A new article by Oracle's Java Champion Jim Weaver, titled "Expressing the UI for Enterprise Applications with JavaFX 2.0 FXML -- Part Two," now up on otn/java, shows developers how to leverage the power of the FX Markup Language to define the UI for enterprise applications. Weaver, the author of Pro JavaFX Platform, extends the SearchDemoFXML example used in Part One to include more concepts and techniques for creating an enterprise application using FXML. Weaver concludes the article by summarizing its content, "FXML provides the ability to radically change the UI without modifying the controller. This task can be accomplished by loading different FXML documents, leveraging JavaFX cascading style sheets, and creating localized resource bundles. Named parameters can be used with these features to provide relevant information to an application at startup." Check out the article here.

Craig Andera explains how some of the main Clojure constructs - namespaces, vars, symbols - are processed during the read and eval phases of the compilation. By Craig Andera

Julian Harty covers various challenges and practices for testing applications for mobile devices. By Julian Harty

In this SpringOne 2GX 2012 session Juergen Hoeller will talk about the 3.2 generation of Spring Framework. 3.2 focuses on core features for asynchronous processing and message-oriented architectures, as well as enhancements to its caching support and its multi-language support. If you are looking ahead to see how Spring Framework 3.2 can evolve your application design then this is the session to be at during SpringOne 2GX. Check out the session on SpringOne2GX.com for more details and register today!

It's Friday again, I hope you're all enjoying the last few weeks of summer before we head into the cooler fall weather (at least here in the northern hemisphere.) It's still relatively hot here in North Carolina, though the nights are getting cooler. Here's a collection of links Brian and I discovered this week for your weekend reading: Preview Text: ...

After implementing some algorithms for record linkage, I found myself in the need to optimized the code for speed.Premature optimization I'm a strict follower of the premature optimization maxim: first make it right, then make it fast; thus my code is prone to speedups of even 10000% once I discover the bottleneck and introduce a cache or a specialized data structure. For example, I always...

Dear Spring Community, We are pleased to announce the release of Spring Social Facebook 1.0.2! This release primarily adjusts Spring Social Facebook's API binding to some recent and upcoming changes in the Facebook Graph API. Specifically: The "picture" field of many objects in the Facebook's Graph API is changing from a simple string containing the URL to an object with additional information about the picture. Spring Social Facebook's API binding has been changed to handle either form and return the URL string. The "likes" field of the Graph API's Comment object has been renamed to "like_count". Spring Social Facebook's API binding has been changed to bind to the new "like_count" field. The picture property of Page, Post, and Video has been deprecated. While it will still return the URL string for a picture in 1.0.2, this property will be replaced in Spring Social Facebook 1.1.0 with one that returns an object with more complete metadata about the picture. The position property of the Photo object has been deprecated, as this property will no longer be populated by the Facebook Graph API. This property will be removed in Spring Social Facebook 1.1.0. To get the software, download the release distribution or simply add/update the maven artifacts to your project: <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.social</groupId> <artifactId>spring-social-facebook</artifactId> <version>1.0.2.RELEASE</version></dependency> We are continuing to monitor any changes that Facebook may apply in their graph API and if an adjustment in Spring Social Facebook's API binding is required, will release followup maintenance releases with those adjustments. We are also looking ahead to the 1.1.0 release of Spring Social, Spring Social Twitter, and Spring Social Facebook with some exciting new features in the coming months. We invite you to participate in the discussion in the Spring Social forum, in the issue tracker (Core|Facebook|Twitter), or at GitHub (Core|Facebook|Twitter).

Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week: Tuesday, September 4 I posted a new AWS Report, Michael Kellen of Sage Bionetworks. We announced that AWS Elastic Beanstalk is now available in Singapore. Wednesday, September 5...

Force.com MVP Michael Farrington explains the Salesforce.com App Exchange's security review process.

HTML5 Boilerplate (H5BP) provides a starting template for HTML5 and CSS development. It contains a set of best practices for front-end web development, including recommended web server settings. New in H5BP 4 are improved Apache compression configuration, HiDPI media query, MIT license, console.log protection and new image replacement (IR) technique. By Bienvenido David III

Having been in development for over a year, version 9.2 of the hipster’s choice of database, PostgresSQL, is now available to download. We covered the beta release in May, and little has changed in terms of major features: the introduction of a JSON datatype and new range types; index-only scans to improve performance, and improvements to streaming replications, allowing cascading replication. An exhaustive list of changes, including examples of the new features at work, can be found on the PostgresSQL wiki. The release is being particularly trumpeted for its speed increases, with support for up to 64 cores touted as able to provide up to 350,000 queries per second and up to 14,000 date writers per second - fourfold and fivefold increases respectively. As per usual, this release and its source are available under the MIT-like PostgreSQL license.

EJB spec does not allow starting and managing threads: The enterprise bean must not attempt to manage threads. The enterprise bean must not attempt to start, stop, suspend, or resume a thread, or to change a thread’s priority or name. The enterprise bean must not attempt to manage thread groups. [EJB 3.1 spec, page 599] With Java EE 6 you don't have to create threads to execute a java.lang.Runnable asynchronously. Just implement an Executor as EJB 3.1: import java.util.concurrent.Executor; import javax.ejb.Asynchronous; import javax.ejb.Stateless; @Stateless public class TransactionalExecutor implements Executor{ @Override @Asynchronous public void execute(Runnable command) { command.run(); } } Now inject the TransactionalExecutor as an Executor (the implementation of the Executor is optional, you could also directly inject the bean): @Stateless public class SlowService { @Inject Executor executor; public void invoke(){ Runnable command = new Runnable() { @Override public void run() { //some heavy work to do } }; executor.execute(command); } } The Java EE 6 solution happens to be less simpler, than comparable Java SE implementation :-). The async-worker Maven 3 project was pushed into http://kenai.com/projects/javaee-patterns/. [The example is an excerpt from the "Real World Java EE Patterns" book (Second Iteration), page 167 in, chapter "Async Worker"] See you at airhacks.com! Real World Java EE Bootstrap and Effective Java EE Bootstrap Workshops [Airport Munich]

