Sunday, January 15, 2006

JBoss EJB 3.0 TrailBlazer

A nice EJB 3.0 in JBoss presentation can be found under the JBoss TrailBlazer pages. It allows you to get a quick overview of what you can do with EJB 3.0 within JBoss and the new changes in EJB 3.0. Pretty worth taking a look.

New England Java Users Group January Meeting

I attended the NEJUG January meeting Struts 2006: An embarrassment of riches. This was a pretty interesting and information filled meeting. The future of Struts was discussed, in particular details on the integration between Struts codebase and WebWork codebase were outlined. Looks like WebWork 2.2 recently released will provide the codebase from which Struts 2.0 will be developed upon so the two technologies will merge. Pretty interesting to see as well the underlying Spring support on which WebWork is based, clearly showing the coolness of this infrastructure. This was a full room presentation with around 230 participants and it well worth the 1 hour drive each way to attend. Next NEJUG meetings promise to be pretty interesting as well.

Healing my head from the bumping on the wall [Part 2]

Yup...head feels a lot better...and the reading material was one of the most interesting ones I took on vacation so far...Both technologies have some elements of QWAN and it definitely been showing their influence in latest and greatest developments in the Java community. Just take a look:

  • Hibernate is now the underlying ORM technology for persistence in the likes of JBoss' implementation of EJB 3.0
  • Dependency Injection is also a concept that is being introduced in latest EJB 3.0 (although, IMHO, still awkward in some aspects).
  • Interceptor queue and aspect oriented programming start showing themselves in EJB 3.0 as well (again in a much cleaner fashion in Spring).
  • WebWork 2.2, the future Struts Action 2.0 is based on Spring and brings (as a result) lots of the great ideas of Spring into the mix.

Unit testing in Spring becomes dead easy since, if you follow the Dependency Injection approach as you should in Spring, you can easily use something like Mock Objects to actually inject pretty much all kinds of stand ins allowing you to test code deterministically and without the need for large, heavy or hard to integrate into testing support infrastructures. Web Unit Testing in particular becomes sane to use by following this approach...

More to follow on this pretty soon....