SQE - New Year's Eve and 2009

Again - after a long quiet period here some news from SQE - the last one for 2008.

Still, the actual main goal of SQE is to provide a stable release for NetBeans 6.5 .

Here is a list what we have already achieved and what will be part of the next binary drop. It will take a few more days before we can upload it - to allow us to ensure everything is working as expected after the major rewrite we did during Devoxx 2008.

Bug fixes:

• Fixes for numerous NPE, CCE
• use NetBeans 6.5 features where possible (Option Panel...)
  

New features

• codedefect history is now working
  
• further UI enhancements
  • windowgroup for codedefect results
  • move codedefect history to control center
• select checkstyle.xml to use
• even better sorting capability for PMD and Checkstyle results
  

Updates

• Update FindBugs to 1.3.6
• Update PMD to 4.2.4

Upcoming (new things or things already planned)

• Support for configuration of FindBugs and PMD based on Maven pom's
  
• Refresh on save/compile (especially useful for tasklist)
• NetBeans 7.0?
• PMD 5.0
  

Any other ideas, comments, wishes? Just leave your comment here or send an e-mail to the user list at sqe.dev.java.net.

... and don't forget we will be going full OpenSource at http://sqe.kenai.com in 2009 (promised) using Maven as build tool. This possibly allows us to provide different binary drops (e.g. PMD 4.x / PMD 5.x series) and many other exciting things.

Happy New Year 2009 to all of you - and see you in 2009!

New Book about NetBeans and Java EE 5

You know Java and you are looking for a simple introduction how to start with Java EE - try Java EE 5 - Development with NetBeans 6 from David R. Heffelfinger.

What I find most intriguing about the book is the coupling between something known to be complex and heavyweight (not really anymore if you believe Adam Bien) and something quite simple to use. The book shows the ease of doing Java EE development with NetBeans IDE - and I have to admit (as a long time NetBeans user) it really is easy to use. To give a short overview I would just say that all the buzzwords are covered (JSF, JSTL, JPA, WS, ...). But do not expect a reference book for Java EE 5 - it really is a hands-on one getting you to do something so you will be comfortable with the more complex Java EE things.

You want to know more details - listen to the NetBeans Podcast which has an interview with David up on its current episode.

Give it a try!

Devoxx 2008 - Day 5 / finalize()

The last day of Devoxx 2008 - just as we got accustomed to long nights with only a few hours sleep. But well next year the show will continue. So today 3 real cool sessions were up. First we attended a session with Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo presenting on JRuby. Besides showing cool NetBeans integration with awsome code completion and giving an overview on how JRuby works they pointed out that JRuby in fact is Ruby running on a JVM. That is all - just take your Ruby application and let it run on the JVM to get the speed up offered by the JVM for your applicatoin for free. For the future they seem to consider moving the source of JRuby (or JRuby itself) over to Kenai - a new Open Source hosting solution - once they get the issuetracker integrated they need.

Next Brian Leonhart from SUN Microsystems talking about "Development beyond Localhost". It focused on "WOTE - Write Once Test Everywhere" using OpenSolaris and VirtualBox. Quite interesting approach and a real cool software. It is free - so give it a try.

Last talk of Devoxx 2008 was fellow NetBeans Dream Team member Adam Bien. who came to Antwerp only for delivering his talk - thanks Adam. He talked about EJB3.x and why he thinks that this is the real lightweight solution, although he is not in favor of calling something "lightweight". He did some real cool live coding using NetBeans 6.5 and the new "Deploy on Save" feature - it worked awesome. Should have convinced the audience that Glassfish and NetBeans is the way to go for Java EE.

So much for now - off for visiting Antwerp, getting some "Mussels with fries" a local specialty and a good Belgium beer.

BTW: I took photos from the whiteboards just friday morning - have a look at them here and figure out what is going on in the Java community.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 4 / Java 7 and JavaPosse

So again there were two big keynotes today - the first from Josh Bloch about "Effective Java 2nd Edition" an update to his famous book "Effective Java" considering things like Enum and Generics. Well you may say this is not a keynote - and you are correct - it was a "Josh Talk". But nevertheless it was fun.

Next was Mark Reinhold giving an update about Java 7 - with a focus on Project Jigsaw. This is the codename for a modularized Java - not only with respect to the libraries, but also down to the VM level. It seems to be a large, complex and very ambitious thing but I think it is the way to go. BTW none of the existing module frameworks won, there will be one especially tuned for this problem field. Pictures taken from slides shown are here. You are thinking this will take a long time? Well, Mark said the delivery of Java 7 will be in early 2010, that is quite soon (measured in Java dimensions).

The first technical session was Brain Goetz and Alex Buckley talking about the way towards a dynamic VM, so that other languages can make themselves more at home on top of the JVM. It seems the changes to be done are not so big, they invented some real clever concepts for letting the language decide about method resolution - and it will be part of Java 7. So that will give a major boost for your favourite language besides Java - Scala, Jython, JRuby... Next was a seesion about the new NIO API's in Java 7. They should really simplify the way to use NIO and reduce the need to write your own layer on top of NIO.

