JavaOne 2009 Summary: Wednesday (Day 2)

Back again... well I'm sorry to write this but I could not make it yesterday to publish the summary of Wednesday. It was 2:15am and I was very exhausted after having been up since 7am. So, I still hope you enjoy this summary as I try to include as much infos as a can within the given time from different sources in the net and myself.

Related Posts so far:

• Day 0: CommunityOne
• Day 1: JavaOne, Key Note

JavaOne Day 2 Summary

=== Mobility General Session ===

• Christopher David, Head of Development and Partner Engagement at Sony Ericsson, was the main speaker for the talk. During his presentation, Erik Hullman (a Senior Java Developer with Sony Ericsson) was given the task to develop a JavaFX Twitter client from scratch that at the end of the presentation should be deployed to three different devices!
  As if the task would not have been complex enough: People in the audience could send questions or comments to his Twitter accound that he answered in parallel to his programming efforts... and at the end, the same deployable artefact worked fine on all three devices. Sounds promising!!
  
  Rikko Sakaguchi, Corporate VP of Creation and Development
  
  

=== Technical Sessions Highlights ===

• Hudson: Continuous Integration in the Cloud with Hudson
  (by Kohsuke Kawaguchi --> Blog)
  - I very much like the automated distribution approach: You start the Master Instance with Hudson installed as well as with the Hudson PXE Plugin (Prebuilt Execution Environment). After that you start the Slave Instance (on another machine) and boot from the network. That's it!
  - The defined target machines can be flagged with so called "labels" and can be used to ensure that Test Units aimed for Windows machines are executed on Windows boxes (and same for Unix boxes).
  - The Hudson Master instance can run on Windows or Unix.
  - Cloud: The demo was about the creation of a CI environment in Amazon EC2. It was very impressive how quickly the setup was done and executed successfully.
  - Hadoop: Kohsuke also mentioned the rather new plugin for Hadoop which makes Hudson run on Hadoop.
  - Slides: PPT
  
  
  
  
• "Effective Java": Still effective after all these years
  (by Joshua Bloch)
  As in his other presentations, Joshua presented his content in a very nice way accompanied by his typical kind of humour... As of the end of the day, his book was again "Number 1" in the Bookstore's Top Seller List.
  
  
• JPA 2.0 (by Linda DeMichiel)
  The new Criteria API as well as the introduction of the pessimistic locking modes were interesting to follow. Overall, the session was a little bit too much on the theoretical side.
  
  
• WebBeans! Sorry: JCDI, Java Contexts and Dependency Injection: JSR-299
  (by Gavin King)
  I just like the way Gavin presents, he has his unique style, very straight forward and nice to follow. JCDI targets to support stateful objects, builds the glue between JSF and EJB, allows loose coupling with strong typing and introduces very nice concepts like BindingTypes and DeploymentTypes.
  
  After the speech we asked Gavin about the other "DI" related JSR submitted by Bob Lee (Google) and Rod Johnson (SpringSource): JSR-330. It states "This JSR targets Java SE, and it will lay a foundation for dependency injection in Java EE." So it seems that this is a big discussion at the moment as the JSR-299 has started 3 years ago and is nearly finalized now and could make it easily into the final release of Java EE 6 by end of this year whereas the newly submitted JSR would take at least 1 year until its finalization and would eventually postpone the release of Java EE 6 as 299 would directly depend on 330. I'm very curious how this gets resolved. My personal hope is that they agree on a common dependency injection foundation for SE and EE and include that one with potential EE specifics in the nearly finalized 299 (During the Java EE 6 Panel Discussion BOF, William Shannon meant that the EG would never accept two different DI specs on the Java Platform, so a common sense must be found, and quickly).
  Links around this discusssion:
  --> Bob Lee's initial post (from May 5th, 2009)
  --> Gavin King's statement (from May 7th, 2009)
  --> Bob's comment on Gavin's statement
  

=== BOFs ===

• JSF Platform and Ajax: State of the Union
  with Ted Goddard (Lead Architect of ICEfaces), Andy Schwartz (Oracle ADF Faces) and Alexandr Smirnov (RichFaces)
  This kind of panel discussion was very interesting as each of the presenters talked about the current status and the progress towards JSF 2.0. RichFaces and ICEfaces convinced most (RichFaces because of its seemless integration with Seam and ICEfaces because of its architecture and the unique feature of automatic Ajax Push based on server-side DOM-diffing (more here)).
  Woodstock was not represented. As of the presenters there are no plans for further releases. On ICEfaces there is a migration plan described from Woodstock to ICEfaces.
  
  Ted Goddard
  
  
  
• Java EE 6 Experts Discussion Panel
  hosted by Roberto Chinnici and William Shannon
  Good discussions, questions and comments... I was surprised that JSR-299 was not mentioned at all in the presentation about Java EE 6. After having asked the question why it is missing, a big *sigh* from Roberto Chinnici :-) (as expected), then responding that they were not yet sure about the inclusion of JSR-299 in Java EE 6. I reformulated my question what the current trend would be, rather "in" or "out". After eye-contacting with William Shannon, William meant "give him the full story"... Then the story around "JSR-299 vs JSR-330" has been described (see WebBeans above for more details).
  
