Jason Hunter has published an interesting article about new features added to servlet 2.5. The focus of this article is like most of the JEE 5 goals all about simplification, easy of use, this is done by leveraging Java5 annotations (resources refences, life cycle support,...), some improvements around the web.xml, and cross context sessions support.
I am using internally Blojsom for blogging about the product I am taking care of: OC4J and especially the Web Services stack. In this post I am quickly documenting, as the title says, how to install Blojsom on OracleAS 10g.
The first thing to do is to download the product itself, just download the Blojsom quickstart from sourceforge.
Since, Blojsom is distributed as a WAR file you have nothing special to do, just deploy it. Anyway I have created a viewlet that shows step by step deployment using Oracle Enterprise Manager.
So the application link will be: http://localhost:8888/blojsom/
Note: if you want to use the command line utility (admin.jar) or the Ant deployment task, you should package the Web archive in an EAR file.
The easiest way will be to just change the index.html page to redirect to the default blog. The index.html page to be modified is in:
$ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/application/blojsom/blojsomXXXX/index.html
where blojsomXXXX is the name of the Web application generated during deployment.This is it...
I would like react to last week marc andreessen's words (netscape founder during the php/zend conference andreessen basically says that PHP will beat Java and succeeds where Java is not. Most of the reasons that Andreesen used to justify this saying are because of PHP simplicity. Do you think he is talking about the language or the application server -yeah, let's call it this way... (J2EE...)..
Let's talk about J2EE first, it is true that when you take a look to the learning curve of J2EE and PHP it is a no brainer.. PHP is effectively more simple. But we can start with the acronyms themselves: J2EE==Enterprise, where PHP==Personal Home Page ( since then renamed Hypertext Processor). So from the origins the 2 technologies were not here to achieve the same goals. But PHP has proven that it could be used for complex application/Web sites, and still keep it simplicity.
So PHP is simple this is true, but Java on the server could be also. I think that the complexity comes from the fact that J2EE its expert always see an application as a enterprise application, and what that means in term of life cycle, development process, packaging and so on.... Why am I saying that it is coming from the expert? Just take a look to a PHP tutorial and a J2EE one? This is clear that you must be a very good and experienced developer to start with J2EE... But this is is not coming from the technologies, but mainly the way we talk about it. I think we should talk a little more about simple development with Java. For example focusing o JSP and JSTL for simple stuff. I agree that putting too much logic in JSP and reduce the number of layer is 'bad' for complex applications, but it could be used for some. Why do we need to always package a WAR or EAR file? Yes you can technically deploy exploded archive and modify the information after the fact. This is not necessary the best practices but it could be useful for some applications (not necessary only in development environment.
About the language itself, sure that Java is more complex, it is considerate as a System Level Language, where PHP is a scripting language. Do we still compare Shell and C? No we need both of them isn't?
In the same time, Java as a language must be simplified, or let be more precise... I think Java developers need the simplicity of scripting languages such as PHP but with the power of Java under the cover. And this is happening right now. JavaScript is now integrated to Java 6, Groovy provided a well integrated JVM with a very powerful and simple syntax. Grails -Groovy On Rails- provided a simple framework for CRUD applications.
Still skeptical about the simplicity of PHP, try it...
Still skeptical about Java being simple, try a scripting language... for example Groovy
In conclusion the platform of my dream should:
And I am sure that Java is the good language and platform for that; but Groovy and other scripting languages will help. And I will also continue to develop using PHP too. And both worlds will coexists and be integrated using Web Services and or JSR-223.
You can now downlaod the Early Access 1 version of Oracle JDeveloper 10g (10.1.3) from OTN.
Finally the Java specification about Web Service will have a name that makes sense... moving away from JAX-RPC to JAX-WS (JAX Web Services)...
The JAX-RPC name, which stands for Java API for XML-based RPC, is misleading because developers assume it is only about RPC, according to Doug Kohlert, a Sun staff engineer, in his blog this week. “By renaming JAX-RPC to JAX-WS, we can eliminate this confusion,” Kohlert wrote. JAX-WS stands for Java API for XML Web Services.
Mike Keith, Oracle Toplink architect, persistence guru, and member of the EJB 3.0 Expert Group, gives an, in his last entry an overview of EJB 3.0, in the context of the comparison with Hibernate and especially explaining why the statement that we sometimes hear "EJB 3.0 is Hibernate" is wrong.
This blog entry as been selected as a news by The Server Side, titled "EJB 3.0 is not Hibernate" and is very active in term of comments/reaction, feel free to add yours there.
In the same time if you want to learn more about EJB 3.0 and start developing with it you can find infromation and EJB 3.0 container on OTN.
Raghu just posted an interesting article asking the question "Does EJB 3.0 really make application development easy?".
So as you will see EJB 3.0 does simplify the development by reducing the number of source and descriptor files that you have to manipulate. (I won't go in the detail of the number of lines of Java or XML). What I really like about EJB 3.0 is not only the fact that Entity bean are POJOs, but also that now you can read the code and understand how the application is build, thanks to the annotations! I am sure that if you got the EJB 2.x genes you do not find them complex, but I did not have this mutation...
I am inviting you to download the Oracle EJB 3.0 Developer Preview to be more familiar with this technology.
This new Java World article compares the different Java scripting languages (Groovy, JudoScript, Pnuts, JRuby, Jacl, Jython, Rhino, and BeanShell), and list the issues that you have to select the good one...
In this article that I like I would like to read a little about the JSR-223 that should help with the integration part.
I will be very interested to know how you use Java Scripting language in your projects, so feel free to drop me a comment or mail ( tugdual at gmail)
The JSR 223: Scripting for the Java Platform is now open for public review until March 28th.
If you are not familiar with it, the JSR 223 main goal is to define how the Java platform should integrate with scripting languages. It defines a standard API similar to Bean Scripting Framework.
You can dowlnoad the spec from the JCP Web Site.
You can find a new How-To Document that explains how to use OC4J and Eclipse together using the Lomboz plugin.
You can download the server definition files for the Production release of OC4J 10g (9.0.4) or for the J2EE 1.4 Developer Preview 10.1.3.