Netbeans 6 is finally here

Finally, NetBeans 6 is released. It has some really great features like profiling and support for ruby. Also their Swing GUI builder (formerly known as Matisse) is really great, and it now supports Beans Binding and Swing Application Framework. The only thing I don't like about the use of the GUI builder is that it doesn't allow you to edit the code it generates yourself, which is really annoying for hardcore developers. Overall, NetBeans is really great, and it really excels in some great areas. For the full feature list, please check this link.

Spring 2.5 is out

Spring 2.5 is out, and it introduces several new exciting features. One of the most exciting features in the new version is the java configuration, and automatic discovery of spring beans. Well, since the beginning of the Spring framework, wiring components to each other and configuring which class will be injected where was done only using XML. Yes, the people behind spring always said that any format can be used to do the configuration, but you have to write your own classes to implement the format you are going to use. Hence, there was nothing but XML until today.

As of now, you can use the auto-wiring features provided by the new version of spring to put the wiring configurations as annotations in your java code. You will still be using XML, but the amount of XML you need to write will be reduced significantly. Mark Fisher wrote a great article on InfoQ titled What's New in Spring 2.5: Part 1. Looking forward for part 2.

Politics in Software Development

Politics is present in every aspect of our life, whether we realize it or not. It's present in the way you treat your family, your in-laws, and your coworker. It's even present in software development.

Ever wonder why Microsoft made Windows Mail in Vista not able to have Hotmail (now Windows Live Hotmail) accounts (unlike Outlook Express), and then months later they release Windows Live Mail which has this feature? Haven't you ever thought why when you want to download the new version of MSN Messenger (now Windows Live Messenger), you have to download an installer which has the options of downloading several other new Windows Live products that you never heard of (Mail, Writer, Photo Sharing, etc)?

Why does Microsoft's Windows Live Family Safety require that each and every member of your household should have a windows live ID so that he/she can access the internet? You say marketing? I say marketing falls under the umbrella of politics.

If the above examples don't strongly show clearly how company politics affect software development, the following ones will certainly do so.

Sun's business is mainly hardware, servers to be specific. Sun is also the company that maintains java. Now java is supposed to be platform independent, and we (java developers) claim that it runs on each and every availabal platform, right? WRONG! Sun creates JDKs and JREs for Windows, Linux and Solaris only, meaning that if you have an HP or an IBM server, you will not be able to get Sun's JVM. HP and IBM develop their own JVMs, but of course the available Java version on those machines is always behind that of Sun. Currently, HP and IBM have JVMs that run java 5, which is more than three years old.

Sun simply won't release versions of java for AIX or HP-UX since it will be releasing it for competitors in the hardware business. If it did, enterprises that have java applications and need to use the latest features may go to Sun's competitors. Sun releases versions for Windows to stop Microsoft from dominating the software development market, and if this is done, the market share of dot net will increase while that of java will decrease, and since dot net doesn't work on anything other than Windows, Sun will be losing a large part of the hardware market for windows based servers.

Sun also open sourced it's star office suite to create openoffice.org, and they open sourced Solaris, and made it compatible with desktop and laptop hardware. Why? To go another step in stopping Microsoft Windows from dominating the desktop market, so that it would slow down the growth of the dot net community, so that software in the market would be runnable on UNIX and not just Windows, so that it would increase it's the possibility of people going for Sun servers.

I believe that Sun's war with Microsoft could simply be over (or at least won't be as strong) if Microsoft made dot net platform independent, but Microsoft will never go for such a move. Microsoft wants to dominate the desktop environment with Windows, and it's very strong competition from Apple and Linux. Microsoft is using the dot net technology, with their fabulous IDE to market Windows. If suddenly dot net applications ran on Linux, for example, Microsoft may lose a huge market share.

I think that projects like WINE must make Microsoft live in fear. Maybe that's why Microsoft made a lot of changes to Vista that made a lot of programs not compatible with it. What had happened is that the software vendors made their software compatible with Vista, and everything went back to normal, except that projects like WINE and REACTOS went one step behind.

I believe that a lot of changes that were introduced to Vista were just to make it incompatible with such projects (such as changing "Documents and Settings" to "Users" and a lot of folders under the user folder like "Local Settings" for example to "AppData\Local" or something like that, and a countless more changes). I believe that such changes have no meaning other that what I assumed earlier.

Now let's go back to Sun again. Sun is THE supporter for Netbeans, which is a great IDE by the way. On the other side of the table, we have the more popular Eclipse, and guess what, IBM led the Eclipse Consortium (and it's the one that created Eclipse). Now someone would say that both are open source projects, and it doesn't make a difference to the companies what IDE developers use, right?. I again say WRONG!

IBM is in the software business, and being familiar with Eclipse makes you somewhat familiar with Websphere and Rational Tools, that are built over Eclipse. Being familiar with those IBM products may lead to you using the Websphere application server, and if you do, which operating system and hardware are the best for such a server? IBM hardware and AIX is the answer. What was Sun's response? Open source Sun application server and create project glassfish, hence you have a high end application server from Sun for free, and of course it supports the latest java technologies months (or even years) before other application servers (like servlets 2.5, JSP 2.1 and other JEE 5 features for example).