  
  William Shannon and Roberto Chinnici
  
  

=== Pavilion ===

• At the ICEfaces booth we met Micha Kiener (also from Switzerland) who is working for Mimacom. We were introduced to the overall architecture of ICEfaces and that looked really cool (server-side DOM diffing, Ajax Push). The demo showed a very elegant way of doing Interportlet Communication (IPC) on Liferay Portal 5.2. Really nice!!
  
  
• And some pictures from the Pavilion and its entrance area...
  
  
  
  
  Dani at the SpringSource booth
  where it says "Eliminating Enterprise Java Complexity"...
  
  
  
  
  
  

Cheers

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Tuesday (Day 1)

Take a deep breath... Time is really rushing away, it is actually Wednesday night now (11pm), 50% already passed, but as promised in the previous post, there will be a summary of each day. So here it is!
Before kicking off, read the summary of Monday's ConferenceOne if you haven't done so already...

JavaOne Day 1 Summary

As every year, Day 1 started with the General Session, the key note by Sun itself and hosted this year by Sun's CGO (Chief Gaming Officer) Chris Melissinos.
Guests on stage were

• James Barresse, VP of Architecture, Platforms and Systems with eBay
  
• Alan Brunner, Senior VP for the Blackberry Platform
• Dan Eklund, Executive VP of Advanced Technologies at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
• Lowell McAdam, President and CEO of Verizon
• Diane Bryant, Executive VP at Intel
• Ronan McBrien, JavaFX TV Architect (nice demo, video should be available here)
• Nandini Ramani, Director for JavaFX

Some pictures:

Jonathan Schwarz about BDJ and BD Live


Java FX TV Demo:

=== Key Note Highlights ===

• Oracle and the Future of Java:
  At the end of the key note, Scott McNealy called Oracle CEO Larry Ellison up on stage to address the $7.4 billion dollar question -- what will be the future of Java?
  My key notes from his answer are:
  - Oracle with a much greater R&D budget than Sun will be able to even more push Java forward. Quote: "I don't expect a lot of changes, just expanded investment and a lot of enthusiasm coming from Oracle."
  - He mentioned JavaFX many times, he wants OpenOffice to use JavaFX as UI. He also mentioned that it would be interesting to see Android based phones and netbooks from Sun running Java and JavaFX. Rumors say that pushing JavaFX will secure his seat in the UI battle between Silverlight and Flex.
  - "Look at the past to see the future": by this he most probably meant Oracle's dedication to Java since its birth, its commitment to support the community and to actively participate in Java's future.
  - Interesting Link about Larry's talk
  - Some pictures:
  
  Scott mentioning that Larry might have more luck
  to bring the JVM on the iPhone :-)
  
  
  
  
  "Mr. Oracle"
  
  
  
  
  - And enjoy the following video:
  




• Java Store! presented by James Gosling: still in beta, community is asked to give feedback on how payments should be implemented.
  
  
• Release of Java FX 1.2 !
  
  
  
• "The classpath is dead": Chief Engineer of Java SE, Mark Reinhold, said this after having shown a nifty demo on how Java SE 7 manages modules.
  
  
  
• "The web.xml is dead": CTO at Sun, Bob Brewin, said this while talking about the next enterprise release Java EE 6.
  
  
• Announcement of JATAF ! The Java Application Terminal Alignment Framework is an open, collaborative community striving for a unified Java ME platform.
  
  
• Project Dark Chat: Nice demo app for the JavaOne.
  --> Download this JNLP file (jre6u10 required)
  
  
• DJ Anna: for me as a fan of electronic music, the opening sounds mixed live by DJ Anna, a local DJ of San Francisco, are always a pleasure to listen to...
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• and of course: Gosling's T-Shirt Tossing!!!
  
  
  

=== Technical Sessions Highlights ===
As it got already very late and I am still writing about yesterday!, more take aways from the technical sessions will follow (as CTP internal Knowledge Shares or in form of upcoming blog posts):
Interesting sessions were EJB 3.1, Servlet 3.0, Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3, Spring 3.0, JSF 2.0 and others...



=== BOFs ===

• The most exciting BOF was of course the one of JavaPosse !
  Download the mp3 and listen yourself what happened!! :
  Episode 0x100 (#256)
  
  As last year, the beer got sponsored by Atlassian and started with some polls from the audience. After that, they talked about topics and news they picked up during the first day...
  After the show we joined them for some drinks at the Kate O'Briens pub near Moscone. I could finally tell Joe to accept my friend request on Xbox360 in order to see his hotlaps in Forza2 (he is actually a real race driver, watch this video if you don't believe me) and Carl told us some more details about his brand new Tesla (100% electric car)... A great moment in life indeed to finally get to know these dudes! :-) I could not talk much with Dick Wall unfortunately... One more reason to go again to JavaOne! ;-) At least one important thing I could tell him: Talk more about Enterprise stuff!
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• BOF about Lift: The Best Way to create RIAs with Scala
  (by David Pollak, Lead of the Lift Framework)
  
  to be honest, I can't comment on this content-wise... The way it was presented was cool (I like the humour of David Pollak), it was also interesting to see how he quickly implemented a fully functioning ajax based chat tool from scratch in less than 100 lines of code :-) but I could only take this one with me: Learn Scala first, then lift off with Lift.... ok! -> Scala book bought!!
  
