The major leap forward seems to be project lifecycle management, and collaboration suites. It doesn't seem like too long ago that we had a compiler, an editor, and some sticky notes.

In the Microsoft camp, my lowly Visual C++ has evolved into Visual Studio Team System/Team Foundation System/Orca/super maximized enterprise grid suite 2.0/whatever, which in turn is an editor on top of the compiler, a collaboration suite with groupware-features and a source versioning system  (and maybe that's an undersell?)!

And Borland, oh-don't-get-me-started! Borland's whole business is now centered on everything that happens before and after the work in JBuilder has been done: it's all about the lifecycle of the project.

JetBrains has their TeamCity product, which - along with their TMate source control client - form a suite of collaboration tools above and beyond working in IntelliJ. Even IntelliJ now has the ability to "share" a coding session with someone.  

And, now, I just read about the Eclipse Foundation's (and tech-lead Erich Gamma's) push into collab-suites with Eclipse Jazz (eh, here, and here). Of course, (the former) Rational has always been about this sort of thing in a lot of ways, so it's no surprise the influence eventually found its way to Eclipse. Interesting, I say!  

Does this mean there's little more vendors can see doing for individual developers? IntelliJ  IDEA) (mmm.. I love you) is good, but is it really the be-all-end-all of individual productivity? All without one patronizing Wizard? Really? Also, I'm a little unclear on how this new wave of software fits in with traditional tools.

Suppose I have a wiki and bug defect system (Trac)), a source control system (Subversion), an IDE (IntelliJ, emacs) and an email address/IM client, a project management tool (Microsoft Project?), and even a build system with a deficiency complex (Maven and Bamboo) what am I missing?

I just deployed a new version of the Tapestry 4.1 archetype. It's the same parameters as the archetype discussed previously. Essentially, the new version provides a few new features:

1. an interesting use of an engine service (in this case to provide a working rounded corner generator, as with Google Groups' rounded corner generator URL) and a corresponding component to employ the service.
2. the rounded corner component mentioned above, which is pretty sophisticated in of itself (as introductory code goes, anyway!)
3. much better documentation (mvn site, and then peruse the resultant docs in the target directory.)
   

.

Gmail is down, and I’ve not been able to access it with any sort of consistency for hours. What am I missing? What’s wrong? This has happened to me before, but never for this duration

That aside, I've deployed updates to the Tapestry 4.1 Maven archetype, and partly updated the documentation. An order of magnitude better, to be sure, but there remains much more to be done...

I love working with Tapestry 4, but I figure that it's because it's already configured to do the cool tricks I want to do with it. It's not easy getting off the ground on a blank new project. (Nor is it easy getting off the ground in a Ruby On Rails project without using the project generator!). Maven offers a solution, but, seemingly, no good archetype for it exists. I want something that'll let me type mvn jetty6:run and pull up a page immediately after I've run the familiar "mvn archetype:create" incantation.

I tried the (admittedly preliminary, at this stage in the game) Appfuse archetype,  and the one from Webtide. However, I wanted something that I could demo with really quickly. I imagine: 1.) I have the archetype. 2.) I mvn clean install it, and voilà, instant "hello world" application that could be aggressively/quickly modified. I took Howard Lewis Ship's Tapestry 5 Simple-Project archetype and expanded it/retrofitted it with a lot of Tapestry 4 scenarios.

I also wanted something that eased some real-world concerns or, at least, hid them. Something that already had a working example of most common things (setting up an ASO, using Spring. Perhaps I'll add SEO friendly URLs configured by default (well, for the common ones, with the less-obvious options commented and explained.).

Anyway, thanks again to Howard and the Tapestry for such a wonderful product. I'll evolve this version and clean it up. If there are any suggestions, I'd definitely appreciate it.

It's deployed to my repostory. Run the following command, and you'll have the archetype installed and a project created. Then, merely cd into the wordking directory and run mvn idea:idea, or mvn eclipse:eclipse, and then run mvn jetty6:run to get started. This will get your application running on port 8080. Simply bring up http://127.0.0.1:8080/ and you'll get a listing of all the contexts. You can modify the various configuration fles (save, of course, for web.xml), and HTML ad-infinitum without restarting. The second you compile a fresh class, Jetty will reload the context automatically.

mvn archetype:create -DarchetypeGroupId=com.codecafe.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=tapestry-simple -DremoteRepositories=http://codecafe.dev-hda.com/repository -DarchetypeVersion=4.1.2-SNAPSHOT -DgroupId=c.b -DartifactId=view

I just started playing with JSR 296 as I've recently started building an application that's Swing based (albeit, as an applet, which I'd like to make Java Webstart-able). It's phenomenal! As it stands right now, you can easily databind, internationalize, easily layout GUIs, and build on a useful Action abstraction if you're willing (and able! And what rocket scientist isn't?? Oh, you're not a rocket scientist? well?. I see? Go sit in the corner.) to coordinate the tapestry of solutions out there.

