Marakana Blog

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.

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.

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!

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 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!

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

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!

Here's a conference worth checking out. We'll be there.

"QCon is a conference organized jointly by InfoQ.com and JAOO (organizers of the 10 year running JAOO conference in Denmark). The event will feature 2 tutorial days (November 5, 6th) followed by three full conference days with multiple tracks.

In the tradition of InfoQ.com and JAOO conferences, QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers and will be similar to JAOO in it's commitment to quality content and a high quality attendee experience.

There is no other event in the US with similar opportunities for learning, networking, and tracking innovation occurring in the Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, Agile, Ajax, and architecture communities."

November 5 - 9, 2007
San Francisco, CA
Info: http://qcon.infoq.com/qcon-sanfrancisco/conference/

This Monday, during his keynote presentation at the WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference), Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. CEO, announced that developers will be able to develop applications for the IPhone after all. This was really important since a lot of people, including some of us at Marakana, were turned off by the idea that IPhone OS will be closed for 3rd party applications.

However, there will be no "real" apps for now, developers will only be able to create web-based internet applications. This news has been received with the mix feelings by the developers. On one hand you have seasoned Mac developers who feel "cheated", and on the other hand you have web developers who are really looking forward to this opportunity.
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Gone are the days of writing the same old CRUD functions (create, retrieve, update, delete). Thanks to the Rails framework, Ruby developers can now get the entire administrative part of their website with couple of lines of code. This is significant given that developing the administration screens takes about half the total project time, yet it is boring and repetitive.

Rails provides the scaffolding right out of the box, but ActiveScaffold takes it up one notch with its Ajax frameworks. Check out the demo and the official website.

I can't belive how much time I waisted in the past on writing the CRUD code.

HotSpotr is a really cool Ajax application written by Andre Lewis. Very impressive stuff. Andre also wrote Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax book that teaches you how to do all this Google Maps mashup stuff with Ajax and Rails.

Here's another Ajax-based website that wants to be your portal to everything-web. Netvibes is in beta, but they are having a big launch party this coming Monday at Minna. We will be there! Definitely feels like 1999 all over again.