  

Good night (oh no... in 5 hours the alarm kicks on :-),
Balz

JavaOne 2009 Summary: Monday (CommunityOne)

JavaOne has not officially started yet, it's Monday and not Tuesday, it's CommunityOne and not JavaOne, but the community spirit already caught us and punched us into the geeky experience of the world's biggest Java conference in the nice Moscone Center in San Francisco... main focus of today's sessions was on GlassFish stuff... In a nutshell: Niiice!!

So here is our summary of today's CommunityOne day (after having had some beers at the OpenSolaris & Sun Cloud Party in Hall A):

=== Sessions ===

• Sun GlassFish Application Server Portfolio (by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart from Sun): Where Sun's Platform Is Going:
  not much news for us actually... no infos regarding how Oracle want to proceed with GF
• Running Seam on the GlassFish Application Server (by Dan Allen from Red Hat):
  - Seam best works with Hibernate as persistence provider (and looks for it in the classpath). GlassFish v2 comes with Toplink, Glassfish v3 with EclipseLink. Dan Allen from Red Hat made a nice summary of all the tweeks you have to apply in order to make Seam work with GF's default persistence provider.
  - Dan further went into differences of JBoss AS and GlassFish AS which also brought some steps to be done if Seam should run on GF.
  - But: from a developer perspective, such details are not necessarily required to be known as "seam-gen" supports both application servers out of the box. We asked Dan about support of Oracle WebLogic Application Server and he pointed us to a chapter in the Seam documentation. As that is not the whole story (as of my current status), we might come up with our additions soon...
  
• Lightning Talks!
  This special type of talks runs throughout the day, split in multiple parts of 50 minutes each where every part again contains up to 8 very short speaches... I visited part 3 covering:
  - The Mural Project
  - Deep Dive Sneak Peek Sun Learning Services
  - Atmosphere (by JF Arcand!): good to know that Atmosphere is not only useful in containers not supporting Servlet 3.0: it autodetects Servlet 3.0 and still provides a nice abstraction of the rather complex Async API of Servlet 3.0
  - Adding AJAX Push (Ted Goddard from ICEsoft, focusing on ICEfaces of course)
  - Alice
  - BluJ
  - In a summary: Cool to listen to, nice to get an impression of the topic and good as decision maker whether to go to the full sessions on certain topics not already being enrolled in your schedule...
• Developing RESTful Web Services with JAX-RS and Jersey (by Marc Hadley and Paul Sandoz from Sun)
  - The two spec leads of JSR-311 made a quick walkthrough from the architectural style REST to the JSR-311 (JAX-RS) and showed two demos running on the reference implementation Jersey.
  - One demo showed how JCDI (JSR-299, fka WebBeans), Java Contexts and Dependency Injection works together with Jersey using Google Guice. This was interesting, and in a side remark he recommended to have a look at Guicey Fruit running on Guice 2.0. Geeks... but we like it ;-)
  
• EclipseLink - The Road to JPA 2.0 (by Doug Clarke from Oracle and Co-Lead of the EclipseLink project):
  - no much news for us at this moment

=== Pavilion ===

• The Pavilion opened at 3pm. Between the sessions and after 5pm, it was interesting to walk from one booth to the other until 7pm when it closed.
• GlassFish, Portals: We talked to Srikanth Konjarla (Software Architect of Web Space Server, aka WebSynergy Project having the same codebase as the Liferay Portal). He was also not allowed to talk about how Oracle will continue with the GlassFish products like WebSpace Server (Portal) and the GlassFish Application Server... we hope for more details in tomorrow's general session!
• Atlassian: We had quite a deep introduction by Douglas Butler (thanks!) into the new versions of Atlassian's products:
  - JIRA (4.0 beta)
  - Confluence (3.0 released TODAY!!)
  - Fisheye together with Crucible
  - Bamboo and Clover -- Really nice what we have seen here!
  - The new versions generally invested a lot into the visualization of data, hiding complexities by using more wizards but also many things happened from an integration point of view:
  - Atlassian released widgets/gadgets to be deployed into any portlet container in order to create nice dashboards etc.
  - They will also soon provide RESTful interfaces for all their products to freely integrate them into any other app.... This sounds very cool indeed.
  - And the give-away gadgets are nice too ;-) Have a look at their new T-Shirts: If you wear one of those and have it filmed by an Atlassian camera, some things get out of the shirt!! ;-)
  
  - And yes, they acquired GreenHopper (announced TODAY).
  
• Livescribe: At last year's Java One, Livescribe presented their JavaME based pen and sold 150 pieces right after the general session... I also bought one. I'm happy to see that the company still exists and that they heavily extended their features (e.g. Pencasts). At their booth today I got a nice little paper blanks (which is not sold in Europe so far).
• Vaadin: IT Mill has released the 6th version of their server driven RIA framework known as IT Mill Tollkit. Together with the release they rebranded it into Vaadin. It is free, open source and looks actually very much like GWT... The demo looked very nice. Certainly worth having a closer look at it!
• James Gosling: Spotted early at the Pavilion entrance! ;-)
  
  
• Sun Cloud: We haven't had the chance to check out the details of Sun Cloud yet but with the rather big party this evening sponsored by Sun Cloud and OpenSolaris we expect a bigger announcement by tomorrow... so stay tuned.
  
• NUUX: We also met Ben (an Alumni CTP Consultant) at his booth in the Java Utopia corner. Check out his website!!
• Anchor Steam Beer: San Francisco's local beer is really worth to be mentioned here as single item ;-) and it tasted great in the OpenSolaris branded glass!
  
