Kev's Development Toolbox

September 14, 2007

New book available – Filthy Rich Clients

Romain Guy and Chet Haase, who during the past couple of Java One conferences have stunned the development community with just what is possible with Swing and building superb looking desktop applications in Java, have published a new book, Filthy Rich Clients. The book gives walkthroughs and code examples of some of the techniques they have used to build their example demo applications.

You can find online demos of the Aerith application in a few places online, including here, and the source code and additional screenshots are here.

September 11, 2007

iPhones price drop

Jobs announced a price drop on the iPhones last week from $599 to $399, upsetting the early adopters who all ran out to buy one on day 1. Smart move to drop the price, but maybe not too smart this closely after they were launched? The price is at least now more realistic. Apple are also reportedly offering $100 back to anyone who paid the full price prior to the price drop.

September 10, 2007

IBM to add resources to OpenOffice project

IBM have announced that they will be adding resources to help with the OpenOffice project, the open source alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite.

August 31, 2007

Glassfish V2 – to include performance improvements?

I tried running a couple of simple webapps that I currently run on JBoss 4.x on Glassfish V1 (including this website and blog), and was surprised to find out that my apps ran painfully slow. This was just an observation, I don’t have any exact timings, but where my webapps on JBoss 4 the pages load within the snap of your fingers, on Glassfish V1 it seems that pages were taking a couple of seconds to come back, and it didn’t improve even after successive page hits.

I heard on the JavaPosse’s interview with the Glassfish developer guys that the Final Release Candidate for V2 has a number of performance improvements (since V1 was just a developer release), so I’m interested to give it another try sometime soon.

I’ve used JBoss for a number of years to run my sites, but from being used to using Weblogic and Websphere during my ‘day job’, I’m used to having a rich administration front end, which I think is the one area where JBoss lacks. Glassfish on the otherhand has an admin console to compare with the big guys, and this is particularly attractive to me. I’ll post an update when I’ve tried it out again.