David Laing, Neels Burger, Neil Pellinacci, Parand Tony Darugar, and Scott Morrison (moderator) discuss the impact of integration of various interconnected devices, web technologies, and cultures. By David Laing, Neels Burger, Neil Pellinacci, Parand Tony Darugar, and Scott Morrison

Pratap Chilukuri explains what OAuth is and how it works, exemplifying using the protocol with an example. By Pratap Chilukuri

Embedded Java is receiving significant new attention, with the first Java Embedded @ JavaOne conference taking place October 3-4, supported in part by members of Java.net's new Java Embedded Community. The Java Embedded @ JavaOne content catalog currently lists 23 sessions, ranging from keynote addresses by Hasan Rizvi ("Java Embedded: Product Strategy") and Judson Althoff ("Java Embedded: Market Strategy"), to detailed sessions on topics like "Smart Grid Controller Powered by Java" and "M2M (Machine-to-Machine): Tackling the Next Data Deluge." In Tori Wieldt's recent blog about the Java Embedded @ JavaOne Keynotes, she notes: With nearly two decades of innovation, Java continues to be the dominant technology solution for enterprises worldwide, and drives an ever-growing ecosystem of over nine million developers. During that time, Java has shipped on over 10 billion embedded devices! That's a lot of devices. But, it would be unreasonable to think that we're anywhere near the peak when it comes to embedded devices. If anything, we're at the beginning of an embedded explosion, fueled by small footprint hardware with more memory, faster processors, and wireless connectivity. Check out the Java Embedded device catalog (PDF) posted by the Java Embedded Community to see what I mean (and also to see the incredible variety of devices that are available today). Speaking of the Java.net Java Embedded Community -- it's off to a running start! Community Co-Leader Roger Brinkley introduced the community in a blog post a few weeks ago: Originally started as the Mobile & Embedded Community the Embedded Community will focus on Java embedded development for the Java Platform. It is a gathering place that enables and empowers developers to collaborate and innovate, driving the evolution and adoption of the Java platform, both JavaSE andJavaME, for embedded devices. Roger has been actively blogging about Java embedded topics at Binky's Cave. If you'll be attending Java Embedded @ JavaOne, and you want to talk/blog about it in advance, see Roger's post Java Embedded @ JavaOne Attendee Toolkit. Terrence Barr, who also co-leads the Java Embedded Community, blogs at Across the Universe. Java.net Weblogs Since my last blog post, several new java.net blogs have been posted: Gabriele Carcassi, pvmanager: a framework to deal with live data (part 2); Larry Fernandez, Implementing Role Based Access Control - RBAC; Sanjay Dasgupta, FX.js on JDK 7 Update 6; and Larry Fernandez, 10 Years of Java: What a Ride!. Poll Our current Java.net poll asks Should Java have a timed release schedule (for example, a new major release every 18 months)?. Voting will be open until Friday, August 24. Java News Here are the stories we've recently featured in our Java news section: Blaise Doughan demonstrates Removing JAXBElement From Your Domain Model; John Yeary shares JSF 2.1 Tip of the Day: PrimeFaces Dialog ; Markus Eisele presents GlassFish City Revisited; Henrik Stahl announces Oracle releases JDK for Linux ARM, JRE for Mac OS X; Roger Brinkley announces Java Embedded Device Catalog at the Java Embedded Community; Geertjan Wielenga presents YouTube: Get Started Creating Modular Data Analyzers in Java; Jonathan Giles announces Scenic View 1.1.0 is now available for download; DonaldOJDK announces Even Flow - Java Embedded at #JavaOne; Roger Brinkley presents Java Spotlight Episode 95: Baruch Sadogursky on JFrog Artifactory; Roger Brinkley announces Embedded Community Launched on Java.Net; jaxenter presents Interview with Adam Bien and Eugene Toporov; Geertjan Wielenga is Back From Vacation!; Blaise Doughan demonstrates how to Handle the Middle of a XML Document with JAXB and StAX; Adam Bien answers Does CDI Injection Of SessionScoped Beans Into A Servlet Work?; and Dustin Marx illustrates NetBeans 7.2: Refactoring Parameterized Constructor As Builder. Spotlights Our latest Java.net Spotlight is Geertjan Wielenga's 5 Tips for Arabic Java Desktop Developers: I created this basic Java desktop infrastructure with Arabic display texts in about 15 minutes, though the RTL parts took a bit longer to get exactly right in the end, but were solved thanks to two sources discussed further down in this blog entry... Notice that the application has a window system with undockable components, as well as a menu bar and a toolbar... Prior to that, we highlighted Oracle's Oracle Releases New Java Updates - Java SE 7 Update 6, JavaFX 2.2 and JavaFX Scene Builder 1.0: With this release, Oracle is providing full availability of Java SE 7 Update 6 on Mac OS X, including the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and the Java Development Kit (JDK), as well as the JavaFX 2.2 rich client platform and JavaFX Scene Builder... And before that we featured Jonathan Giles' Interview with Daniel Zwolenski: Today I have an interview with Daniel Zwolenski, a developer who has been involved with JavaFX, both from a commercial point of view, and as part of the open source community. He is active in openjfx-dev mailing list discussions, as well as running a very popular blog on using JavaFX in enterprise environments... Subscriptions and Archives: You can subscribe to this blog using the java.net Editor's Blog Feed. You can also subscribe to the Java Today RSS feed and the java.net blogs feed. You can find historical archives of what has appeared the front page of Java.net in the java.net home page archive. -- Kevin Farnham Twitter: @kevin_farnham AttachmentSize JavaEmbedded2012.gif24.43 KB

