uses Java and Flash to create a stunning User Interface. Even though Ajax and DHTML give you a lot of interactivity on your web pages, Flash goes one better at the small cost of not being as good for SEO and requiring a plugin (that most people already have installed).

So, what are you to do if you want to combine the coolness of Flash with the heavy lifting of Enterprise Java on the Server? The two main options are:

  1. Flex from Adobe is one way for Java people to create flash. The core toolkit is free, but the editor costs about $500 and that’s before you pay for using it on your servers. More details in the previous blogposts on Adobe Apollo and Adobe Flex.
  2. Open Laszlo Project is open source all the way, but does’t have a drag and drop editor (i.e. it’s more technical than graphical). Still , it allows you to create some cool effects , such as this Flash Clock.

Which framework will win out? I don’t know , and that’s before you even consider the Standard Java Web Frameworks such as Struts 2.

More (In progess) notes on Open Java and Flash are on the wiki. In an impulse buy , I bought the OpenLaszlo in Action yesterday. As an EBook , with rebate (coupon LZ35607 before the end of August) it costs about 10 Euro. Initial impressions are good (both for the book and Open Laszlo) , but I’m still working my way through it (so don’t quote me on it).

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Disclaimer: I get a rebate if you buy the book from Amazon, but not if you buy the (Cheaper) E-Book direct from Manning. I bought the E-Book this time, but have got free books from Manning in the past for having reviewed (as yet unpublished) JBoss items.

Enterprise Java Presentation , Stephens Hotel , Dublin

Posted on by paulbrowne

You may remember we did the Enterprise Java presentation at DCU back in October for the wireless skillnet in Ireland. We’re doing a follow up presentation, this time in Central Dublin, on the 22nd January. The audience is mainly business people with some sort of interest or connection with technology.
Irish Dev has more details.

The topics covered include:

  • What Problem are we trying to solve?
  • Enterprise Java Architecture Overview.
  • Benefits to the Enterprise.
  • Alternatives (.Net , PHP , Oracle , Lightweight Java Frameworks , scripting)
  • Vendors (IBM, Oracle, Sun , Bea , JBoss and SAP)
  • Market Trends – Resource availability (can we get the people to do this?)
  • Enterprise Web 2.0 and Service Orientated Aritecture (SOA).
  • Integrating with other Systems ( Legacy Systems, Oracle etc)
  • Enterprise Java Beans 3 (EJB3)
  • Middleware (MOM, Rule Engines, Workflow)
  • Security – Application and Server Level including Java Access & Authorization Service (JAAS).
  • Frameworks (Struts , JSF, ADF, DWR, Spring, Hibernate)
  • .Net interoperability
  • What’s next for Enterprise Java?

And the results of the Virtual Java Meetup are …

Posted on by paulbrowne

And the results of the Virtual Java Meetup are … here. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

If you couldn’t be bothered reading the entire thing , the results of the Dublin Jury on ‘what technologies should I be learning in the next 12 months’ are:

  • Web services are going to be big, but only if they can be simple.
  • EJB 3 and Netbeans are both worth taking a look at again, they are now much better than the previous versions that gave them a bad name.
  • Middleware (e.g. workflow and Rules Engines) are interesting in a corporate environment, but there is a high barrier to entry.
  • Struts , and to a lesser extent JSF , will continue to be dominant Java Web frameworks, despite not being the best technical choice.
  • A lot of companies are still using Java 1.4, but may make the leap to Java 6 (Mustang).
  • Service Orientated Architecuture (SOA) is a nice idea, but not so many projects have been implemented using it.
  • IDE’s (Netbeans / Eclipse / JDeveloper) can deliver a lot of value, but only if backed up by lower level tools (e.g. Ant and Maven).
  • More for the next 24 months , keep an eye on Apache Service Mix.

JRuby – Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Java world

Posted on by paulbrowne

On a recent project , the choice was between Enterprise Java (using frameworks such as DWR and Struts) , or Oracle Forms. The newest latest Java technology , versus a 15 year old technology that Oracle is comitted to phasing out (and moving to ADF / Oracle fusion). No contest , you think , until you hear that the decision was made (and rightly so) to us Oracle Forms.

‘What?!’ I hear you say – how could this happen? The project in question was fairly simple – get information and store it in a database. The problem is , despite being mainstream for the last 6 years, there is no standard, easy ‘drag and drop’ method of doing these applications in Java. C# does it in Visual Studio. Oracle does it with Forms. With Java (and despite having doing 10 or so of these projects), there is still too much plumbing that the developer needs to know.

I’m expecting a deluge of ‘have you tried project X’ on this post. And yes, I expect that an Eclipse based tool will probably fill the gap. But for these simple applications , there is no standard way of doing this (standard being a solution that dominates the market in the way Struts did the Web App framework space, until recently). But we’ve been waiting 6 long years!

ruby on rails logo

All of which brings me to Ruby. Ruby on Rails’ sweet spot is exactly these kind of simple, ajax enabled , no frills ‘get info from web and store it on database’ applications. Enterprise Java’s sweet spot is the heavy lifting workflow , Rules , Calculations, Integration with Legacy and other systems , web services and basically anything to do with Business logic. The two are a perfect complement to each other, which is why the news that JRuby now runs Ruby on Rails is especially interesting.

JRuby is a version of Ruby that runs in the Standard Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It means that (1) You don’t have to install Ruby, which might meet resistance in a corporate environment. It also means (2) that all the methods you have available in Java you have available in Ruby. The O’Reilly Ruby site and this Javaworld Article are good places to start learning more about Ruby and linking it into Java.

Ask Tom – Oracle is from Mars, Java is from Venus

Posted on by paulbrowne

Sometimes Java people (who do the pretty websites, as well as the ‘ugly bits’) and Oracle people (who hang round in server rooms storing the data) exist on two paralell worlds. The normal conversation goes like this:

Java Person

Where do I get the information from?

Oracle Person

That Table there.

Java Person

Thanks

And that’s it , until the next month or so. And that’s before we get into words such as ADF , Oracle Forms, Fusion , 10g or OAS, all of which appear on a regular basis on JobServe, but to most Java people may as well be an exotic plant just discovered in the Jungles of Indonesia.


The solution? Ask Tom. More Oracle stuff than our caffine-addled little brains can handle.

Tom Kyte (the Tom above that works for Oracle) , also has his own blog for Oracle related stuff.