When students tell you, "I could hardly believe I was programming my own game, animations and videos using java" or "It is a great opportunity to find out the fun of programming and creating your own animation or whatever you want to create" and one parent added "after the workshop, my son is so familiar with Oracle and Java," I just can tell you it was a great event! Over 300 Oracle employee sons and daughters, Oracle employees, parents and local high school students and teachers attended the three day Java Summer Workshop and volunteer training on Greenfoot and Alice (Aug 8-12). Alice and Greenfoot are two award winning visual educational software tools to teach Java programming. The workshop was an introduction to programming only using drag and drop functions for 11 to 18 year old students. Now available online are the online training for Alice and Greenfoot, video student interviews, presentations, additional resources to learn Java, quotes, projects and pictures. Check it out!

On August 31st, 2011: I will have the great honor to present our beloved Play Framework at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference here in San Francisco, CA. If you are attending, please feel free to check it out or just stop by to say hello. Thank you Zenexity for the opportunity! I am always excited to help spread the word on this awesome framework!

The integration framework Apache Camel already supports several important cloud services (see my overview article at http://www.kai-waehner.de/blog/2011/07/09/cloud-computing-heterogeneity-will-require-cloud-integration-apache-camel-is-already-prepared for more details). Mitchell Pronsc...

After just a few months at search giant, Gosling is taking a chief software architect position at Liquid Robotics

I've surprised myself and made another career change. I had a great time at Google, met lots of interesting people, but I met some folks outside doing something completely outrageous, and after much anguish decided to leave Google, I'm now at a small startup called Liquid Robotics They have a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles that roves the ocean collecting data from a variety of onboard sensors and uploading it to the cloud. The robots have a pile of satellite uplink/GSM/WiMax communication gear and redundant GPS units. They have a bunch of deployments. For example, one is a set of robots patrolling the ocean around the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico monitoring water chemistry. These craft harvest energy from the waves for propulsion and can stay at sea for a very long time. The longest that one craft has been out is 2.5(ish) years. They can cross oceans.... Slowly. They only move at 1-2 knots, which is a great speed for data collection. I'm their new chief software architect. I'll be involved in both the onboard software - sensing, navigation and autonomy - and in the datacenter, dealing with the inrush of data. The current systems work well, but they have a variety of issues that I look forward to working on. This is going to be a lot of fun.

New Relic is taking its Web application performance service to Java apps running on Heroku's platform.

Oracle and Google may not get to go at each come Halloween depriving onlookers of a real treat. District Court Judge William Alsup told the pair Monday that the trial may have to be postponed. It all depends on whether a "large criminal" trial starts, as scheduled, on October 17. If it doesn't then Oracle v Google will pick a jury on October 19 and the trial will start October 31. Then on Tuesday the judge said there were going to be two Java trials: one on liability, one on damages and that he's appointed Brigham Young University professor of economics James R. Kearl as an independent damages expert.

As microprocessors get smaller and smaller, there may come a day when most of us are walking around with embedded medical devices literally embedded in our bodies. But would you trust an embedded device with your life?

Prime Technology is glad to announce the third milestone release of it's leading JSF component suite, PrimeFaces. M3 is featuring over 140 improvements, 17 new components(9 reborn, 8 brand new), improved quality as a result of significant maintenance, better portlet support and much more.

Why are people against industry-standard frameworks like Hibernate, Spring, JSF and EJB?

Every web project needs some environment-specific configurations. Database credentials, root url, smtp settings, to name a few. It's a recurring question on stackoverflow, and I've seen a lot of variations on the topic, and here I'll describe the one that I think is best.

Significantly improved performance and a cleaner API are the key takeaways for the Disruptor 2.0 concurrent programming framework. This release is the result of all the great feedback we have received from the community. Feedback is very welcome and really improves the end product so please keep it coming.

Working every day in a particular abstraction (such as object orientation) makes it hard to see when that abstraction is leading you to a solution that isn't the best alternative. This article is the first of two that explores some implications of object-oriented thinking for code reuse, comparing them to more-functional alternatives such as composition.

The Heroku cloud development service now supports four programming languages.