Talk #1: Stefan Edlich suggests choosing a NoSQL DB after answering about 70 questions in 6 categories, and building a prototype. Talk #2: Edlich presents NewSQL solutions counteracting NoSQL. By Stefan Edlich

Number crunching with Big Data techniques is great, but sometimes a computer algorithm just can’t cut it. What if you want to know whether a tweet is referring to cats or cats or cats? Or maybe you need to filter uploaded images for pictures of dogs in coats. If so, most computers still aren’t smart enough to do the job. Amazon’s ‘Human Intelligence Task’ marketplace, Mechanical Turk, is perfectly suited for outsourcing this kind of work, allowing any task, from transcribing text to classifying adult images, to an army of workers. But when you have thousands of individual tasks, inputting each can take some time. Enter Clockwork Raven, Twitter’s own solution to batch-uploading to Mechanical Turk. Open-sourced today - and largely overshadowed by API news - the application is now available for anyone to download from github. The Ruby-based application is designed for those with almost zero technical knowledge. Questions for your human analysts are constructed using Google Docs-style forms, and the answers are delivered back for detailed breakdown. Being an internal Twitter tool, there’s easy embedding of tweets and Twitter users. Of course, each analysis will cost a few cents - those human workers need remuneration, after all - so it won’t ever be as cost-effective as an algorithm. But it’s a unique and rather clever option in the Big Data toolset.

It’s difficult to avoid today’s headlines on the upcoming changes to Twitter’s API, announced via a blog post. Unlike previous threats, these changes aren’t just hints as to where the service will go, but a death sentence to many parts of the Twitter ecosystem. Let’s get the less controversial bits out of the way first: changing the way in which Twitter limits API requests - 60 of each endpoint per hour, rather than 350 of any per hour, is sensible, and mandatory OAuth use will help reduce load, even if some apps will suffer. Meanwhile, the strict guidelines on tweet presentation may seem sensible on the surface - except they seem to even extend to contexts such as the redesigned digg.com, which uses custom embedded tweets in its current design. Generating more public ire is Twitter’s decision to limit third-party clients to a maximum of 100,000 users without explicit permission (or, for those already above 100,000, the ceiling will be double their current userbase). Mind you, the shutting-out of third-party clients has been a long time coming. Twitter’s Director of Consumer Products, Michael Sippey writes in today’s blog post: Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience." And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today. What Twitter wants, as illustrated by a rather cringeworthy chart, are analytic apps and corporate clients. The current API, version 1.0, will be discontinued in six months to give developers time to adjust. Of course, developers in many cases won’t be adjusting - they’ll simply be abandoning their projects. Instapaper developer Marco Arment highlights in a blog post just how many services are likely to be affected - including his own app. As you might expect, the reaction to all of these announcements has been largely negative. John Gruber, a big fan of third-party clients, is scathing of Twitter’s direction: So Klout, which is utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense, that’s OK. But services like Storify and Favstar, which are actually useful and/or fun, those are no good. Some have played down the announcement, accepting that Twitter is taking fairly sensible steps. Anil Dash’s rewrite of the official blog post puts a cheery spin on things, but his interpretation of Twitter policy - that third-party clients are still welcome, and that apps with more than 100,000 users will get “personal” treatment - is probably a bit naive. But this bad press is nothing to Twitter, because they don’t need its core tech audience anymore. An audience of ‘Little Monsters’ and ‘Beliebers’ (that’s Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber fans) is infinitely larger and more profitable. App.net's alpha client Alarm bells have been ringing for a while, and developers have been looking for an alternative service for a while. The announcement of API v1.1 comes soon after the funding of App.net, a service pitching itself as a Twitter clone. The difference here is that it is paid for by users rather than its advertisers, and with an unrestricted API. While still currently a proof-of-concept “alpha prototype”, App.net has succeeded in giving itself initial momentum. Where the service is heading is another matter, and the likelihood is that it will end up being a closed community of Twitter-bashing techies willing to pay. Twitter was of course initially populated by early adopters, many of them developers interested in playing with the service’s API. But App.net is unlikely to ever gain Twitter’s mass appeal: after all, what does it have to offer users who don’t even know what an API is? A greater range of clients and no adverts are no substitute for Twitter’s millions of users (notably their celebrity contingent). Plus, in an age where most services are free and ad-supported, $50/year for a single account is a hard sell. The other social network that has failed to take advantage of developer dissatisfaction is Google+. A year on from launch and still a full API is nowhere to be seen. While it’s to be expected that, like Twitter and Facebook, Google want to keep control of their product, opening it up to outside developers could give the service the shot in the arm it needs to become somewhat relevant. Unfortunately, this doesn’t look likely. Facebook has proven that “mainstream” users already invested in a service are very, very difficult to scare off, and so far Twitter hasn’t offended them directly. Let’s just hope they can keep up a high standard of native apps.