JSR 296 seeks to bring a lot of that flexibility to the developer right off the bat. With it you get internationalization, an action model, application lifecycle, persistence, etc. Pretty cool. Still missing is databinding and IOC and a layout mechanism. Fortunately, SpringRich, and JGoodies help alleviate those pain points, so I'm pretty stoked about the possibilities.

Maybe one day we'll have a framework for the desktop user and it'll endeavor to bring "web-style programming" to the desktop.

Which reminds me: all those frameworks endeavoring to bring Swing-style programming to the web (Wicket, JSF, Tapestry, Echo, whatever else I missed: this means you!) should change their attitude a little. It's telling that all of the things this framework brings to the table have been de rigueur in web frameworks for half a decade.

Check out the Swing Application Framework for more.

I wonder what this will mean for so much of the way an application is built currently. Will I have to become very good at securing SOAP services again? Will an easy, useful desktop programming paradigm reverse the transition from Web Services to JSON? I deployed a custom XML-based (not XML-RPC, or SOAP, but my own protocol) service specifically to be able to achieve modest portability/thoroughput on a prototype J2ME application I built a year or so ago. This was so because the XML parsers are sketchy enough. SOAP stacks (while available, even as a standard) weren't prevalent enough.  I can see Spring earning it's keep here, again. Imagine what could be done with a useful databingn mechanism and a convenient way of exposing services (à la Spring). Desktop applications could become the rich client king again. Maybe.

Meanwhile Bruce Eckel seems to think rich clients are where it's at, as well. Of course, he's pitching Flash, and not Swing.

Can't wait to see what's next. Windows Vista (Aero, WPF) is poised to make the rich client desktop commonplace. Maybe it'll heat up the landscape enough to drive a resurgence for the desktop developer.  Any one use any of these tools? Anything I should know?

I'm about to upgrade to JDK6 on my Windows XP machine. I'm running IntelliJ 6, which I understand works well on the new JDK. Confusing is the lackluster availability of the JRE. I expect Java.com to yeld a JRE 6 build, but instead it's still pushing the old JRE 5, which is also still being bundled with various PC vendors by default. Why is this? At what point does Sun certify a release as being "good enough" for the developers AND the rest of the world?  

The consensus seems to be that Java SE 6.0 offers the best out-of-the-box performance boost yet, by far.

After a bit of searching, I finally got to this thread  which has the whole process spelled out for you. I went with the second choice enumerated on the page (deleting the jre, and replacing it with JDK1.6's JRE as I didn't want to have to use idea.bat. Using idea.bat causes the DOS console to stay open while you're in IntelliJ. I created a second .bat file whose job it was to load the first one (idea.bat) like so: start idea.bat, however, the trouble is that didn't seem to work. I didn't want to give it much more thought and simply pursued the second option.

I wholely recommend the upgrade it's very quick. Loading IntellIJ would be one kind of speed increase, but loading a very big project quite another, and they both dramatically improved, to the point that IntelliJ no longer shows me "Tip Of The Day" when I'm doing these actions because it doesn't have to keep me entertained.
 
Completely worth it! 

Aside from all the new APIs supported (and there are a LOT ? some only previously available through extensions. Notable among them: Java APIs for Bluetooth ( JSR 82), Wireless Messaging API (WMA, JSR 226), and J2ME Web Services Specification (JSR 172), and of course we can?t forget.. argh... just check out Sun's page for the full scoop), the coolest thing for me has to be the standard support for the Location API?s. These APIs, of course have helped propel J2ME into orbit via Google?s "Google Mobile Maps" application (and the plethora of other maps / GPS applications out there helped, too, I suppose :-) )

This is an impressive release and long-awaited. One gripe: where?s my Linux SDK? I?ll have to use the windows version for now, I suppose. I should count my blessings: there doesn?t seem to be any mention of a Mac version!

I just noticed Salesforce.com?s latest step towards platform domination: Apex.

I like the name. Cool. Sounds like Apress, and Ajax. Half buzz, half hard-hitting tech done cheap, with just a twist of that je ne sais quoi, that ?this could be a Windows codename? quality. Yeah!

