What is the goal for the new portal? The goal for the portal is transparency. We want to make sure that this is not just open source, but an open community. There have been open source projects in the past industry-wide where it is just, "Here is our source, do what you want." The only way we can do that is to really engage the existing open source communities out there and ask them for their advice, guidance, and opinions. |
The NetBeans IDE is pretty good on its own, but even handier once you start extending it with plugins specific to your needs. In this installment of Open source Java projects, Jeff Friesen introduces you to NetBeans plugins that let you view the NetBeans filesystem, explore pictures on Windows systems, check code for standards compliance, add properties to Java classes, and make OpenGL development easier. All that is just a start, though, as you'll also learn how to create your own NetBeans plugin for accessing the NetBeans API Javadoc. Level: Intermediate. |
But what of that? If a business model that says "develop for free but pay to deploy" is acceptable, then what does enterprise IT need open source for, anyway? |
May 22, 2006—Among the biggest news stories at this week's JavaOne conference was Sun Microsystems' long-awaited announcement that it will be releasing the industry-standard Java programming language under an open source license. Java expert Richard Hoffman put together this list of answers to frequently asked questions covering some of the basic history behind this decision, what it means, and why you should care. |
Reports made easy with JasperReports JasperReports, a popular, full-featured open source report-generating library, uses XML report templates to generate reports you can display on the screen, send to a printer, or save as a PDF document. In this inaugural Open Source Profile column, Erik Swenson introduces the JasperReports library and explains how to integrate JasperReports into your applications. Erik Swenson, September 2002 |
Many CI tools, both open source and commercial, are on the market, and deciphering which one would best suit your particular environment can prove difficult. Some CI tools also boast additional SDLC (software development lifecycle) features, such as release management and build artifact management, while others concentrate on core CI functionalities. Some try to provide a wide range of notification methods and support virtually every version control system under the sun, whereas others concentrate on delivering a small, light, easy-to-understand product. In this article, we will look at four of the better-known and more interesting continuous integration tools in the open source world and see how they measure up: |
JavaOne 2008 included a track on open source with a substantial number of very interesting panels, discussions, and presentations. These talks concentrated mostly on big, well-established, and very broad open source communities, however, which does not reflect the specific problems of a much vaster open source landscape. Here I'm talking about literally hundreds of thousands of projects that only have a single active developer. I call these "party of one" projects, and they pose some significant challenges to their owners, especially if the project is done as a part-time hobby. |
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Enterprise Java specialist Steve Haines joins the Open source Java projects series this month with an introduction to Java Caching System (JCS), a robust enterprise-level caching solution. Steve starts with a quick introduction to caching, discussing the criteria for determining if objects should be cached and whether your application would benefit from a cache. He then shows you how to configure JCS and use it to build a caching application. |
You can save time and reduce other costs associated with Java development by taking advantage of open source Java projects. In this new series, Jeff Friesen introduces a variety of lesser known open source Java projects that can benefit your Java software. Jeff begins the series by looking at Bernhard Pauler's balloontip project, which you can use to add Windows XP-style informational "balloons" to your Swing-based Java applications. |
April 24, 2006—Germany's Software AG has joined the Eclipse Foundation, an open source community focused on providing an open development platform for building software. |
April 11, 2005—When making procurement decisions, it often all comes down to whom you trust. If you're buying a copier or a forklift, a strong brand name can give you confidence in your purchase. The same is true for big-name commercial software. But when it comes to open source, things aren't that simple. |
Sun's corporate image is grounded in its embrace of open-source software and some components of JavaFX, including the JavaFX compiler and elements of graphic libraries, are now available under the GPLv2 open-source license, according to the official JavaFX FAQ. |
FRAMINGHAM (07/29/2008) - IBM and Websense are separately issuing their semiannual security trend reports this week, and the picture isn't pretty for Web sites, open source software, and social networking programs. |
