Marakana Blog

You'll be glad to know that the CommunityOne registration is now open to the public!

For those that don't know, CommunityOne is a conference sponsored by Sun Microsystems that focuses on open source innovation and implementation. It brings together developers, technologists and students for technical education and exchange. In 2009, CommunityOne will focus on the free and open platforms, tools and services that can be found powering the Internet, running enterprises, and enabling high-performance computing.

The conference runs just before JavaOne (June 1-3, 2009 @ The Moscone Center in San Francisco), and your free registration for CommunityOne will get you complimentary access to the one-day conference program, including technical sessions and the Pavilion (June 1 - 4), plus access to JavaOne general sessions (June 2 - 4). That's even better than C1 2008, which was great!

If you live in the Bay Area, attending C1 is a no-brainier - not only because it is well-organized, very technical, and super educational, but also because you'll get to network with some of the smartest folks in the Java and open-source communities!

We here at Marakana are fortunate enough to be able to host a presentation on WidgetFX framework, which in turn runs on Sun's shiny new JavaFX platform on February 9th in San Francisco. This is part of The San Francisco Java User Group that I help run.

The presentation will be conducted by Stephen Chin who founded the WidgetFX framework and the folks from Sun's JavaFX team will be doing the intro. It should be fun!

For those of you that don't know, WidgetFX is a new open-source framework for deploying JavaFX applications to users' desktops with the simplicity of one click installation. WidgetFX ships with several configurable and skinnable widgets and has a growing repository of user created widgets from Performance Monitors to Streaming Video.

Unlike other widget frameworks, WidgetFX is cross-platform, provides robust security, and can take advantage of existing Java and JavaFX libraries, making it ideal for enterprise deployments. Widgets written for WidgetFX can leverage all the rich media capabilities of the JavaFX platform including graphics, animation, and video.

After years of planning, developing, tweaking, and talking about it, Sun finally released JavaFX, the newest platform on the block for developing rich client applications for desktop, mobile phones, TV, and other consumer devices.

Like Java, JavaFX is both a platform and a language (actually, the language is called JavaFX Script), but unlike Java, JavaFX promises to greatly simplify the process of building network-enabled client apps with sophisticated user interfaces. Of course, for serious applications JavaFX integrates with Java and can serve as the presentation layer to an enterprise Java app so that you get the best of both worlds. Given that it targets all popular end-user platforms, it will be exciting to see how the Java community welcomes this newcomer. Since Java rules on the server-side, I am hoping JavaFX will finally deliver on the original promise of Java and complete the end-to-end picture. Check out some really cool-looking demos.

Needless to say, JavaFX has to prove itself against well-established technologies, from Adobe's Flash and AIR to Microsoft's Silverlight, and even the true-and-tested JavaScript/AJAX frameworks. It may take some time, but I think that JavaFX is the logical choice for the millions of Java programmers who are looking for an easier and more integrated platform for the client-side development.

Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG has invited Rod Johnson to give a presentation on Spring Framework on Monday, August 18th starting at 6:30pm at Google.

The registration is free but the seating is limited!

I will definitely be there.

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:

• CSS Tutorial
• CSS Advanced Tutorial
• Java Overview for Manager Tutorial
• Java EE (J2EE) Overview For Managers Tutorial
• Java Frameworks Overview for Managers Tutorial
• XML Fundamentals Tutorial
• XSL Fundamentals Tutorial

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 Cedric 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!