Now for the fun part - JavaPosse Live Recording. The Posse guys were as much fun as always discussing JavaFX, Java 7 and all the other things around Devoxx. Tor and Joe were live via video - just listen to the podcast to imagine the fun we had.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / All the remaining things

Ok - since there are already to posts available for today I will just try to summarize the remaining events. In the afternoon we went to Bill Venners talk "The Feel of Scala" - one of the few highlights.
He showed Scala vs. Ruby, how ducktyping works and a lot of further features. Seems OSGI is getting into the market.

Here are some pictures I took during the talk:


Aftwards there was the reception for all the developers.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / How NetBeans Saved the Day

... at least for a real unlucky - or perhaps a real lucky guy - read on and fond out for yourself.

Emil Ong from Caucho was up for a talk about PHP on Java showing how to use Java's abilities (and the performance of the underlying JVM) to make PHP integratable/coexisitng with existing Java WebApps on one application Server. This approach is based on Quercus, which is Caucho’s 100% pure Java implementation of PHP.
At the start of the session he already had difficulties getting his laptop to work, but finally got it up and running showing his presentation. Then suddenly somwhere right in the middle of the session his system got stuck switching to the next slide. Rebooting did not really help - so he asked the audience if anybody would lend him/hers laptop. The first try failed (seemed to be some problem with the USB-Drive) so he went for another one.
This is where the story gets interesting. Toni Epple from the NetBeans Dream Team had already met Emil last night on the Devoxx dinner and they had set up Resin/Quercus/NetBeans to work together during a break at the Cauch booth, so that PHP can be deployed with NetBeans to Quercus/Resin (read Toni's blog for more details). So he lend Emil his "trusty new and shiny MacBook" and having figured out the difficulties with the language of the operating system and one display-cable-adapter later the presentation could continue. At the end of this real interesting talk (come on PHP developers - give it a try) he was sorry to announce that the prepared demo could not be shown, since his laptop did not work. So Toni took the opportunity and proposed to show their setup with NetBeans/Quercus and Resin. So Toni just showed the PHP project he had created for Wordpress in NetBeans and just clicked "Run" and that's it - Wordpress was running on Quercus and Resin. What a cool Demo. So that is how NetBeans saved the day - and I think Emil is a lucky guy - he learned about NetBeans and the always helpful Dream Team.

You do not believe this? See for yourself

Devoxx 2008 - Day 3 / JavaFX Keynote

The theatre was packed for the keynote this morning.


Wow - those guys from Sun really showed the community how to sell the technology. Only few slides and many real cool demos and even a world premiere - the "Fox Box", which was so mindboggling cool that I just missed taking a picture. So here is one of another application shown - with a mobile version

The key note was done by Danny Coward

with help of the JavaFX-Team guys (Joshua Marinacchi, Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and Martin Brehovsky)

... and they used NetBeans


The only thing more cool than this was the "Beatboxer".

The second highlight this morning was Brian Goetz giving a talk about "From Concurrent to Parallel".

He discussed in some detail how the JSR 166y works behind the scenes and how easy it is to use (and how better it might be with "Closures") - Josh may disagree ;-) .

Devoxx 2008 - Day 2

Being early as everyday Florian and myself got interviewed for the Parleys magazine. It was a surprise seeing that those guys still remembered us from last year. So it still seems to be a small conference - even with 3200 Java enthusiasts.

The second University Day started with the session Java Performance" by Kirk Pepperdine and Holly Cummins. A quite interesting presentation showing a lot of new and old aspects for performance analysis (remember everything you learned is wrong). One new tool that may be of interest is The IBM^® Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools for Java™ - Health Center™ in Early Access. It provides the possibility to get monitoring directly from the VM without using bytecode injection. To use this you will need the latest IBM JDK as well. So give it a try.

For the afternoon session we picked "Advanced OSGI", but actually there was not so much new in the talk. During his presentation Peter Kriens talked about the classloading issues you could have and visualized it with a photo

So the highlight of the afternoon was meeting with Aaron Houston from Sun. We took a photo of the dreamteam members and did a small podcast recording.

For the BOS's we selected Meet JSR Spec. Leads, Effective code reviews in agile teams and The magic of JXLayer component .

All in all a lot of interesting stuff to try out and evalute.

Quotes of the Day:

• "You do not have performance requirements? So you have no further goal in life!", Kirk Pepperdine
• "A mouse move has been detected. Do you want to keep it? Please reboot!"
  

Small Language Changes for Java 7

Did you still believe language changes for Java 7 would be coming? Well here is the announcement from Joseph D. Darcy and some in length discussion what may be in there from Stephen Colebourne.

So any ideas? Just help Joseph and Stephen and put them on the whiteboard.