Back to Netbeans and Eclipse. Both IDEs allow developers to create custom plugins, but Eclipse recently (not very recently, actually about a year and a half ago) changed their framework to use Equinox, which is Eclipse's implementation of OSGi. OSGi is maintained by a large group of corporations, that include both IBM and Sun Microsystems, and both were founders of the OSGi Alliance. Having IBM and Sun working together is not something to be surprised from, because, as I mentioned before, it's all about politics.

Now Eclipse implemented OSGi by creating Equinox, what will Netbeans do? Well, as an active member of the Netbeans team told me once, they are waiting. They already have their pluggable framework. If they go to OSGi, they have to choose an implementation, and for sure they won't use Equinox. Even if they go for any other implementation (Apache Felix or Knopflerfish for example) or even create their own, they would still be switching to OSGi after eclipse did, hence Netbeans would be following Eclipse's steps (or as someone else would be seeing it, Sun would be following IBM's steps).

So, what's next? Well, there is a JSR (JSR 277) which was created to create Java Module System, which is very similar to OSGi, and guess what, IBM is not in the expert group. As I mentioned seconds ago, the Netbeans team is waiting to see which one will win, Java Modules or OSGi, but I reckon that they will either go for Java Modules once the JSR is finalized, or they will stay as they are. I'm quiet confident that they will never go for OSGi.

I believe that this post became much longer, than I wanted it to be, but I can still go on with the subject for much longer. I wanted to get to a point, and that is, politics between large companies have a great effect on software development. Even with open source projects, when a project becomes very popular, large companies tend to create standards similar it. Examples in java include log4j & JDK 1.4 logging, Hibernate & JPA and of course OSGi & java modules (OSGI and java modules have some differences of course). It's then up to the original creator of the open source project to implement the standard (like hibernate implementing JPA).

I'm not at all against Sun (actually I'm a huge fan), but I took it as an example. I'm also not against standardization. I just wanted to speak about the subject of why large corporations do what they do.

Edit on 12/12/2007
HP released java 6 in November and IBM release java 6 just this month, which is still two years after the release by Sun.

Logback web configurer for Spring

On thing that should be mentioned about logback is that spring doesn't have a ConfigListener for it like the one it has for log4j (the org.springframework.web.util.Log4jConfigListener class). Well, you can write your own code based on the spring source. Thankfully to Davide Baroncelli, he already did that for us. He had already sent the code to the logback user mailing list. The the thread is available online on Nabble, so that if you would like to view it. He also has an updated version that supports auto reloading for logback configurations. Thanks Davide

Windows Vista Screen Flicker

Well, this post has nothing to do with java, but I though it would be important, since this issue caused me a lot of frustration. I recently bought a laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium, and I was frustrated at what seemed to me that it was a hardware problem. Well, it wasn't. It was a windows "feature" ;-)

The "feature" that annoyed me was that the screen blinked a couple of times when I was logging in, in a matter that seemed as if the screen is faulty. The same thing happened when I wanted to do something that windows think that I shouldn't do, like moving a read only file, or run an executable program (yet another windows "feature"). When I tried to do any of those actions that would cause a security problem, I got a prompt to ask me if I allow this action, with the desktop disabled, and with an occasional screen blink (totally random).

Well, after some googling, I found the causes of those two really annoying "features". The first "feature" was the Transient Multimon Manager (TMM). This TMM is "a Microsoft Windows Vista operating system feature" responsible for detecting your monitors as you connect/disconnect them to/from your mobile PC. You may regard TMM as a good feature in case you use multiple displays (external monitor, projector, etc.) especially that "TMM persists the user's settings on a per-display basis when possible".

When you seldom use multiple displays (like me), TMM is of no value. So, how do we turn it off? Simple. Go to task scheduler (present under "Accessories/System Tools"), then go to "Task Scheduler Library/Microsoft/Windows/MobilePC", and you'll find a TMM task. Disable it, and you're done (of course you'll have to restart your system for the change to take effect, because the task will already be running). You can also disable the trigger of the task. I do not recommend deleting the task altogether, since you might need it in the future.

Now for the second "feature". Windows vista has what's called "secure desktop". Well, it is a good feature to be frank. When you try to do an action that Vista thinks that it might be the result of a malicious action, it will prompt you whether you allow this action or not. This is not "secure desktop" by the way. Secure desktop is responsible for locking all the processes running in the background so that if the action was really performed by a piece of malicious software, it wouldn't give this piece of software the ability to mimic the user allowing the action to be performed.

