The LinuxWorld Conference and Expo is coming to San Francisco's Moscone's Center on August 4-7, 2008, and you could register for many free community sessions (on Moblin.org, PostgreSQL, OpenSUSE), Ubucon, and get a free pass to the Exhibit Hall.
Of course, you could also register for the full conference ($400-1500), featuring over 100 top-tier, educational sessions covering seven tracks that go deep into Linux and open source industry trends.
Grails has finally reached the milestone 1.0 release!
For those that don't know, Grails is the newest member of the Java EE stack of frameworks that promises convention-based rapid development of web applications. Rather than serve as yet another alternative for Java web development, Grails sits on top of the proven Spring/Hibernate/SiteMesh open-source combo that developers already know and trust.
Along with Groovy, Grails aims to do for Java EE what Rails did for the Ruby community.
Check out the Grails 1.0 Release Notes for info on new features, change log, downloads, and documentation.
We have opened some of our tutorials that was previously available only to paying participants for use by the general public. The new FREE Tutorials section features some quick overviews on topics such as Java, J2EE, XML, XSL, and other. Here's the list of the initial few:
Hope you enjoy it!
What a day for M&A's!
After months-long dispute over the value of BEA Systems Inc., Oracle finally agreed to buy the middleware software company for about $7.85 billion USD. When all is said and done, this little purchase will cost Oracle around $8.5 Billion or close to 25% more than BEA's current market cap. I guess BEA was smart to refuse Oracle's previous offer of $6.7 Billion.
Of course, this comes as no surprise given Oracle's $25 Billion three-year buying spree, which included PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and Hyperion Solutions.
Mind-boggling if you ask me.
Wow! With CNN Money predicting that MySQL will be "one of the most anticipated tech IPOs" of 2008, I guess it should come as no surprise that Sun acquired MySQL today for $1 Billion USD.
Of course, Sun is huge in the open-source community and it does not have a database server of its own, so its marriage with MySQL makes sense. There will be some anxiety within the ranks of the developers and users alike, but MySQL already addressed some of those concerns in their announcement. In short, everything we've come to love and expect from MySQL will still live on (e.g. like LAMP), so there is no reason to stress over what this means for the rest of us.
As far as I am concerned, this is another win for the open-source community!
Sun's open-source community conference, CommunityOne 2008, is now open for free registration!
This one-day event, happening on May 5th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, conveniently prequels Sun's flag-ship conference, JavaOne 2008, which runs from May 6th to 9th at the same location.
While the JavaOne conference is very structured and is meant to serve the entire Java community, CommunityOne 2008 on the other hand is driven (or at least defined) by the open-source community itself. Attendees are encouraged to come and discuss their own projects or open-source efforts, though Sun does invite speakers to talk about some of the more specific topics, including: Projects and Strategy, Operating Systems, Web Servers and Databases, Scripting Languages: Content Authoring and RIAs, Tools and Integrated Development Environments, Next Generation Web Applications, Web Scale Computing, and Chip Multithreading (CMT).
While the registration is free, space is limited. There is only room for 2,500 attendees, so register sooner rather than later!
We are kicking off the San Francisco Agile Software Meetup. Someone had to do it and after searching for an appropriate group, we decided to do it ourselves.
The first event will be on Tuesday January 29th at Marakana San Francisco Center, 1081 Mississippi Street, San Francisco, CA 94107. Event starts at 6:30. Come and join us!
Robert Vamosi from CNET, posted an article claiming that San Francisco-based Coverity, working in collaboration with Stanford University (and under a contract from the Department of Homeland Security), certified eleven open source projects as secure on the source-code level.
The projects include: Amanda, NTP, OpenPAM, OpenVPN, Overdose, Perl, PHP, Postfix, Python, Samba, and TCL.
This is great news as this certification provides enterprises and governments with an extra level of confidence in open source solutions!
After much delay, I decided to start The San Francisco Java Meetup group. Granted, this meetup existed in the past, but never really caught on. I guess the chemistry wasn't there, but the Java community is not only strong, it is growing! I feel that there are enough people in the Bay Area who are eager to meet other like-minded Java professionals and exchange ideas on hip'n'cool Java technologies.
To get things started, I will give a short talk on TestNG at the first Java meetup event on February 11th 2008 in San Francisco. I hope to see you there!
After the much-hyped Google / Earthlink free WiFi deal went bust, many of us in San Francisco were left disappointed. Here we are, in the IT capital in the world, and two companies that had the resources to pull this off instead pulled the plug on the entire project.