If you're planning to develop a game engine or other Java software that needs 3D graphics, consider using Java Binding for OpenGL (JOGL). This low-level Java API acts as a bridge to the underlying platform's OpenGL technology. In this installment of the Open source Java projects series, Jeff Friesen introduces JOGL. Learn how to use JOGL to bring OpenGL's high performance and powerful features (such as shaders) to your Java-based games. |
A few years back, Sun Labs researchers developed the all-Java PDF Renderer project because they needed a PDF viewer for content created by OpenOffice. When this project was no longer needed, Sun Labs offered PDF Renderer to Josh Marinacci and Richard Bair (of SwingLabs) who set out to get the project open sourced. Tom Oke signed on to head up future work on the project, and Josh announced the release of the open source PDF Renderer project in December 2007. |
Sun began its latest open source kick about a year ago when it first unveiled it would open source its proprietary operating system, Solaris. The reason? Linux was eating Solaris for lunch, and Sun's crown jewel of an operating system was losing mindshare among the all-important developer community. |
Animated transitions are key to creating a comfortable, seamless user experience in your Java desktop and Web applications. In this installment of Open source Java projects, Jeff Friesen introduces the AnimatingCardLayout API and its six built-in transition effects: cube, dashboard, fade, iris, radial, and slide. You'll see these effects in action in a slideshow application, and also follow along as Jeff builds a custom zoom effect to enhance the slideshow. |
June 12, 2006—WS02 is offering an open source application server, which, unlike that of its rivals, is not based on a J2EE stack, but instead focuses on XML and Web services. |
If you've used the Java Native Interface (JNI) to make a platform-specific native library accessible to your Java programs, you know how tedious it can be. Jeff Friesen continues his series on lesser-known open source Java projects by introducing you to Java Native Access -- a project that eliminates the tedium and error associated with JNI and lets you access C libraries programmatically. |
If you're faced with creating a Swing-based wizard from scratch, you'll want to know about Tim Boudreau's Wizard project. This installment of Jeff Friesen's Open source Java projects series gets you started with the Wizard API and concludes with a hands-on installation wizard that is sure to please users and impress the boss. |
As the O'Reilly Network Java Editor, I attended the inaugural O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) Java track, focused on open source Java projects and tools. Given the excitement over open source Java, based on the success of the Apache Jakarta projects such as Tomcat, I expected a full house at most of the technical sessions in this track. I was wrong. Instead, expectations were deflated somewhat with attendance below expectations, at around a maximum average of forty to fifty attendees for most of the sessions, starting with OpenNMS. |
Ant, an open source Java project, has been gaining in usage and attention lately -- and rightfully so. Ant is driving ease of use in cross-platform software development by dragging the redoubtable "make"-style of build tool into this new century. But where did Ant come from? |
One of the top priorities in the matrix should be price. Today's economy mandates careful investments, and free or open source software makes perfect sense. Many of these tools offer near-commercial-class stability (especially in their 2.x versions and above) with good-enough performance--and you can't beat the price! To help those people for whom price is an important factor, I've reviewed a few free or open source J2EE application servers that support EJB 2.0. |
The biggest news of this year's JavaOne was delivered Tuesday morning by Jason Hunter, an Apache Software Foundation vice president, co-creator of JDOM, and author of the popular O'Reilly Servlets book. Flanked by Sun CEO Scott McNeally and Sun vice president Rob Gingell, Hunter outlined an agreement negotiated between Sun and Apache that has broad-ranging implications to developers and to the future of Java itself. First, all in-progress and future Sun-led Java Specification Requests (JSRs) will be made available under a license that allows for open source. |
ScreenFlow grabs audio and video from the computer and external sources, provides a timeline for editing these recordings, and offers a range of effects aimed specifically at creating on-screen software presentations. This screencasting studio is easy to use and affordable. And if you have a Mac running Leopard with ScreenFlow loaded up, you're suddenly in the educational movie making business. Jochen Wolters reviews this application and provides plenty of video samples. |
This is not the intended use for JNI. JNI is best when it is used to build a higher-level marshalling layer that provides a transparent, or near transparent, mapping between Java objects and objects on a particular native platform. In order to access the very large number of COM components and Win32 DLLs, several companies and open source projects have leveraged JNI to create more developer-friendly, Win32-specific solutions. |
Editor's Note: O'Reilly & Associates' senior Java editor Mike Loukides revisits Sun's positioning on an open source J2EE and its effects on JBoss and other open source J2EE projects. |
