Elan Lennard discusses porting a desktop app to a mobile device: choosing the functionality that makes sense, make it look great, and deciding between native and HTML5. By Elan Lennard

Joe Walker covers present and future Firefox development tools for editing, inspection, history and control. By Joe Walker

Q+A with CloudBees leader and former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey shows his thoughts on Platform as a Service.

Oracle announced the availability of Oracle ADF Mobile - a framework the enables the development of hybrid applications for mobile devices. Oracle ADF Mobile uses Java and HTML5 and enables developers to develop a single application that installs and runs on both iOS and Android systems. Visual and declarative development in Oracle JDeveloper.

This Week in Spring Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it! A lot of this news come from SpringSource itself, from various projects timed to coincide with SpringOne2GX last week. It's like receiving an early birthday gift! And speaking of gifts, if you missed SpringOne2GX, don't worry! We recorded the SpringOne sessions and they will be posted soon. Also, you can check out the show wrap ups for Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 on SpringSource.org to get a flavor for the conference. Costin Leau announced the release of Spring for Apache Hadoop 1.0.RC1 (the first-ever RC of Spring for Apache Hadoop!) featuring a template, exception translation and declarative runner for Pig and Hive scripts, enhanced map/reduce .jar and tool execution, and refined JVM scripting, M/R, and Cascading runners. Don't miss the upcoming webinar on Nov 8th! Peter Bell did a great presentation on Spring Data and the NoSQL space for QCon. Be sure to check it out! Yusuf has done a nice job introducing Spring's XA support in terms of the open source Bitronix standalone JTA-XA transaction manager. For an alternative guide, might I humbly suggest this blog post? Oleg Zhurakousky announced the release of Spring Integration 2.1.4 and 2.2.0.RC2 . The new release features pseudo transactions, JPA support, built-in retry support, and a lot more, so be sure to check it out! Costin Leau announced the release of Spring Data Redis 1.0.2, which features cache expiration and ZSet methods, among other things. Thomas Risberg announced the availability of the Spring Data JDBC extensions with Oracle database support, version 1.0.0.RC4. Satish Ab has a nice post on building the web layer with Spring MVC for his sample invoice application. The Mkyong blog has a nice post on how to autowire dependiecnes into custom JSF validators. Very nice post! Our friend Krishna Prasad has a nice post on hwo to implement the control bus pattern with Spring Integration and JMS

Java Evangelist Stephen Chin (@steveonjava) is motorcycling across Europe, and dropping in on developers and Java User Groups to talk about Java and do some hacking. What's cool is you'll be able to be a part of it too: watch via live streaming, and interact using #nighthacking on Twitter. The tour will kickoff stateside with a visit to James Gosling (Father of the Java Language) - Wednesday Oct 24 at 11AM PST. Some noteworthy stops on the tour include: Ben Evans (LJC Leader and Author) - Saturday Oct 27 at 8PM BST (12PM PST) Adam Bien (Java Champion and Author) - Friday Nov 2 at 11AM CEST (2AM PST) Andres Almiray (Griffon Founder and Author) - Sunday Nov 4 at 8PM CEST (11AM PST) In total, there will be over 20 different interviews, several JUG visits, and special coverage of J-Fall and Devoxx conference.You can view the full schedule and watch streaming video at nighthacking.com.