Apache Hadoop YARN - a new Hadoop resource manager - has just been promoted to a high level Hadoop subproject. InfoQ had the chance to discuss YARN with Arun Murthy - founder and architect at Hortonworks. By Boris Lublinsky

We all wish we could predict the future. It would be wonderful to tell when a stock was going to go up before it did. Unfortunately, most of us are not psychic. In order to be successful in the stock … Continue reading →

IRC isn’t a new thing - back in the heyday of chatrooms, the protocol was almost mainstream. If you’re a developer, you’re no doubt using something similar to communicate across your team, making sure that everything is ticking over and spread the news when the proverbial hits the fan. Whilst it is still essential for any development team to use IRC, the advent of newer approaches and tools, such as Jenkins and Git means it is in a dire need for a upgrade. At the same time, with all these components coming into play, there’s also a demand to strip back the modern client, giving it a clean web interface. A neat little project that just been open-sourced by the team at German software firm, Viaboxx Systems, seems to be following this trend. Flurfunk (not a new music genre, but a German term equivalent to the rumour ‘grapevine’) takes inspiration from other collaboration tools while putting a new twist on things. Within Flurfunk’s internal timeline, users can see recent commits, monitoring messages and build reports all under one roof. Aside from that they can post links and have small discussions whilst coding away. The architecture is simple enough to grasp: From the Github home, we can see that Flurfunk is split into four key repositories. The Clojure-coded server does the heavy lifting, receiving and sending message to clients as well as acting as the storage facility. Currently there’s one web frontend (written in ClojureScript and built through Clojure’s automation helper Leiningen), which looks basic but sleek. We can expect a Mac OS X desktop client in due course, but at the moment the team say it needs a bit of tinkering before it can be unleashed. Also available to peruse is a Apache Camel implemented Camelbot, salvaging components from the advanced Java framework to pick up messages from a mailbox and post into a Flurfunk instance. Unlike Twitter though, Flurfunk users don’t follow each other and instead read channels, sifting out what they don’t want to see and ranking the important stuff to them. Whilst this isn’t exactly revolutionary, we’re impressed by the move from the team and also by the simplicity of it. The potential scope here is quite huge, with the team discussing future plans, which mostly revolve around Git commit Github service hooks. Should it gain traction, there’s potential to add in Jenkins and Confluence bots, as well the standard Android, Linux and Windows clients. Aesthetically, it might be close to a blank canvass, but we could see additions such as gravatars to give it that personal feel. We’re not sure that it has enough to displace the stable of enterprise offerings, but if enough developer’s register an interest, it could become an option for smaller developer teams looking for a For the above to happen, the team are looking for contributors to dig into the API to write clients. Why not fork it and have a look? A handy installation guide for your own instance is provided too. GrapevinePicture courtesy of VectorPortal

In this article we introduce Spring Integration. If you have not worked with Spring Integration before, it might help to brush up on Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe. Also, I will recommend this excellent introductory article by Josh Long. Context setting Preview Text: In this article we introduce Spring Integration. If you have...

The scenario is trivial - you want to generate a database schema creation script while building your application (and then execute the script on the target database). This was relatively easy with Hibernate 3, as there was the hibernate3-maven-plugin, but it is not compatible with Hibernate 4. And for every new project you should start with Hibernate 4, of course. So what to do? It's...