  

=== Bookstore ===

• Bought today:
  - Java EE 6 with GlassFish 3
  - The Definitive Guide to Lift
• More tomorrow ;-) ...
  

=== Tomorrow ===
Sure, lots of interesting session are registered in our schedule, but:
tomorrow is also the long expected JavaPosse BOF from 9.30pm to 10.20pm, so don't expect a summary like this after that :-) We will most probably post a 2-day summary on Wednesday evening... ok?
So cu then! And don't forget to follow Balz @ Twitter for live updates!
- Cheers, Balz & Dani.

JBoss Seam Hot Deploy with Maven - EAR Projects

As requested on some comments on my previous posts (initial post and update), the Seam Hotdeploy Maven plugin now works also with EAR projects.

Some more details on how to configure your project can be found in our Google Code Wiki. The plugin now defines a new packaging type for Seam WAR modules - the only possibility to override the war:war goal in the package phase.

If you're interested in how to override the default lifecycle Maven goal, you can check out the plugin source - something I haven't been able to google easily. Or, maybe wait for a dedicated blog post - stay tuned!

Something you should definitely checkout with the Hot Deploy plugin is the Maven CLI plugin. See the great post from Dan here, or the integration in the sample POM.

As usual, feedback and contributions are very welcome!

CTP @ JavaOne 2009

Only three weeks until Java One! Can't believe it's less than one month away!!
So let's have a look at what we think is hot this year. As every year, the conference has a certain umbrella topic where this year's JavaOne is certainly in the light of Java EE 6:

• JavaEE6: JSF 2.0 @ TS-4640 (by Ed Burns)
  
• JavaEE6: Servlet 3.0 @ TS-3790
• JavaEE6: JPA 2.0 @ TS-5214
• JavaEE6: Contexts & Dependency Injection (WebBeans) @ TS-6726 (by Gavin King)
  
• JavaEE6: EJB3.1 @ TS-4605
• JavaEE6: Developing JPA Applications with NetBeans and EclipseLink @ TS-5018
• JavaEE6: JAX-RS (REST) @ BOF-4878
  
• JavaEE6: Glassfish v3 (JavaEE6 Reference Implementation) @ TS-4923
• JavaEE6: JCA 1.6 @ TS-4733
• JBoss Seam: Conversations and Page Flows on the JSF Platform @ TS-5045 (by Seam in Action author Dan Allen)
  
• Java Posse BOF @ BOF-4418 with Dick Wall (he likes the Groovy! :-), Joe Nuxoll and Carl Quinn, why is Tor Norbye not listed? Probably still digesting Snoracle!
  
• Google App Engine @ TS-3817
• Building JavaEE based Web Apps with Google Open-Source Technology @ TS-4062
  
• Effective Java: Still effective after all these years @ TS-5127 (by Joshua Bloch!)
• Defective Java Code: Mistakes that matter @ TS-5335
  
• Metro Web Services Security @ TS-4402
  
• Enterprise Integration Patterns in Practice @ TS-4839
• SOA at Enterprise Scale @ TS-5123
• Spring 3.0 @ TS-5225 (by Rod Johnson)
  

Of course there are much much more topics addressed like Scala, JavaFX, Java Mobile including Bluray Disc Java, lots of sessions about Cloud Computing, GWT, Groovy, OSGi and many more...

Interesting sessions at the CommunityOne West Conference (starting 1 day before JavaOne):

• Oracle EclipseLink: S308133
• SUN Glassfish Portfolio: Where is it going?: S307894
• Architecting robust Applications for Amazon EC2: S304314

How to get updates:

• Follow Balz live from JavaOne via his Twitter account (also see widget at the end of this post)
• Follow other twitworks: Kevin Farnham or the JavaOne official twitwork
  
• Java.net will produce again lots of Podcasts (not Pencasts!):
  The Schedule has been published already.
  
• And: Check this blog after JavaOne for a summary!

Cheers!

CTP Java Pencast #1

Welcome to the first pencast!
Switch on audio to fully enjoy the show!
Be aware that this has been recorded in one single shot and without any post-processing...



Shownotes:

• JavaME enabled pen by Livescribe
• Customer Technology Stack: JSF 1.2, JBoss Seam 2.1 (with jBPM), Hibernate 3, WebLogic Server 10.3 or JBoss Application Server 5
  
• Java EE5 : JSF 1.2, EJB 3.0, JPA 1.0, Glassfish v2
  
• Java EE6 : JSF 2.0, EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, Glassfish v3
  

So come back to visit us for checking details on the discussed web technology stacks!

Portal Update March / April 2009

Winter has turned into Spring, at least here in Switzerland... and in parallel to the brighter days, let's bring some light into the Java Portal area as well: What products are interesting these days and which should be followed for sure in 2009?

From the commercial side, major players are:

• Oracle WebLogic Portal 10.3:
  formerly known as BEA WebLogic Portal
• Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g TP4:
  WebCenter Suite also includes the formerly known product AquaLogic Interaction by BEA, now called WCI, WebCenter Interaction. Longterm, WLP will probably fully converge with WebCenter Suite where nowadays integration happens via the WebCenter Services.
  
• IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1

Open Source portals that have the most promising potential at the moment are:

• Liferay Portal 5.2:
  back in August 2008, SUN and Liferay announced their partnership to work jointly on the next portal generation and presented their roadmap, Liferay keeping their Liferay Portal and SUN continuing their WebSynergy project).
  
  
• SUN's brand new Web Space Server:
  Since February 2009, SUN has released Web Space Server version 10 which is including all the efforts from the internal Project WebSynergy. WebSpace Server is not only a portal product, it is a full fletched portal platform and has been integrated into the Glassfish Portfolio.
  For more info, read their first documentations.
  


• JBoss Portal 2.7.2:
  - On March 12th, JBoss has released the latest version of its portal product and is available for download.
  - On Apr 3rd, JBoss released the JSR-301 compliant Portlet Bridge CR1. Currently the bridge supports any combination of JSF, Seam, and RichFaces to run inside a portlet.
  
  
• eXo Portal 2.5.1
  
  
• Jetspeed 2: no updates since version 2.1.3 from December 2007.
  

From a portal technology point of view, it is interesting to see the product's maturity with regards to the following standards:

• JSR-168 - Portlet Specification (final since Oct 2003)
  
• JSR-286 - Portlet Specification 2.0 (final since June 2008)
  
• WSRP 1.0 - The first specification of Web Services for Remote Portlets (final since August 2003)
  
• WSRP 2.0 (final since April 2008)
  
• JSR-301: Portlet 1.0 (JSR-168) Bridge Specification for JSF 1.x:
  Current Status: proposed final draft in Jan 2009
  Currently available implementations of JSR-301:
  - MyFaces Portlet Bridge
  - OpenPortal Portlet Bridge (used in Liferay Portal)
  - JBoss Portlet Bridge (used by JBoss Portal)
  
• JSR-329: Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286) Bridge Specification for JSF 1.2:
  too early for products to support this JSR as it has been created in January 2009 and is in the status "Early Draft Review" as of March 2009.
  Note that this specification is led by Oracle exclusively at the moment.
• JSR-314: JSF 2.0:
  The support of JSF 2.0 in a portlet container is not yet officially addressed. There is no JSR around like "Portlet 2.0 Bridge for JSF 2.0".
  

Besides the Portal related activities, let's have a look on Java related quick news:

• SUN has announced that Glassfish v3 Milestone 2 will be ready by Java One 2009 in June.
  For the complete schedule, click on this link.
• Liferay 5.2 is now fully supporting WSRP 2.0 with the release of the WSRP 2.0 FCS binary.
• Oracle & SUN: Oracle buys SUN as of the announcement on April 20th 2009.
  It will be very interesting what will happen to SUN's products like
  - The whole Glassfish Portfolio
  - MySQL
  - Netbeans
  - OpenSolaris and
  - JavaFX
• Java EE 6: The JSR-316 has passed the Public Review state. See its results.
  

Java People Spotlight: Domenico Crescenti

In this edition of the "CTP People Spotlight" series we introduce Domenico, one of the CTP competences for content related topics.

Java Competence Role:
Messica (insider)
My Master Kung-Fu Skills:
They call me Mr. Bean
I'd be excited to get my hands dirty on:
JCR 2.0 (JSR-283)

---

Q&A

Q: Hi Domenico, how would your message look like if you would have to tell it via Twitter what you are currently doing?
A: I'm buying some insecticide to feed the bug in my code :)

Q: What was the greatest piece of code you have ever written so far?
A: That was definitely the play fair chiffre

Q: What is the best quote you have ever heard about programming?
A: "Cool!!! You didn't mess up my code"

Q: What is the best quote you have heard from our managers?
A: "........."

Q: What is the most cutting-edge technology or framework you actually used on projects?
A: Vamosa!

Q: What is your favorite podcast?
A: Discovery Channel Video Podcast – the US original of course – and the Java Posse Podcast

Q: Which Java book can you recommend and for what reason?
A: Java (Taschenbuch) by far the best Java book I’ve ever read.

JBoss Seam on Google App Engine - First Steps

[UPDATE] The latest Morjarra release 1.2_13 as well as the latest Appengine SDK 1.2.2 seem to fix a couple of problems described below. My task backlog is actually growing :-) but I hope I find some time to look again how things work with these new versions.

I spent the last three weeks in a repetition course of the Swiss army - far away from any Java code. Naturally my fingers started to itch while reading the announcement of Google that their App Engine now supports Java! So I grabbed my MacBook to enjoy the sun, Java coding and Eastern holidays.

As I usually write web applications with JBoss Seam, I decided to give the framework a try in the Google cloud - preparing for a bumpy road as Seam founds on standards which are mostly listed as either not or not known to be working. The following article describes the (bad) tweaks I had to do to get something basic running - I guess if you start doing serious development, you might hit more walls.