Last week, we profiled OpenGamma, a London-based startup bringing the open source model to the closed world of finance. A key member of staff is Stephen Colebourne, the company’s “Java guru” (to quote their marketing manager), who is best-known for his work on open source projects such as Joda-Time and the upcoming JSR-310 specification for a Time and Date API. Although no longer a member of the Apache Software Foundation, he’s still passionate about OSS, recently making news with SQL-handling library ElSql. This library was already freely available, Colebourne explains, but was buried within the OpenGamma source code. “It was just a case of, well, we seem happy enough with it, why don't we publish this as a separate project?” he says. “I think what'll be interesting is now that it's a separate, independent thing on GitHub - will other people pick it up, and if other people pick it up, will they actually have small changes they want to make to it themselves.” Other components of OpenGamma have previously been broken out into separate project, such as messaging messaging system Fudge. Colebourne is positive about extracting further elements, and hints at a possible standalone time series library (though “it would need quite a lot of work”). JSR-310: the Date and Time API ElSql is a mere distraction, however, compared to JSR-310, the Date & Time API, which Colebourne is leading. With Jigsaw delayed, it has become one of the headline features of Java 8, which Colebourne describes as “very weird, given that I don't work for Oracle”. He started on the project as an attempt to bring the ideas of Joda-Time (“the API most sensible people, it would seem, use to do their date and time”) to the JDK. “Obviously Joda-Time is a separate library,” he says. “It's only so good. It would be nice to get similar ideas into the JDK, and then over time Joda-Time can just fade away. The thing was, that it wasn't really possible to just take Joda-Time as it was, and put it into the JDK.” (Colebourne has written about this in detail on his blog.) Perhaps to deflate expectations, he’s remarkably pessimistic about the likelihood of JSR-310 being finished in time, or even making it into Java 8. “JSR-310 aims for JDK 8,” he stresses. “Obviously that's up to a whole variety of people to decide on whether they want to accept it or not... it also requires it to be actually finished to a point at which it is actually suitable for inclusion into the JDK.” On reforming the JCP Colebourne has long been an outspoken critic of Java’s standards body, the JCP (which he describes as “kind of a fake zombie body”), regularly voicing his opinions on the election process and pushing for increased transparency on his blog. “There's lot of people - particularly the London Java Community - who are trying to reinvigorate it, but reinvigorating a zombie is a bit hard,” he says, admitting a lack of interest in the upcoming election. “The JCP is trying to reform itself, and it's trying to become more transparent, but they only solution which makes any sense is to separate out [into Java EE and SE bodies] - because the JCP does two different roles. “You need the JCP as it always was - multiple vendors for Java EE specifications, application servers, JMS, all that kind of stuff, and then something else that allows other people to have input into, and general management of, changes to Java SE itself. Where that second body recognises that Oracle is the one who puts in most of the money, and therefore they should have the final decision. “There's no problem with [Oracle having ultimate control over Java],” he adds. “People read my blogs and assume that I have a problem with that. I have no problem with that at all - Oracle puts in all the money, it should have the final say. What Colebourne wants to see is “clarity in the organization”, he says. “We need to get the reality of what the situation is back in step with what the legal documents say.” Photo by Rowan McLaughlin.

Classloaders are at the core of the Java language. Java EE containers, OSGi, various web frameworks and other tools use classloaders (aka class loaders) heavily. Yet, when something goes wrong with classloading, would you know how to solve it?

With criticism still running rife over the performance of the newest 4.2 platform, the Eclipse Foundation finally have some good news to crow about, with the arrival of Google as the newest Strategic Member. Google were of course the first company to lend a helping hand when Eclipse 4.2 performance issues reached a head in September, donating $20,000 to buy hardware for testing. They also offered to start up a testing lab to tackle problems within Eclipse’s Common Build Infrastructure. Now, Google join the likes of CA Technologies, IBM, Oracle and SAP in providing $250,000 annually to help keep Eclipse operations ticking. The 4.2 fiasco has brought to light the need for Eclipse funding in the central projects, and Google stepping up to the plate will no doubt help boost the coffers. Director of the Eclipse Foundation, Mike Milinkovich wrote on his blog that “Google has long been a very large user, adopter and contributor to Eclipse,” before going on mention that the Eclipse tooling platform had been “an important part” of Android’s success. He added: “By providing this additional funding, Google will be helping the Eclipse Foundation ensure that we have a great infrastructure and a great staff to support our community.” The number of Eclipse Strategic Members now stands at 11, with Actuate, Bredex, EclipseSource, itemis, OBEO, and Talend all taking seats on the board. Google’s generosity and stature might spur others on to donate to the Eclipse ecosystem as it goes through some troubling times. Their presence as Strategic Member should help ease the pressure and hopefully guide Eclipse onto greater things.

CON3896 - Interactive Onstage Java EE Overengineering, Monday, Oct 1, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III [Video Download] TUT3907 - Java EE 6/7: The Lean Parts, Monday, Oct 1, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM - Parc 55 - Divisidero [Video Download] CON3908 - Building Serious JavaFX 2 Applications, Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM - Hilton San Francisco - Imperial Ballroom B [Video Download] CON3906 - Stress-Testing Java EE 6 Applications Without Stress, Thursday, Oct 4, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III [Video Download] Thanks for attending my sessions and for all the nice interactions! Slides and projects are also available to download. See you at Java EE Workshops at MUC Airport (March 25th-28th)! Real World Java EE Bootstrap and Effective Java EE Bootstrap Workshops [Airport Munich]

When would it ever be a good idea to randomly and intentionally try to terminate parts of your software system -- including the hardware it runs on? How about early and often? In this Agile DevOps installment, DevOps expert Paul Duvall describes approaches to creating a Chaos Monkey (as it's been dubbed by Netflix) to ensure that your production infrastructure can recover from inevitable system failures.