Rich Hickey explains how immutability enables Datomic's features and facilitates programming (not just in functional languages). Also: Datomic and other NoSQL stores, Clojure Reducers and much more. By Rich Hickey

For the Eclipse Foundation, the Juno release train represented their biggest release in history. Not only did it contain the most projects in a simultaneous release yet, it also heralded the arrival of Eclipse 4.2 as default for building applications. The honeymoon period appears to be over, however, as community members made their discontent clear in recent weeks over the performance of the new standard platform A mailing list thread initially started by Eclipse committer Thomas Hallgren sparked concerns amongst the community over the performance of Eclipse 4.2 against the previous incarnation 3.8. Hallgren wrote: For various reasons I had to switch my development environment from 4.2 to 3.8 today. I was stunned by the performance improvement after the switch. The 3.8 platform is much MUCH faster. It boots faster, it closes windows faster, it shows menus faster, etc. It also seems to consume less memory and be less buggy. The way things stand right now, there's just no way I'll switch back to 4.2! Many others in the community echoed Hallgren’s concerns, notably Eclipse plugin developer Andrey Loskutov, who didn’t hold back in his criticism. It quickly emerged that unbeknownst to many in the community, the Eclipse Juno release hadn’t gone through performance regression testing or rigorous code coverage analysis. Considering that the Eclipse foundation had spent the best part of a year making it clear that e4 was incoming, and the sheer number of Java developers who use the IDE, it’s quite shocking that this was allowed to occur. Granted, with such a big release, the odd bug or two is likely to crop up. But to make Eclipse 4.2 as the stable release without putting it under the most strenuous performance tests is highly questionable. The reason for the performance testing omission? Lack of funding and resources, both of which have dogged the Eclipse foundation, since IBM reduced their input. Eclipse PMC Mike Wilson revealed back in January that his seven-strong team devoted to working on the Platform UI had fallen to three (as they sought other opportunities), leaving them inadequately prepared for the upcoming months. He rightly admitted at the time that  “three people, alone, are not enough to deliver a 4.2 of acceptable quality.” It seems that the Eclipse Foundation is struggling to find long-term committers to the Eclipse cause. Having three people work on the core platform just isn’t enough. Does this suggest a fundamental change needs to occur within the open source foundation to allow more developers to commit full-time to core development? Whilst there are a large number of part-time committers, there perhaps needs to be more dedicated full-time developers. Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation Mike Milinkovich was equally shocked by the performance findings, stating that this was the first he’d heard of the situation last Wednesday. In a call-to-arms blog post, Milinkovich addressed the problem and what he deemed “very valid concerns”. “My personal summary of where we’re at is that Juno is on 4.2, and it’s far too late to talk about switching the release train back to 3.8,” he said adding that the next release train Kepler would be based on 4.3 and not Eclipse 3.9 to be based on 4.3. That is to be expected as turning back makes little to no sense at this point, given the expenditure put in. Milinkovich reiterated that “the Eclipse platform team has a serious resource issue,” and that the only way to overcome it was through people or organisations stepping up their contributions. This is of course the nature of the beast with open source foundations - you are reliant upon the donations of others. At least this debacle appears to be the catalyst for further donations. Already Google’s Open Source Programs Office have offered $20,000 to purchase needed hardware to test 4.2, but also to build a common testing lab to tackle issues within Eclipse’s common build infrastructure. According to Milinkovich, this is just the first of several offers for help (and cash). “A few people and companies have quietly approached us about where they can best put their resources to help. The entire staff of the Eclipse Foundation is going to pitch in to help resolve these issues as much as we can,” he said. Shipping a release of Juno’s scale is hard and it is to be expected that issues arise in the immediate aftermath. But this situation reveals something much more critically wrong at the centre of Eclipse. For the Eclipse Foundation to continue growing, it needs the companies that are so reliant on their Java-based tooling to step up and not only consume, but contribute. What do you make of this Eclipse 4.2 scenario? Give us your view below...

Let's start with the basic question: What is the disruptor? The disruptor is a concurrency framework for Java that allows data sharing between threads. The age old way of coding a producer-consumer model is to use a queue as the buffer area between the producer and the consumer, where the producer adds data objects to the queue, which are in turn processed by the consumer. However, such a model does not work well at the hardware level and ends up being highly inefficient. The disruptor in its simplest form replaces the queue with a data structure known as the 'ring buffer'. Which brings us to the next question, what is the ring buffer? The ring buffer is an array of fixed length (which must be a power of 2), it's circular and wraps. This data structure is at the core of what makes the disruptor super fast.

One of these annoying challenges when coding is finding proper names for your classes. There are some tools available making fun of our inability to come up with proper names. But while I enjoy these kind of gags I think there is some serious problem hiding. The problem is: Classes should be some kind of abstraction. I should only have one abstraction for a single purpose. But if my classes...

Before trying this out make sure you have installed GlassFish in your machine. Installation is just easy as downloading the zip archive from here and unzipping it to a desired location. Creating a new domain Open up a terminal, change directory to the GlassFish installation directory and run following. Preview Text: Before trying this out...