Winning

A shout-out to Open For Business

One of our favorite projects is moving into a more prominent role, as the Java Tools Community project Open For Business (OFBiz) has been accepted as an Apache Incubator project. OFBiz provides the building blocks of e-commerce applications, including catalog, customer, order, warehouse and fulfillment management functionality. A strong community has formed around the OFBiz project, as described in a java.net success story article from 2004.

OFBiz has a remarkably active community -- one that has held its own OFBiz conferences -- and we're sure that the prominence they'll get as part of Apache will help to make this remarkable project even more successful.

Also in Projects and
Communities, an article on TheServerSide addresses Clustering JSR-168 Portlet Applications in Tomcat. "While Tomcat has provided session replication for quite some time, it has not supported replication of session changes resulting from a cross-context call from one webapp to another." The article show how to resolve the problem, with needed changes to be included in Tomcat 5.5.16 and later.

... in today's Weblogs.
Marcelo Mayworm is
Using Maven to remove Chinese Wall during offshore development:
"I came across several interesting communication glitches in an offshore development software. We faced problems such as communication bottlenecks and lack of awareness of what developers were physically producing."

Lance Andersen writes about the
JDBC 4.0 RowId Interface:
"JDBC 4.0 has introduced several new features which will be highlighted in blogs over the next few weeks. Today's focus is on the RowId interface."

In
The economics of quality, Malcolm Davis writes:
"The only thing more expensive than writing software is writing bad software. - Alan Cooper. This blog discusses the truth in Alans statement."

New thoughts from James Gosling kick off the
Also in
Java Today section.
In a talk at Sun's World Wide Education & Research Conference in New York City, Java founder James Gosling discounted the idea that Java was threatened by other languages. "PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems," he continued, "but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems." He also dismisses C#: "we were afraid they were going to do something really creative - but they're hopelessly focused on one platform." Gosling also speaks to SYS-CON.TV's Jeremy Geelan in a video interview.

So what is Java? Lazy conventional wisdom spouts catch phrases about applets, bad performance, Swing appearance problems, and other issues that either aren't true or aren't relevant (and maybe never were). The article What Is Java tries to reframe the conversation for Java's second decade by separating language from VM and taking a look at what each is and where they're going, while also noting the profound size and influence of what is the largest and arguably most underappreciated open source community in existence today.