I like the possibilities. The market for middle ware integration is astonishing. The application that?s readily customized is the application that more readily adapts, and is adapted. This should go a long way towards removing all the edge cases defying Salesforce.com?s proliferation. Apparently, they have a little less than 30,000 customers. I don?t know if that?s individual users or entities, or what. It?s not nothing. Interesting: the inclusion of LINQ-style sql objects:

Account acc = [select Id from account where name = 'xxx'];
Account[] accs = new Account[]{acc};
System.assert(accs[acc.id] != null);

It?s a typed SQL query, embedded inline with your java. Not like those opaque String queries I keep hearing about?

I got the hint on all of this from eWeek magazine, in a small blurb about Apex of the January 22 issue. To my chagrin I get to the salesforce.com site, and start looking around right there, not too deeply linked, is Peter Coffee, formerly a columnist of 18 years at eWeek. He?s just switched jobs! Good luck, Peter!

Before Spring/Hibernate/that whole wave came along, I don?t remember being particularly inspired to have persistence and business logic attached to the entities on which that logic acted? In fact, I rather disliked EJB?s entity beans pattern specifically because everything was on the bean itself. Often times it?d be on a SessionBean, and that?s good. But even there, entity beans have basic persistence, removal and lifecycle operations built into it. A Car doesn?t car how it?s persisted, does it?

Then along came Rails (the most infamous example of this pattern) and suddenly everything is built into the object itself. And, honestly, I like the pattern there. Everything is static if its an operation that would be done by a DAO in Java. It?s a property if its to be persisted. Simple. You know where you stand. I also like the DAO/domain objects mechanism in modern day Java.

That said, I?m astonished at how ugly having the DAO functionality built into the domain object can get in Java.

I ran across some code that has factory methods for returning the entity! Then, as you modify the properties in the entity (mutator by mutator), it writes them to the database! Ugh! Modify 10 properties on the object, and lo 10 update statements fly by your console.

Furthermore, I?ve gotten used to the idea that you can have an interface defining a contract and then an implementation of that DAO?s interface. You can hide that implementation (especially with Spring) behind its contract through any number of remoting technologies, simple base casts and more in a local call, and more. You don?t have to include the accessor / mutators in the interface, too. That?s pretty remarkable.

I just found a tool called "archy"!

I have archetype-fever. I?m not ashamed of it. Long have I lusted over toolset x but not had the inner strength or resolve to spend the night setting up an ant build that MIGHT one day be integrated into my workflow, let alone quick enough for a 5 minute test. Maven archetypes make the agile ?10 minute test? a possibility. Java?s robbed open source projects of their 10 minute tests by being so complicated to bootstrap. With installation and compilation the norm, configuration is par for the course. Who has time? Who has more than 10 minutes, anyway?

A really polished project will have some sort of installation mechanism. But often times, it?s non standard, or half-assed. Download Tomcat for Windows and be received with a windows installer with all the bells and whistles. Download it for linux and?look forward to configuring a few things..

If you?ve got a project that?s a webapplication and you?ve got an installation process, then that?s impressive! Tigris.org?s Scarab, for example, has an installer. That?s not to say that there?s no configuration at all, What?s more, in Scarab?s case, I definitely would have preferred some documentation and a few bug fixes in lieu of that installer!

Archetypes give the project the spotlight and take care of the minutiae. This is why, unless it?s very exotic (J2ME and Jini spring to mind! A proposito: has any one found a useful maven 2 plugin for J2ME or GWT?), I wait for the archetype. Simply add the archetype?s repository to ~/.m2/settings.xml and run that familiar invocation, ?mvn archetype:create ??. Voilà, out pops a working project. You invoke mvn idea:idea at the root and off you go building a new application!

So fine, maven archetypes are amazing. Though, now you?re where you started, in a sense, aren?t you? Not quite as bad, but bad. You have to know where the archetypes are for them to be of any use to you! You could easily spend the time just looking for a way to avoid getting invested too much into some technology without a result.

That?s where archy comes in. It has a centralized listing of archetypes and their corresponding repositories and a command line interface to guide you through using any of them. It reads from this Wiki page, and it reads from archetypes.xml, on the local classpath. There doesn?t seem to be an easy to use way to expand that, though. I suppose you could just author your own archetypes.xml and put that on the root of classpath and it would resolve that, instead. I haven?t perused the source itself, so I don?t know. I?ll certainly get into it as I add more archetypes to my arsenal. Here are a few of note: Matt Raible's Appfuse, and a JBoss Seam archetype.

Update: I just found Pyx4me.com, which, among MANY other golden nuggets, seems to have a working Maven 2/J2ME plugin. Goodbye kludgy old Maven 1 / Antenna wrapper! I hope!