March 2006 – Page 2 – Kev's Development Toolbox

March 29, 2006

Microsoft ship IE patch for Eolas case settlement

Microsoft has been in court attempting to settle the case against them by Eolas, who are claiming Microsoft’s Internet Explorer infringes on their patents for using browser plugins to display multimedia content in a browser.

In response to this, Microsoft have an update to current versions of IE that disables all ActiveX plugins when first loaded in a page. The browser will prompt the user to click the initially inactive plugin before it is activated and ready to use. I’m not sure if this really is the final solution but this seems a bit lame to me. Maybe in addition to this there will be an acknowledgement message that pops up that credits the technology to Eolas, but by itself I can’t imagine Eolas will accept this as the only solution to their case against Microsoft?

March 29, 2006

Sun Developer Network: Advantages of Java EE 5.0

java.sun.com have an interview with Bill Shannon, the Java EE spec lead, and discuss the benefits of the Java EE 5.0 platform.

The interview covers the introduction of annotation for marking up beans as a replacement to complicated deployment descriptors, the Java Persistence API in EJB3.0, JSF, Webservices, and the Glassfish open source Java EE 5.0 application server.

March 28, 2006

Is the RIFE framework stack the next big thing?

This had recently caught my eye – a stack of different Java frameworks that together give you all the features and APIs you need for building a large majority of typical web applications – called RIFE.

The JavaPosse on March 22 interviewed the guy behind the framework – I haven’t listened to it yet, but I’ll post again when I have some feedback.

March 27, 2006

Netbeans 5.0 first impressions (and would I switch from Eclipse?)

I downloaded and played around with Netbeans 5.0 at the weekend. I used it to develop some sample code using the Java SE 6.0 Beta Desktop Integration new APIs (see my sample SystemTray code here).

So my first thoughts? Wow, it looks good. The default UI is very slick and clean, and the user interaction is very responsive. I’ve been living in an Eclipse derivitive world for the past 3 years now at work (using IBM’s WSAD and RAD), and so it was a natural choice to also use Eclipse outside of work. When you use an IDE solidly day in, day out, you get very accustomed to it’s nuances and ways. I have to say though, my first impressions of Netbeans are, yes – I could use this IDE on a daily basis.

Of course one day is hardly a thorough test drive and there are plenty of features I didn’t even use, but so far I like what I see. The main noticable difference from Netbeans 5.0 compared to Eclipse out of the box, is that with Eclipse development you can’t go far before you start looking for plugins to supplement it’s features. Netbeans seems to have a lot of support straight out of the box without the need for searching around for add ons.

The main selling point so far has to be the Matisse GUI builder. Wow is that slick. I only used it to develop a small test app, but it was an absolute joy to be able to drag and drop Swing components onto a Panel and have the GUI builder help with positioning and alignment – very neat feature. If I had to build a Swing app any time soon, I would definitely be using Netbeans 5.0.

My only major concern right now is the lack of support for the emerging EJB3.0 spec. I’m doing a lot of investigation with EJB3.0 and deploying to JBoss 4.0.x, so it was a surprise to not have the support in 5.0 yet. Sadly at the moment this will be the only reason to hold me back from switching from Eclipse. JBoss have their JBoss-IDE Eclipse plug-in which gives EJB3.0 support with JBoss server WTP targeting. If this feature were available in Netbeans right now then I would make the switch today.

Overall, I was so impressed that I even bought a Netbeans 5.0 shirt to wear at work amongst my Eclipse colleagues 🙂

Update: I just did a quick Google and found a couple of articles, for example this one, on the EJB3.0 support in the latest Netbeans 5.5 daily builds, so I’ll be downloading this and getting started with Netbeans from here on…