Tag: java

Stopping short of open sourcing the language itself, which I think is a good thing, Sun are today expected to announce that they will be open sourcing many of it’s development tools and applications.

Announcements are expected for:

• a Java EE 5 Application Server (based on GlassFish? – this would seem logical since GlassFish is already open source)
• Sun Java System Portal 7 – an integration server
• Java Studio Enterprise (their enterprise flavor of their IDE, based on NetBeans)
• message queing software
• Web Services Interoperability Technology

It’s JavaOne in San Francisco this week, starting tomorrow. New this week, Sun is offering a large number of PDFs for the sessions available for download prior to the sessions, so this year you won’t have to wait several weeks before you can get hold of the PDFs.

Check out the session browser here.

In time for JavaOne this week, Netbeans 5.5 beta is announced complete with Java EE 5.0 support.

In general I’ve been impressed with the Netbeans 5.0+ IDE, but from my recent experience with the 5.5. daily builds, there are still plenty of bugs to be ironed out in the Wizards before they are usable. The one that has caught my eye is the ‘JSF pages from Entities’, but it’s not very stable – throws lots of exceptions, and the generated code does not yet run on JBoss 4.0+.

My previous attempts to find a code generator that worked for me led me nowhere. One of my collegues at work mentioned Grails, a framework based on Groovy, a scripting language close to Java in syntax and runs on a JVM. Grails is ‘Groovy on Rails’, a Groovy implementation of Ruby on Rails.

Ok, now we’re talking. I had a hard time picking up Ruby On Rails because I couldn’t get my head around the Ruby syntax, but I can see the benefits on the RoR approach.

Grails gets me to a place I’m comfortable with, and a language I can work with – I can generate my CRUD application based on my Entities and then take it from there. This is looking good. So far I have generated just a small test app to see how it hangs together, and have modified some of the generated .gsp pages – this is looking very promising so far.

I have to say I am pretty excited about Grails. I have a small project for a client to build an online store, so I’m going to be investigating building it with Grails and will see how far I get. Here’s my first post about some MySQL issues, but now I’ve resolved those I’m on the way.