As a Java developer, you should be aware of the tremendous wealth of open source development software that is available for your use -- even if you have no desire to release any of your own software as open source. In this article, I will introduce you to some of the most useful open source Java development tools by showing you how I used these tools to develop a complete database-driven Web application called Roller. |
At the other end of a typical web application is the persistence layer. This is usually where things get out of control fast. Developers underestimate the challenges in building their own persistence frameworks. A custom, in-house persistence layer not only requires a great amount of development time, but also often lacks functionality and becomes unmanageable. There are several open source object-to-relational mapping (ORM) frameworks that solve much of this problem. In particular, the Hibernate framework allows object-to-relational persistence and query service for Java. Hibernate has a medium learning curve for Java developers who are already familiar with SQL and the JDBC API. Hibernate persistent objects are based on plain-old Java objects and Java collections. Furthermore, using Hibernate does not interfere with your IDE. The following list contains the type of code that you would write inside a persistence framework: |
Editor's Note: Recently, TheServerSide.com's Publisher, Floyd Marinescu, directly asked Bill Shannon, a Sun Distinguished Engineer and Spec Lead for the J2EE, and Karen Tegan, Director of J2EE Compatibility and Platform Services for Sun Microsystems the following question: "What is Sun's point of view in the debate over whether J2EE licensing restricts open source J2EE products?" Their reply may surprise you at first, but it seems to be the same status-quo from Sun. See what senior O'Reilly & Associates' Java editor Mike Loukides thinks of Sun's policy on this and its effects on JBoss and other open source J2EE projects out there (Jan. 30, 2002). |
SQLExecutor is a light weight, open source JDBC framework that makes it easier to write concise, readable, and database independent JDBC code. SQLExecutor automatically translates checked exceptions such as SQLException into unchecked (runtime) exceptions, enabling you to catch only those exceptions you want to catch. And instead of littering your program with database specific code that checks for arcane SQL error codes, you can call methods that abstract away the specifics of a particular database. For example, instead of checking to see if the SQL error code is 1407, you can call a method like isDataIntegrityViolation(). SQLExecutor also provides a simplified interface to transaction management, connection pooling, and stored procedure/function calls. |
There are always a few books that you know are in the works... but aren't due for completion for a long time. Sometimes you are really looking forward to getting them in your hands, and this book was one of these. "Java Open Source Programming" is an interesting title as it could mean so many things. I think this book is two things: |
Laszlo Systems was founded in 2000 to "advance the web experience." In the early years of the company, "advancing the web experience" meant building and selling a Flash-based rich internet application framework to large enterprises. But in mid-2004, Laszlo went open source, and Laszlo is now a mature and powerful framework for rich internet applications that also happens to be free. And that's pretty compelling. |
Sun Microsystems' Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps discusses some of the key points from his keynote address at FOSS-IN late last year in India. We look ahead to the upcoming Mobile and Embedded Developer Days. |
PolePosition is an open source Java framework for benchmarking databases. The impetus behind PolePosition came from the observation that developers evaluating candidate databases for future applications often resorted to constructing ad hoc benchmarks rather than using "canned" benchmark tests (or relying on vendor-provided data). This is entirely understandable; to properly evaluate a database for a specific project, you would want to exercise that database in ways that correspond to the application's use of it. Put another way, if the target application will use the database in read-only fashion, you'll have little interest in a benchmark that runs the database through write operations. |
The first thing to consider is whether a similar project currently exists. Some people suffer from the "Not Invented Here" (NIH) syndrome, but it causes a lot of pain. Managing an open source project demands a lot of time and effort (and money, sometimes) and it is usually better, easier, and cheaper to contribute to an existing project rather than creating a new one. There are some factors that may require the creation of a new project, such as license incompatibility (more on this later) or a "closed" development process, but it is still better to talk to the owners of existing projects and discuss these issues first. Many of them will do whatever is possible to meet your needs, and then everybody ends up winning. |
