If you are looking for an awesome look n feel for Swing, the Synthetica LNF is very impressive – check out the screenshots.
Lightweight O/R mapping with Amber
Norbert Ehreke introduces a lightweight O/R mapping framework called Amber on the OnJava.com site.
He walks through a code example of mapping objects to tables using Java 5 annotations together with Amber.
Incidentally, Hibernate3 also supports mapping using Annotations as part of the implementation of the EJB3.0 Entity Bean spec – see on the Hibernate site.
Google launch music search service
Google have added music, CD and lyrics search results to their search engine. Enter an artist, album title or song name, and in the results you’ll get links to partner sites to buy the music (iTunes etc), and also links to the lyrics. Very cool.
“Java? It’s so Nineties” – BusinessWeek
Business Week have an article on their site claiming that Java ‘is so Nineties’, implying that it’s time has come and gone. I think the author is missing the point somewhat. Java right now is in it’s prime and is well and truely entrenched in mainstream large systems development. It is also a hugely successful diverse development platform enabling system development on mobile devices, phones, settop boxes, PCs, Macs, Linx, other Unixes, and mainframes. No other development platform and language has had this degree of widespread adoption before (well maybe C and C++ for enabling development at a lower level, but no other high level languages), and certainly nothing from the Microsoft side of the fence.
I’ve seen it quoted a couple of times in different places that ‘Java is the new Cobol’ – meaning that Java is currently in it’s maturity as a language and a patform, and is a serious contender as an option for developing a new system. In the early days in the late 90s you were taking a serious risk to choose Java as your development language because it was new, not widely understood and quite honestly at that time no-one could have forseen the widespread success that the language has had.
This does not mean that the rest of the article is incorrect – there are other options out there, like LAMP based solutions as the author mentions, but the article is incorrect in the negative image that it portrays. There has never been a better time to be involved in Java development, this is an exciting time, and the platform continues to evolve and develop at an alarming rate.