First, install the Eclipse Plugin for App Engine and create a new project. I'll base my descriptions on this initial setup. Switch on sessions in appengine-web.xml:

<sessions-enabled>true</sessions-enabled>

Setting up JSF 1.2

Download the latest Mojarra 1.2 release [1.2_12] and put it in the WEB-INF/lib directory. You can configure the Faces servlet in web.xml as usual

<servlet>
   <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
   <servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
   <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
   <servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
   <url-pattern>*.seam</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Starting Jetty with only this will fail due to some incompatibilities of Jetty and Mojarra. As with Seam we will need JBoss EL anyway, we can configure Mojarra to use the JBoss EL ExpressionFactory. Add the JBoss EL JAR to WEB-INF/lib and the following XML to your web.xml:

<context-param>
   <param-name>com.sun.faces.expressionFactory</param-name>
   <param-value>org.jboss.el.ExpressionFactoryImpl</param-value>
</context-param>

Now it's already patch time. Jetty in the Google environment seems to have a bug in its Servlet API implementation, missing the ServletContext.getContextPath() method (new in version 2.5). Also, Mojarra tries to be clever about initialization work and uses Threads in the ConfigManager - the App Engine SecurityManager will let the whole thing blow up. Something similar happens in the JBoss ReferenceCache class. All patched classes can be found here. Drop the Java code in your source folder, Jettys classloader will pick it up.

This will at least make the whole thing start up. I also added facelets (JAR file, view handler in faces-config.xml and view suffix in web.xml).

Unfortunately, using RichFaces components is an absolute no go on App Engine. RichFaces is full of references to AWT or JAI classes, which Google blocks completely. If anybody wants to try ICEFaces - good luck!

Adding Seam

Now it's time to add all the Seam stuff. Quite a couple of JARs to put into the application. I basically used Seam 2.1.1.GA and libraries from JBoss 4.2.3.GA. The complete list of what should go into WEB-INF/lib is shown in the screenshot below.



JTA is not even on the list of APIs Google gives a recommendation, so let's fall back on Java SE behavior. Configure components.xml with:

<transaction:entity-transaction entity-manager="#{entityManager}"/>

Although we cannot use Hibernate as persistence provider, Seam has a couple of dependencies to it (e.g. when using Hibernate Validators). As soon as we have it in the classpath, Seam activates its HibernatePersistenceProvider component. This will behave pretty bad, and for simplicity we just override this component:

@Name("org.jboss.seam.persistence.persistenceProvider")
@Scope(ScopeType.STATELESS)
@BypassInterceptors
@Install(precedence = Install.APPLICATION,
      classDependencies={"org.hibernate.Session", "javax.persistence.EntityManager"})
public class OverrideHibernatePersistenceProvider extends PersistenceProvider {
}

Now also add a persistence provider as described in the Google docs and disable DataNucleus checking for multiple PersistenceContextFactory instantiations with this property in appengine-web.xml.

<property name="appengine.orm.disable.duplicate.emf.exception" value="true"/>

As before, also Seam needs a couple of patches. Main reasons for those are references to javax.naming.NamingException (which is not white listed, credits to Toby for the hint) and session/conversation components not implementing Serializable correctly. The last point is probably something not hitting Seam or your application the last time.

Identity

As a next step I tried to add some users to the application. Seam's Identity module builds around the javax.security.auth.Subject and Principal classes. Even though those classes are white listed, the SecurityManager blocks any attempt to add a Principal to a Subject. Well, how useful is that... As a quick fallback I integrated the Google Accounts API:

@Name("org.jboss.seam.security.identity")
@Scope(SESSION)
@Install(precedence = Install.APPLICATION)
@BypassInterceptors
@Startup
public class AppEngineIdentity extends Identity {

  private static final long serialVersionUID = -9111123179634646677L;

  public static final String ROLE_USER = "user";
  public static final String ROLE_ADMIN = "admin";

  private transient UserService userService;

  @Create
  @Override
  public void create() {      
      userService = UserServiceFactory.getUserService();
  }

  @Override
  public boolean isLoggedIn() {
      return getUserService().isUserLoggedIn();
  }

  @Override
  public Principal getPrincipal() {
      if (isLoggedIn())
          return new SimplePrincipal(getUserService().getCurrentUser().getNickname());
      return null;
  }

  @Override
  public void checkRole(String role) {
      if (!isLoggedIn())
          throw new NotLoggedInException();
      if ((ROLE_ADMIN.equals(role) && !getUserService().isUserAdmin()) || !ROLE_USER.equals(role))
          throw new AuthorizationException(String.format(
                  "Authorization check failed for role [%s]", role));
  }

  @Override
  public boolean hasRole(String role) {
      if (!isLoggedIn())
          return false;
      return ((ROLE_ADMIN.equals(role) && getUserService().isUserAdmin()) || ROLE_USER.equals(role));
  }

  @Override
  public String getUsername() {
      if (isLoggedIn())
          return getUserService().getCurrentUser().getNickname();
      return null;
  }

  public String createLoginURL(String destination) {
      return getUserService().createLoginURL(destination);
  }

  public String createLogoutURL(String destination) {
      return getUserService().createLogoutURL(destination);
  }

  public User getUser() {
      if (isLoggedIn())
          return getUserService().getCurrentUser();
      return null;
  }

  private UserService getUserService() {
      if (userService == null)
          userService = UserServiceFactory.getUserService();
      return userService;
  }

}

Both create... methods can be used in the UI for generating login/logout URLs. Destination defines the URL the user gets redirected after successful login/logout. Also make sure that the identity configuration is removed from components.xml

Wrap up

Running this setup should give you a base for a very simple Seam app like in the screenshot below.



This first step has not been doing any persistence work, and my first tries with DataNucleus were not as straight forward as I had expected from a JPA implementation. Hope Google will catch up here with something more mature. Also, even the simple setup required a couple of nasty tweaks on the frameworks. Another big hurdle here are the runtime differences from production to local environment. For some serious work on App Engine, it's so far more recommendable to look into GWT.

