Felipe Leme's Blog: Tools Archives

Posted by felipeal on July 13, 2004 at 04:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I haven't blogged in a while - even after attending Java One 2004, which is source for blogging heaven - but I couldn't let this date pass on without making some noise.
From Maven's main page:


Maven 1.0 Released - 13 July 2004



Maven 1.0 has been released.

Download | Installation Instructions | Release Notes

'Nuff said..

Felipe

PS: and, of course, congratulations to the whole Maven team :-)

JavaServer Faces specification finally approved

Posted by felipeal on March 03, 2004 at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The JCP committee approved the final specification for JSR 127. In other words, the long awaited JSF (JavaServer Faces) has finally left its specification stage.

There is a lot of expectation about JSF and the problems it will solve (or create). Some people are excited with the technology, others are worried it would compete with frameworks like Struts, while other are just skeptical if its really that panacea.

In my opinion, it has the potential to be a good technology, specially with the support IDE vendors are giving to it (for instance, JDeveloper 9.0.5 supports it and Sun's-IDE-formerly-know-as-Project-Rave is based on JSF), but it's still early to take any conclusion. So, only time will tell, and hence a final JSR specification is a first step in this direction...

PS: the process took so long that even Sun recognized it when they vote for it:

On 2004-02-17 Sun Microsystems, Inc. voted Yes with the following comment:
This has been a long road. I'm glad to see this important JSR coming in for final approval!

ASF's comment was even funnier:

On 2004-02-24 Apache Software Foundation voted Yes with the following comment:
Is it really done? :)

Extra! Extra! Lomboz has gone open source!

Posted by felipeal on January 22, 2004 at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Lomboz - a J2EE plug-in for Eclipse - has become open source. That is great news for the Eclipse and Open Source communities.

A couple of days ago I was browsing the Web to get more information about JOnAS and JORAM. As both products are offered by the same entity (ObjectWeb), I decided to take a look at their repository. Then, once I clicked on that link, I got the suprise: it said Lomboz was their top download project for the last 30 days!!!

If you do not understand my reaction let me tell a little bit of history: one of the main complaints about Eclipse is the lack of a free (as free-speech) J2EE plug-in, especially something that offered JSP editing and debugging capabilities. So, if you wanted a fully-integrated J2EE environment on top on Eclipse, you would need to install MyEclipseIde (which is an awesome product, but not free) or Lomboz (which was free but as free-beer, but not as free-speech). I think MyEclipseIDE is a better product, although Lomboz is more popular because it is free. But even though it was free, Lomboz had many limitations and bugs that couldn't be fixed by the community (as it was a closed-source product). To make things even more complicated, Lomboz was hosted on SourceForge, which would suggest it was indeed open-source (but the truth is that they used SF resources only for forums and bug reporting).

What intrigues me most though (and hence the reason I am posting this message) is the fact that Lomboz transition to the OSS (Open Source Software) world has not been heralded as someone would expect - in fact, if you google for "Lomboz Open source", the only notification you will find is Eteration's news page, which does not even mentioned *when* that happened.

I like Eclipse - and that comes from a Emacs junkie, whose favorite IDE is called JDK. It's the only IDE that have a nice look feel on Linux, for instance. But the fact that you have to install a lot of plug-ins to make it fully-productive is a pain. Specially when a plug-in breaks something and then you have to re-install Eclipse (and all the plug-ins).

So, now that one of the last pieces of the puzzle has been found, I think it is time for an OSS project that creates an Eclipse distribution bundled with a couple of nice OSS plug-ins (like Lomboz, XMen, JFaceJDBC, etc..) integrated with bundled servers (like JBoss, Tomcat, HSQLDB, etc). We could even call it something like ESAD (Eclipse Studio Application Development) or EIE (Eclipse Integrated Environment) - although I think the first option would have some brand/copyright issues :-).

JDK 1.4.2_02 released

Posted by felipeal on October 22, 2003 at 06:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday was really a "release day". Not only JWSDP and JDeveloper had new releases, but also JDK 1.4.2.

Acording to the release notes, most of the changes are bug fixes. And even though these bugs don't affect the applications I'm using, I'm downloading it anyway (as I said earlier, it's time to move on :-).

JDeveloper 9.0.3.3 released

Posted by felipeal on October 21, 2003 at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oracle has relased today JDeveloper 9.0.3.3, a maintenance release for its IDE.

It has dozens of bug fixes, most of them related to BC4J (its MVC framework).

Running ant in loop mode

Posted by felipeal on September 02, 2003 at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Once in a while I work in a Java project where I need to run a simple Ant task many times in a short period of time. Like web projects where the JSP files are located in a directory under source control and are deployed in another directory by an Ant task. If I change a JSP file, I need to run Ant again, and it takes an eternity (about 5-6 seconds), due to the overhead of running the JVM, reading the XML files, etc...

Wouldn't it be nice if I could leave Ant running in a loop mode in those situations, so when I change the file I could redeploy it without that overhead?

For me, the answer is "Yes, that would be nice". But Ant doesn't have that feature, so now what? Now I can change Ant to include that feature, and that is the beauty of open source projects: if you want a new feature, you can just grab the code and implement it yourself. The same with bugs: rather than wait for the vendor to fix, test and publish a patch, you can open the code and nail the bug!

Now back to that new Ant feature: I created such patch and opened a bug for it.

We've been using it for a while in my team, and so far it's working fine. It's not in the basecode of Ant yet - and it might never be - so I upload the code to my site. If you liked the idea, please feel free to download it and give it a try. And if you like the results, give me some feedback through the bug's page or this weblog.

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