Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
The ObjectWeb opensource group have released v3.2 of their popular Eclipse plugin, Lomboz, that offers helpers and support for EE development in Eclipse 3.2.
Lomboz is based on the Eclipse WTP (Web Tools Platform), and offers server support (start/stop/debug etc), support for building portals with ObjectWeb’s eXo portal framework, support for Struts and XMLBeans, Service Component Architecture runtimes (Apache Tuscany), and Enterprise Service Bus (ObjectWeb Celtix).
JRuby 0.9.1 has been released – JRuby offers a 100% Java implementation of the Ruby language supported on the Java VM, which brings all the benefits of the dynamic language to the Java platform. This release improves performance, and also improves support for running the Ruby on Rails framework and applications on the Java VM.
For more info on JRuby, see the project site here.
The majority of Solution Providers are still waiting for Java EE 5 support from the major vendors before starting to consider implementing new systems with EE 5 features. This article on InfoQ.com provides a good summary of where the major players currently are in terms of their announced support for EE 5 compliance. Noticibly falling behind is IBM which apparently will not have EE 5 support in Websphere until 2008.
Howard Lovatt has a good summary of the various proposed approaches to include the ability to support closures in Java, including his own proposal as well.
Closures are supported in many other languages like Ruby, Python, Lisp and Perl, and allow the developer to define a block of code and refer to that block of code with a reference. This allows the reference to the block to be passed as a parameter and to be applied to other code, for example to all matching items within a loop.