Anyway, if you found this useful - looking forward to hear from your next steps in the cloud.

JBoss Seam Hot Deploy with Maven - Update

I just published an updated version of the Seam Hotdeploy Maven Plugin (see my previous post here). For a detailed description on how to use it, have a look at the Google Code Wiki. I also updated the sample Maven POM featuring JBoss Seam 2.1.1.GA.

The new version should be easier to configure and play nicer with e.g. the Eclipse Maven plugin (I'm not using NetBeans/IntelliJ too often, but I hope this works also fine there). The new Eclipse builder configuration looks like shown in the image below:



Note: The Eclipse Maven plugin using its embedded Maven had somehow problems with the extended lifecycle of the Hotdeploy Plugin. Using an external Maven installation (2.0.10) felt not only faster but was also not having problems with it.

Java People Spotlight: Daniel Käppeli

The "People Spotlight" series continues with a Java fellow who is at Cambridge Technology Partners since years now: Dani is continuously working in projects that most often deal with Open Source technology stacks.

Java Competence Role:
Senior Developer
My Master Kung-Fu Skills:
... there are so many to choose from ...
I'd be excited to get my hands dirty on:
Java EE 6 : see how all the bits and pieces fit together

---

Q&A

Q: Hi Dani, how would your message look like if you would have to tell it via Twitter what you are currently doing?
A: Recovering from a busy week and from yesterday’s dinner.

Q: What was the greatest piece of code you have ever written so far?
A: Parsing an XML document in 1 LoC with Spring OXM. Isn't that cool?

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
JAXBElement<GpxType> object = (JAXBElement<GpxType>)this.getUnmarshaller().unmarshal(new StreamSource(inputStream));

Q: What is the best quote you have ever heard about programming?
A: “These performance improvements are quite slow!”, K. K. 02.09

Q: What is the best quote you have heard from our managers?
A: "In the next quarter the hockey stick effect will kick in."

Q: What is the most cutting-edge technology or framework you actually used on projects?
A: RESTful Web Services with Jersey
Q: Wow! I actually didn't know that CTP uses that already... so we belong to the very early adopters of JSR-311 in customer projects! Nice Dani... when are you doing a Knowledge Share on this? ... Ok let's keep on with this short questionnaire first.

Q: What is your favorite podcast?
A: Discovery Channel Video Podcast – the US original of course – and the Java Posse Podcast

Q: Which Java book can you recommend and for what reason?
A: Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java Second Edition, by far the best Java book I’ve ever read

Portal Update January 2009

After the snowy december we are back with new posts this year and we are looking forward to an interesting year! Java EE 6 is the late christmas present for many of us Java aficionados and it is going to be released probably around JavaOne in June...

In the portal corner, the following was important this month:

• SUN: no updates
  
  
• Liferay:
  - One UI to rule them all: Check out this introduction of a new management console in Liferay Portal. This portal product is definitely going to be more and more interesting among the free portal products!
  
  
• Oracle:
  - Oracle Fusion Middleware Radio has released some talks about portal product roadmaps. No much news if you followed all our portal updates so far ;-). But if you are interested in to listen to them, here they are:
  Oracle WebLogic Portal Roadmap (formerly BEA WebLogic Portal)
  Oracle WebCenter Interaction Roadmap (formerly BEA AquaLogic User Interaction)
  Oracle Portal Roadmap
  
  
• JBoss:
  - Release of JBoss Portal 2.7.1 which is a maintenance release for the 2.7 series that support JSR-286 portlets. The detailed release notes can be found here.
  - The JBoss Portlet Bridge has reached Beta 6 and it integrates Seam and RichFaces. Documentation on this Beta release can be found here.
  - Next-Gen Identity API for JBoss Portal is in public review. Check their documentation here.
  
  
• eXo:
  - eXo Portal 2.5.1, a maintenance release, is now available and has finalized its support of Right-To-Left languages like arabic. See video here.
  - eXo Portal and Spring Security: This is a very nice documentation released in January about how to integrate Spring Security 2.5.x into eXo Portal.
  
  
• Other portal and Java related quick news:
  
  Jan-26: JSR-299: WebBeans is dead. Long live Java Contexts and Dependency Injection!
  
  Jan-23: Java EE 6 has gone Public Review!
  - WebBeans (Gavin King, JSR 299, @TA )
  - Bean Validation (Emmanuel Bernard, JSR 303, @TA )
  - JSF 2.0 (Ed Burns & Roger Kitain, JSR 314, @TA )
  - Servlet 3.0 (Rajiv Mordani, JSR 315, @TA )
  - JPA 2.0 (Linda DeMichiel, JSR 317, @TA )
  - EJB 3.1 (Ken Saks, JSR 318 @TA )
  - JCA 1.6 (Binod PG & Sivakumar Thyagarajan, JSR 322, @TA )
  
  Jan-18: Performance Analysis: VisualVM 1.1 has been released!
  Dec-16: JBoss Application Server 5.0 has gone GA. So JBoss has finally joined the list of "Java EE 5 Compatible Implementations".
  