Devoxx 2008 - Day 1

First thing after breakfast today was an extensive presentation on JavaFX done by Richard Bair, Jasper Potts and Martin Brehovsky - "JavaFX in Practice". It was an amazing thing to see and to try it out in parallel. There are lots of interesting features in JavaFX already and more to come. The downside is that deployment is not finally solved (how to get it to a customer, who uses a closed network) so no easy way to get around the actual deployment limitation.



The afternoon session was "Groovy and Grails in Action" with Guillaume Laforge - presenting all this small niceties Groovy has to offer in comparison with Java. But I have to admit - I did not find the flexibility very appealing; e.g. that it is possible to overwrite the operator "+" so that it always returns 1 (reminded me of my good old C/C++ days).

For the "Tool in Action" series we went to "VisualVM - new extensible monitoring platform" done by Kirk Pepperdine and "Building Java Projects With Gradle" by Hans Dockter. VisualVM is a must have troubleshooting tool ranging from Heap-Analysis to CPU-Monitoring. If you need anything else, just create your own plugin and extend the existing functionality, e.g. like TDA. The best is you now get it with your favorite JDK (and it brought the NetBeans Platform into the JDK). Gradle seems to be a quite flexible tool for creating a build environment, but somehow I missed a bit the declarative nature, as it can be found in Maven. So check it out and give it a try.

Afterwards we attended another session for JavaFX (from Martin Brehovsky) showing a bit more about the integrated workflow between developer and designer. Next up was "Tune It!" a performance related session with Kirk Pepperdine. For the finishing session at Day One we had a session about SwingLabs. The expectations were quite high I think after all those long e-mail discussions about Sun stopping funding for SwingX.

So what's the Story about JavaFX and Swing? Well I'd say that nothing special will happen - so there is still Swing and for more advanced fancy UI code there is now JavaFX coming up. Will there be a possibility for a mesh-up? Yes. The NetBeans plugin is already quite usable, but it still seems to lack some of the features a typical Java developer will try to use (e.g. in place rename, comment out, code completion) - hope there will be updates quite soon (next year)

So what may be on the roadmap for Java7 from a Java Desktop User's view?

• Integration of Scenegraph API and other tools and laguages should be scheduled
• JWebPane is still in the works
  
• Full Java/JavaFX Meshups still to be done
• JavaApplicationFramewrk
• Beans Binding
  
• JAM (???)
• ....

My personal subjective impression - there is a cool technology coming up - so please stop whining - if you need something be part of the community and contribute.

Devoxx - Registration

To avoid long queues for registration, we decided to already pick up our bags on Sunday evening. Everything went smooth - so now we are prepared for Devoxx 2008.

We have already met some cool people - had a small chat with Stephan Janssen (make sure to visit his talk/BOF about Parley TNG), met Aaron Houston from Sun, Kirk Pepperdine (Master of Java Performance Tuning), Bill Venners (Artima Software) and just got a short glimpse at Josh Bloch.

Seems this years conference is again packed with a lot of real interesting people. So if you are already registered - cu at Devoxx from tomorrow on (or better today already past midnight here in Europe).

Last Day in Brussels - Atomium

After the rainy evening yesterday - today the sky cleared and it was sunny. Since we had some more time to spend before starting for Antwerp - we decided to visit the Atomium.

Looking at the photos you should remind yourself that the Atomium has been built for the EXPO 1958.

Photos documenting the trip can be seen at the usal location (once I got to uploading them).

Brussels Day 2

So what to do in Brussels on a Saturday? First breakfast then go shopping - try to find Manneken Pis and afterwards meet with Toni ;-) .

The live performance on the "Grote Markt" was an astonishing event - music, light and performance met rain. So it was a bit wet, but nevertheless something you have to experience yourself to get a real feeling for it.

Some photos are available at the Devoxx-Album or in the sidebar as a preview - I apologize for the quality - it was quite dark and rainy.

First night in Brussels - approaching Devoxx

Last night was our first night here in Brussels. We enjoyed the christmas market - as planned - and tasted good belgium beers and "Gluwhein".

Especially cool are the "The Electrabel Nights ..."- a fantastic mindboggling lightshow taking place in the "Grote Markt" - come and see for yourself. Tonight there is a live performance scheduled for 19:00.

See photos from this journey in the sidebar or visit the Picasa-Web-Album directly.

So still 48h hours to go before Devoxx opens.

Devoxx 2008 - The Adventure Begins

It has started. Just a few minutes ago the "Katamaran" has left Friedrichshafen towards Konstanz - the first leg of a multi-part journey to Antwerp.

... and it's only the beginning ....

So first stop is Brussels - enjoying the chrismas market and preparing SQE for Devoxx.

SQE and Devoxx 2008

Interested in exchanging ideas how to make SQE better?
Want to share your preferred workflow with the SQE developers?

Meet the SQE Team at Devoxx - just leave a comment and your e-mail - so we can get together over a Belgium beer or just have a chat over breakfast / lunch or a coffee break.

BTW expect some news on SQE for Devoxx - following our tradition we are actually working full steam for a new stable version of SQE compatible and best to use with NetBeans 6.5 Release. More news to follow ...