Kev's Development Toolbox

O’Reilly have a good article on their OnJava.com site on resolving classloader issues – they cover both the more simple ClassNotFoundException, as well as the more confusing NoClassDefFoundError.

I don’t think I had come across NoClassDefFoundError in 8 years of working with Java, until the last year where I have been developing with IBM’s Websphere Studio Application Developer. It works with your projects as WAR, JAR and EAR files expanded to your filesystem anduns them like this within it’s Websphere test server environment. If you don’t have the correct JAR dependencies set between projects then you are guaranteed to see some NoClassDefFoundErrors…

Had I been there this year this is something that I would have liked to have seen… a huge timeline whiteboard set out over several boards on a wall, where people could add their own experiences with Java.

There are some pretty good resolution pictures on the java.net site here.

Bruce Tate has some interesting comments on the announcements at JavaOne this week, on how developers have ‘hit the wall’ with the current programming model with overly bloated feature rich APIs:

“They’ve hit the wall. It’s ground-hog day all over again. Get excited. Learn a monolithic API. Start to build it. Make design mistakes. Dig hole. Make mess. Curse. Work overtime. Scratch and claw. Find silver bullet. Lather, rinse, and repeat”

We’ve all been there, done that. So whats next? Whereas OO programming was the last major shift to get past the last ‘wall’, he believe Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is going to be the next major change in development.

Major annoucements today included:

• NetBeans 4.0 released: now a complete J2EE development environment with support for developing JSPs, Servlets, EJBs, and Web Services
• Allied Irish Bank, one of Irelands largest financial institutions, is going to be migrating 7500 users to the Linux based Java Desktop System operating system.