J2EE 1.4 introduces a major release of JSP: 2.0.

Here some of the cool new features:

Oracle has published a new white paper about Service Oriented Architecture, and how Oracle Application Server 10g accelerates SOA development and deployment.

Read the paper on the Oracle Web Site.

In the context of the 10th anniversary of Oracle TopLink, The Server Side published an interview of Mike Keith and Doug Clark, architect and product manager of TopLink. They talk about persistence in J2EE using EJB 3.0, but also the differences between TopLink and other persistence solutions...

One of my favorites tools on my Mac is Konfabulator that allows you to create -or use prebuilt- application called Widgets. This Widgets are for example battery level, weather, see the Widget Gallery.

The reason why I love it is not necessary the list of existing one, but more because you can very easily develop yours using Javascript. Dowload it and start to develop your widgets, developer guide, javascript reference are available in the Konfabulator Workshop

I was discussing with a friend about the creation of a monitoring dashboard in HTML. As any monitoring tool you want to be able to see the information in real-time, so you need to refresh the content....

One way of doing it is to refresh the whole page and this is easy, just use the meta tag: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="5; URL=http://www.grallandco.com/" > where 5 is the number of seconds between each refresh.

Javascript allows you to easily refresh a specific image of your page (a chart for example):

<img src="myChartServlet" name="chart1"/>
<script language="JavaScript">
  function loadImage() {
    var now = new Date();
    if (document.images) {
      document.images.chart1.src = 'myChartServlet?time='+now.getTime(); // add the time to avoid caching
    }
    setTimeout('loadImage()',1000);
  }
  setTimeout('loadImage()',1000);
</script>

You can obviously make the whole think dynamic and configurable...

Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Beta Release is now available for download, from OTN:

• Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE).

If you ask yourself on which Operating Systems, JDK, Browser, etc... you can use Oracle Application Server 10g just consult OTN or Oracle Metalink:

• OTN Oracle Application Server 10g (9.0.4) Certification Matrix

Mike Keith,architect for Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) and TopLink products and currently represents Oracle in the EJB 3.0 expert group, has published an interesting article about Annotations in Java 5.0:.

To Annotate or Not? focused on the usage of Annotation or XML as metadata language. Mike provides sample code and explain the pros and cons of the annotation using use cases.

Ronaldo Viscuso has just released a new version of his DHTML Menu Portlet. This portlet generates a DHTML menu for site navigation, with links to pages and subpages from a selected page group.

Stylesheet, height, width, mouse-over behavior, etc. are all configurable via the "Edit Defaults" page, which allows for complete customization for pretty much any desired look & feel....

The portlet, screen shots and installation document are available on the Portal Knowledge Exchange.

An Oracle Application Server (OracleAS) Provider for Jive Forums is now available to download from the Portal Integration Solutions page on OTN.

The Oracle Application Server (OracleAS) Provider for Jive Forums contains portlets that allow users and administrators to:

• View topics posted on their favorite forums
• Create a new topic or post a reply to one
• Search the forums
• View the hot topics across all forums
• View all topics, forums, categories and users being watched by the user
• View top reward points earners
• Administer the Jive Forums Application