Fortunately for us, all hope is not lost. Meraki, a new startup on the block, promises to blanket the entire city of San Francisco with a free mesh-based WiFi network. With their "Free the Net" campaign Meraki provides free WiFi repeaters, and the city residents donate the juice to run them all. It's a win-win for everyone, so it's no wonder that Merkai's network already has over 40,000 users, and that the company recently raised $20M in funding!
I cannot wait for the network to expand to my part of town 
When asked about automated unit testing in Java, most developers first think of JUnit. Without a doubt, JUnit is still the de facto standard when it comes to test-driven development in Java, and is arguably the most popular/successful in the xUnit family of frameworks created by Kent Beck, and (in case of jUnit) Erich Gamma, the co-author of the very influential Design Patterns book (one of GoF).
Yet, despite all the popularity and the success behind jUnit, the open source community chose to embrace yet another automated testing framework for Java called TestNG. Created by Cédric Beust and Alexandru Popescu in 2004, TestNG tries to address many of the shortcomings of jUnit outlined here and here.
Of course, the jUnit camp has not stood still since 2004, and it caught up to TestNG with many of the features introduced in version 4.0, most notably the annotation-based API. Yet, TestNG is still considered superior to jUnit is the areas of flexibility, configuration-driven-testing, dependency-driven-testing, reusability of test cases through parameters, and efficient/quick rerunning of failed and skipped tests. Also, TestNG is not just limited to unit-testing, since it can also serve well as an all-around testing framework for integration and system testing.
For those with a significant investment in jUnit, TestNG folks even provide a simple Java utility to help with the migration from jUnit.
Filippo Diotalevi from IBM wrote a great TestNG example that outlines some of the main principles behind the framework as well as the @Test, @Before, @After annotation syntax that is at the heart of TestNG. It's a great read.
Update: if you live in the Bay Area, you can hear me talk about TestNG at the next event of The San Francisco Java Meetup on February 11th, 2008 at our classroom in the city. I hope to see you there!
An already awesome web development framework gets even better! New features, tons of bug fixes, and more polished than before, that's what you get with the official release of Ruby on Rails 2.0!
Of course, we've already updated our Ruby on Rails training course for 2.0
I still remember the days when people were saying that Java would never become a mainstream general purpose programming language because it was too slow… it was too inefficient… it was just hyped up. Yet somehow Java turned into a dominant force in the enterprise! In fact, nowadays people are finding that Java apps can be faster than natively compiled ones. The skeptics were proven wrong.
But it seems like the history tends to repeat itself. This time around, Ruby on Rails is in the spot-light, and while many people are branding it as the best thing in the world of web development since sliced bread, there are still plenty of skeptics. The arguments are almost the same as they were with Java: RoR is too slow, it's too inefficient, it's just hyped up. The answer from the Ruby community? Silicone is cheaper than carbon. I love it!
Anyway, given that I am still mostly a Java developer, I don't really have the authority to either bash or defend RoR, so I'll point you to this article instead: Rails Yet To Make Dent in the Enterprise.
What do you think?
Yesterday I ran into Jason Brittain (the co-author of Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition) and he told me about spigit.com, a smart social network for the enterprises, that he helps build.
Think of it as an intranet-based discussion forum where users (employees) share their ideas, others rate them, and the system keeps track of which ideas are "best" based on the users' feedback. Along the way, users build their online reputation. This is all part of a larger, social-networking-like application.
What makes spigit.com's solution unique is that it combines social networking with a ratings engine that finds the best ideas (idea management) and the "best people" based on peer/social feedback. And unlike other social networks out there, Sprigit is geared towards the enterprises. Once deployed, it makes it easy for businesses to capture ideas in their organization and assess the quality of those ideas based on the social interaction around them. Sprigit enables logical transformation of business ideas into business decisions.
The way I see it, while other social networks just capture connections between people, Spigit also models connections around ideas.
Now that's a great idea!
This is a simple example on how to secure a Java web application (regardless of whether it is based on Servlets, JSPs, Struts, Spring, JSF, or any other combination) using just simple FORM-based container-managed security. True, other, much more sophisticated security frameworks exist, but this is by far the simplest way to wrap a security layer around an application regardless of its underlying implementation.
We also demonstrate how to authenticate users against a relational database (in this case we used MySQL).
The example application shown below was tested on Tomcat, but the principles should work on any modern Java EE servlet container.
Continue reading 'Securing Java web applications using FORM-based container-managed security'
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