  
• NetBeans:
  - Portal Pack 3.0 Beta is now available
  
• IBM: no portal news
  
• Eclipse: no portal news
  
• IntelliJIDEA: no portal news

Using JBoss Seam Hot Deployment with a Maven Build

[UPDATE: The new plugin version is documented here]

As you might have read in previous posts, one of our favorite web application stacks consists of JBoss Seam. While combining this with our favorite tooling suite consisting of Eclipse and Maven, we had to realize that Seam has a much longer tradition with Ant, and Maven support is only slowly moving in. Today I want to share some ideas on how to tackle the combination issues.


While JBoss Tools provides a nice code hot deployment feature when working with Seam on JBoss, things can get a little hairy when using a Maven build with the project. Seam uses a special classloader and relies on monitoring the WEB-INF/dev folder for changed classes - where Maven is completely unaware of this and uses the standard WEB-INF/classes folder to deploy all classes in the project. More than once I've seen the situation where JBoss Tools and Maven got in each others way, ending with JBoss rejecting to restart the application due to "duplicate components". The reason was that Eclipse hot deployed classes to WEB-INF/dev where Seam expects them, but Maven being completely unaware of it packaging all classes in the common WEB-INF/classes folder.

In order to avoid trouble and also to allow using hot deployment from a command line build, I experimented with several approaches to achieve hot deployment with Maven. The main challenges here are:

• Distinguishing compiler output: The Maven compiler plugin by default compiles everything in the same output folder. We need to be able to distinguish between hot and regular deployable code.
• Publish updated resources to JBoss, including domain model classes, seam components as well as XHTML pages.
• Make sure Seam unit tests still compile.
  

The solution I came up with was to write a new Maven plugin which extends the Maven compiler plugin with a new hotdeploy:compile goal and the following functionalities (source code as well as a simple Maven 2 repository is available in our Google Code account):

• Hook into the compile phase and compile the source code to a dedicated directory. The source code location is configurable as well as the output directory.
• Remove outdated hot deployable class files from the JBoss deployment. This is necessary for the Seam classloader to pick up the changes, only updating the file is not enough.

The plugin configuration is straight forward as it's based on the regular compiler plugin and is shown in the XML snippet below. Note that it is recommended to create a profile for this build setup as both your continuous build as well as your operations team might not care too much about using hot deployment.

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.ctp.seam.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-hotdeploy-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.0</version>
    <configuration>
        <source>${java.source.version}</source>
        <target>${java.source.version}</target>
        <hotdeployOutputDirectory>${directory.hotdeployables}</hotdeployOutputDirectory>
        <includes>
            <include>**/session/**</include>
        </includes>
        <deployDirectory>
            ${directory.deploy.jboss}/${build.finalName}.${project.packaging}
        </deployDirectory>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <phase>compile</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>compile</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

The main additions to a regular compiler plugin setup are:

• This variant uses the common /src/main/java source folder and uses in- and excludes to distinguish the hot deployable sources. Alternatively you can set the sourceDirectory configuration value pointing to a dedicated source folder (similar as JBoss Tools does the setup for you). Don't forget that this requires then the Build Helper Maven plugin to add source folders to your regular build.
• The deployDirectory is a reference to your exploded application directory inside the JBoss deploy folder. This is needed in order to remove outdated hot deployable classes.
• You can specify the hotdeployOutputDirectory directory where the code should be compiled to. Note that this defaults to the value shown in the example - feel free to skip this part. The plugin will compile into this folder after appending a WEB-INF/dev to the path.
  

The rest of the setup we can do by simply reconfiguring existing plugins. Note the Google Code Wiki contains a complete sample POM ready for you to start your own Seam webapp. The details on the configuration are:

• Reconfiguring the WAR plugin so the webappDirectory points inside our JBoss deploy folder. Maven uses this folder to assemble the WAR file, which perfectly corresponds to an exploded deployment. Additionally we define our hot deployment compilation folder as a webResource, which will copy our compilation exactly to the WEB-INF/dev folder in the exploded deployment.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <webResources>
            <resource>
                <directory>${directory.hotdeployables}</directory>
                <filtering>false</filtering>
            </resource>
        </webResources>
        <webappDirectory>
            ${directory.deploy.jboss}/${build.finalName}.${project.packaging}
        </webappDirectory>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

• Similarly, we have to add our output folder to the test classpath. This is simplest done by adding it as a resource folder, which will copy the classes to the target/test-classes directory before the test classes are compiled:
  

<testResources>
    <testResource>
        <directory>${directory.hotdeployables}/WEB-INF/dev</directory>
        <filtering>false</filtering>
    </testResource>
    ...
</testResources>

If you want to run a similar luxury setup as you get from JBoss Tools, you can add a Maven builder to your project. Simply go to the Eclipse Project properties and click "New" on the "Builders" properties. The new Maven build should look like the following:



Make sure that the following conditions apply to your Eclipse setup:

• The JRE you have configured is actually a JDK - otherwise the builder will fail. Once you see that the builder does not fail, you can also switch off the console allocation in the "Common" tab.


• Also take care that you always build with your specific hot deploy profile - otherwise make sure to clean before using the build again.


• Assert that Eclipse uses a dedicated output folder and not the Maven target/classes.

Unfortunately when activating the builder Eclipse might prompt you when editing files and (depending on the speed of your machine) hang for a second or two after saving a file. Still, this is much better than waiting a minute for your JBoss server to restart.

Happy coding!