My Opinion About Java FX

I was interviewed (java.sun.com) about Java FX in the enterprise, Java FX tooling and superfluous GoF patterns.

I'm a "Most Valuable Blogger" (MVB) at Dzone.com!

I was asked to be a part of the MVB (Most Valuable Blogger) program at dzone.com - what I accepted.

Contents of this blog will be republished more frequently at dzone.com with a back-link to the origin post. ...and I will get some cool t-shirts. That's the deal :-)

So, You Want To Start With Java EE? ...Some Excellent Books To Read

  • Java EE 5 Development with NetBeans 6: if you want to start with hacking your applications quickly. This book guides you step by step with wizards and screenshots and explains briefly the technology. Netbeans 6.7 and Glassfish v2 is probably the fastest way to start your Java EE carrier. You get installed your whole environment + IDE in few minutes and clicks without fiddling with plugins, configuration etc. It covers Netbeans 6.5  - but is still valid for 6.7 and 6.8 (except visual web pack).
  • Pro EJB 3: Java Persistence API: this books is exact the opposite: its IDE agnostic and concentrates on the principles and challenges. If you like to understand the JPA concepts - read it.
  • EJB 3 in Action: explains EJB 3 with some interesting case studies (EJB 2 migration, Spring integration etc.). If you are starting with EJB 3 development - an interesting read.
  • Beginning Java™ EE 6 Platform with GlassFish™ 3: From Novice to Professional: this book introduces you nicely to the future: Java EE 6 and Glassfish v3. It also explains RESTFul services, JSF and Facelets. 
So - enjoy your weekend - after reading these books you will become a Java EE professional (around Monday :-)).

OOP Session Transscript as (German) Article in Computerwoche "Building Dream Teams"

In January I gave my first "softskill" session about "Building Dream Teams" at the OOP conference in munich. One of the attendees wrote a German article about it in computerwoche. A short summary in English: "There are only two types of developers, those who enjoy programming, and those who don't"

Free (German) Artikel about EJB 3.0/Java EE 5, Domain Driven Design and Services in JavaSpektrum

In the current JavaSpektrum magazine an article about the two different (actually opposite) approaches:

"Service Oriented Architectures vs. Domain Driven Design with EJB 3.X" was published. The magazine will hit the shelfs at 18.01.2008, however the article is already available as a PDF for download.

 

I will discuss some topics from this article during the sessions "Enterprise Architectures in Practice" and partially in the "Greenfire" at the next OOP-conference in munich as well - so feel free to come for a chat during the conference.

 

Your feedback (as always) is highly appreciated! Leave a comment, or send me an email.

Java EE 5 Architekturen book is finally available, 21 Observers in p4j5

The book "Java EE 5 Architekturen" is available from amazon.de - so is really out now :-).
The p4j5 community is still growing. Only last week I approved 3 observers - now we are 22. I get many direct questions and suggestions (some really interesting) directly per email regarding patterns, and architectures - please use the p4j5 forum/mailinglist for discussion as well. 

Java EE 5 Architekturen, is printed and finally out

The (german) book Java EE 5 Architekturen is definetely out now. My publisher has it already ...and I hope for delivery :-).

Java EE 5 Architekturen book - is available now

The Java EE 5 Architekturen book should be available this week. I'm also going  to check-in the remaining projects into p4j5. Special thanks to the reviewers:

  • Sascha Frevel,
  • Daniel Lipp,
  • Frank Baier,
  • Günther Rackl,
  • Michael Stachel,
  • Daniel Adelhardt,
  • Robby Zeitfuchs,
  • Christopher Schmid, 
  • Michael Bien,
The feedback was very detailed and great. Btw. the first coresponding workshop in Zurich will be repeated - two workshops should scale better :-).

I wrote a chapter for a SOA book and forgot it...

...until I received today a copy of it. The book SOA-Expertenwissen (actually a bible, it comes with 867 pages) was written by many (about 20-50 its hard to say) recognized experts like Bernd Oestereich, Thilo Frotscher, Gernot Starke, Michael Stal, Stefan Tilkov, Markus Voelter and many, many others. I only wrote (and so read) a short chapter about Java EE 5 last year - and forgot it completely.
It was a nice surprise today, after almost one year, receiving this "bible". Now I have to read the remaining 800 [(867 - (Java EE 5 Chapter)) > 800] pages to learn something from the other authors :-). 

Java EE 5 Architekturen book is completed

The book "Java EE 5 Architekturen" book is completed now. I just have to write the preface. The publisher is going to review all five chapters, after this step I will send a copy to the technical reviewers.
This book describes serviceoriented (actually procedural), as well as objectoriented architectures. Similar to the "Enterprise Architekturen" - I didn't described the technology (EJB 3) and just concentrated on the essential ideas (I hate books with long introductions to the technology, I prefer to read javadoc or the spec instead...:-)). Some ideas were already presented on the OOP, Entwicklertage, JAX and JavaONE conferences - the feedback was positive (actually no negative feedback so far). The book contains independent patterns, ideas and utilities as well as suggestions for the combination or profiles of these. The last chapter describes superpackages, components and subsystems and how they are related to the independent patterns. I mainly described my experience from my projects, without beeing too theoretical. I will provide for every pattern a small sample as netbeans 6 project with glassfish v2 settings.
Some reasons for choosing Netbeans for creating the samples:

  1. Netbeans 6 support for Java EE 5 is really good. To create a EJB3/JSF applications no additional plugins are needed -> which is a bless. You just have to download Netbeans and deploy the projects. Netbeans already comes with SQL-Explorer, JBoss, Glassfish, WLS 10 support, Tomcat, JPA, JSP and JSF integration etc. You can even monitor appservers from the runtime tab (or perspective :-))
  2. I used ForteJ for the samples of my first book - the result was - I lost the interests for Netbeans and used Eclipse 1.0 - 3.2 for the remaining 4 books projects and several articles :-). I'm also working as a consultant for different companies. So I had to maintain different configurations of eclipse with different plugins/features like EMF, GMF, WTP, TPTP, DTP, SQL-Explorer/Quantum DB, Dali (the plugin hell?)etc. Although I still like lean IDEs, it became a huge overhead to maintain all the customer specific combinations. Netbeans was improved significanlty in the last years and solved the problem - no plugins are required per default :-). Interestingly enough Netbeans is also gaining momentum in Germany - perhaps also because of the "plugin hell". I also started to use Netbeans in my trainings/coachings - with very good experience - just extract and go.
  3. It is very easy and efficient to create UML-diagrams in netbeans. You can just reverse engineer an existing project into UML one. The diagrams look really great and are Power Point compliant All UML pictures/figures are made with Netbeans 5.5 and 6
  4. Was not important for the book, but: Netbeans 6 comes with JSR-295, JSR-295, Matisse support - this is very important for the long term strategic decisions.
...and why glassfish for deployment:
  1. The admin console is great - you can increase the heap, change classpath, setup datasources from graphical view - without vi or emacs skills :-)
  2. Glassfish is very good documented - you can download PDF docs, even the command line comes with unix-like "man" documentation
  3. I used already glassfish for some high performance projects because of grizzly (the glassfish kernel), and was impressed. It already comes with good out-off-the-box performance.
  4. Call-flow is great - you can monitor the whole EJB invocation stack. Event  performance monitoring charts are supported.
  5. You can manage, debug and profile glassfish from netbeans 6...
  6. Was not important for the book, but: the architecture of Glassfish V3 is even more exciting :-)
Now I have more time to describe some ideas in this blog and starting some opensource projects.

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