So, if you think that you will never have malicious software, and you don't want secure desktop, all you have to do is to run your registry editor (just type "regedit" in the "run" screen), and go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/
CurrentVersion/Policies/System", and change the value of the "PromptOnSecureDesktop" to "0" (that's a zero not an O) instead of "1". This will remove secure desktop (hence the occasional blinking) but will not remove the prompting. I recommend that you keep secure desktop for the security reasons, but that's just me.

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Edit on 6/1/2008:
I would like to thank Matt for supplying this link in his comment. I think that the screen shot woul give you a little help. Thanks Matt

Commons Logging may be harmful to your health

All of us know that decoupling your code from the frameworks you use is a really great thing. This is why bridge libraries like commons logging are really wonderful. Just imagine how much code you will be changing if you are using log4j APIs in all of you application classes, and then a decision was made to start using the java APIs instead. Think of how much code would be changed. But with commons logging, the code changes would be minimal. Another thing, look at how many open source projects that are using commons logging. This must mean that commons logging is a good thing, right? WRONG!

First, let us define the meanings of "good" and "bad" concerning libraries such as commons logging. I think, that a "good" library would be able to bridge your logging requests to the logging framework of your preference with minimum interference and a very small overhead. I don't have to mention here that it should be stable and bug free of course. Another thing, which I personally think that it's very important, is that it should be as simple as possible.

If we take a look at JCL (Jakarta Commons Logging), we'll find that a lot of those aspects are not met. JCL works in a quiet complex way. It has a discovery mechanism to see which logging library you have in your application, and then uses class loading to load the logger that will be used. Even though this does the job, this class loading solution has its drawbacks. First of all, this may cause a lot of problems if your application is in a strict class loading environment (like OSGI for example). Another thing, JCL has a bad history with it's class loading solution.

Version 1.04 of JCL that was released on the 16th of June 2004 had some serious problems with its class loading mechanism. Ceki Gülcü (the original author of log4j) wrote a marvelous article on the subject. He also wrote a great piece on JCL, but might be a little outdated. Even though version 1.1 of JCL, released about 2 years after 1.04, claims that the bug is fixed, it's still a risk to use it, especially for the complexity of this library.

Another thing that needs to be mentioned here is that Rod Waldhoff, the author of commons logging, wrote a blog entry in 2003, titled "Commons Logging was my fault", where, in the last part of it, he says where to use and, more importantly, not to use JCL. To conclude it, JCL should be used in small and tiny components that are intended to be used by other developers in their projects. Even with that, Erik van Oosten created a project called "Version 99 Does Not Exist", which is an empty JAR with a pom file and maven meta data, so that you would put it in your maven repository, so that libraries that depend on JCL would not download it from the net, since the empty JAR is version 99.

So what else should we use? Well, I think that SLF4J is a great project. It's a simple facade for various logging APIs. The beauty of it is that instead of the class loading solution, it is just a simple facade, where you just plug in the desired implementation at deployment time. It's a very simple solution, "perhaps even laughably so" as stated in their FAQ.

SLF4J is wonderful, simple, stable and can be used in strict class loading environments like OSGI. It can be used with log4j, jdk1.4 logging, SimpleLogger, logback and x4juli (the latter 2 provide native implementation of SLF4J APIs). It's very simple to migrate to SLF4J from JCL. Simply download "jcl104-over-slf4j.jar", and it will delegate JCL calls to SLF4J.

SLF4J also has a couple of great features, parameterized logging and MDC support. Parameterized logging can cause a significant increase in the performance. One last thing that I have noticed, which is quiet funny really, several apache projects use SLF4J instead of commons logging. This sure shows that SLF4J is on the right track.

Complete Java 2 Certification Study Guide (Sybex)

This is my second review, and again, it's a java certification book. This was the book I studied from for my certification exam, and thanks to God, I did pretty well.

The book is well constructed, with a lot of info, and a lot of great exercises at the end of each chapter, plus a mock exam, and four sample exams on the accompanying CD. Unfortunately, the book is full of typos, and there are several mistakes with the exam and the review questions, which is quiet a shame. Those mistakes turn this book from a great book, to a "just quiet satisfactory" book. Some of the mistakes are clearly due to lack of revision of the changes done to this edition, so conflicts show up in a couple of places.

An example to what I mean is that starting from Java 5.0, the return type of the overriding method could be a child of the return type of the overridden method, and it's stated clearly in the middle of the chapter, but in the summary at the of the chapter, it's mentioned that the return type of the overriding method must be exactly the same as the overridden method, and can't even be a subclass of it (which is true for pre-5.0). This is clearly something that was in previous editions of the book, and wasn't changed where it was supposed to be. Several mistakes like this occur in the book.

The book is worth it's price, but only if you are going to be careful while studying from it, and check other sources, whether they are other books, or freely available resources on the internet. If you are going to study from one book, and one book only, and will not rely on any other resources, then this is not the book for you. The book is not a bad choice, but there are several other better study guides in the market, like Katherine's Sierra's and Bert Bate's SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide from Osbourne. I checked it out, and it looks great.

Buy Complete Java 2 Certification Study Guide from amazon
Buy SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide from amazon