Dalibor Topic, Kaffe.org; Fabiane Nardone, Brazilian Health Care; Tony Wasserman, Carnegie Mellon University; Ashlee Vance, The Register form a panel of outsiders reviewing Sun's Open Source efforts. This session isn't specific to Java ME technologies but is worth listening to as it relates to open source as a whole. |
The alternative of using the Apache License or any other similar permissive non-copylefted license like the MIT license, is that by not enforcing a strong copyleft as the GPL does, will IMO lead to the continuation and proliferation of forking of Java versions, as is done today by IBM and others. |
In this mini-talk from the java.net Community Corner at JavaOne, Edgar Silva takes a very Brazilian perspective in a free-form discussion of business models and opportunities he's seen with the adoption of open-source software development. |
Simon Phipps was recruited from IBM in 2000, and he has served in recent years as Sun's chief open-source officer. In that role, he oversaw the open sourcing of the Solaris Operating System and the Java platform, both projects that required many years from inception to completion. In the process, he has carefully observed and analyzed the economic, technological, historical, and psychological processes that make open-source communities possible. |
Few have been closer to the day-to-day processes involved in open sourcing the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) than Ray Gans, a manager at Sun Microsystems with a long history of working with Java compatibility programs. He currently manages the OpenJDK and Mobile & Embedded community programs, where he works to improve the collaboration between Sun and the open-source Java developer community. We met with him to gain a better understanding of how the open sourcing of the Java SE platform is going and where it is headed. |
Software vendors, and even standards bodies, started to recently discover that applying new approaches and recent innovations to system integration can yield significant benefits, however. One such company is Talend, a French software vendor that has been building an open-source community around its system integration product, Talend Open Studio. |
What follows is a study I have made over the past few months to more suitably answer the question posed by my students and others looking at Java persistence options. This is not an article that will teach you how to persist Java objects in each of the technologies; although the attached code provides a couple of examples in each framework that may help in that endeavor. Instead, this article considers the following questions: |
Log4j is an open source logging API for Java, designed to be "reliable, fast, and extensible." To the avail of programmers wanting to adopt an easy logging facility, Apache Log4j fits the mold. |
Palo Alto, CA, March 18, 2003--The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Eclipse announced the transfer of AspectJTM technology from PARC to Eclipse and through the Eclipse Technology Project, to the entire open-source community. AspectJ has an active following in both the research and industrial communities, and represents a well-researched toolkit for Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). |
When Chief Technology Officer Jeremy Boynes joined Gluecode Software, he brought first-hand knowledge of the possibilities that come with combining open source software and enterprise application development. He was Chief Architect for Bravanta and Netmosphere, where the use of open source software helped him reduce those companies' expenses, and his 20 years of enterprise computing experience also includes posts with Cisco, BT, Centrum Systems, and Sequent Computer Systems. He has a degree in electronic engineering and has participated in a number of large open source projects as contributor and committer, including OpenEJB, ObjectWeb, the Derby Java database, and, of course, the Apache Foundation's Geronimo J2EE server project. |
See a set of architectural patterns exploiting features in open source and entry-level IBM® middleware to build cost-effective software as a service solutions. This demo shows how to share a single instance of the WebSphere®Application Server Community Edition and DB2® Express-C between multiple tenants, with a different look-and-feel and access control. |
For most Java developers, any type of graphics development is intrinsically bound up with the Java 2D and 3D APIs and java.awt.Graphics. While the Java 2D and 3D APIs provide an excellent tool for creating graphics in Swing, they aren't the only ones at your disposal, and they certainly aren't the easiest ones to learn. And for those of you who don't have the time, need, or inclination to burn the midnight oil getting to know java.awt.Graphics intimately, I propose an open-source alternative: JSci. |
Each of these open source licenses is tailored to meet certain goals for specific kinds of content (for example, some for software, others for documentation, still others for images or data) and varies in its terms, but each shares five fundamental intents (from attorney Lawrence Rosen's Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law and used with permission): |
In the case of building a Proof Of Concept (POC) for a portal, you can solve all of the above by using the Open Source Apache Struts running on Jakarta Tomcat. With only a few lines of code and minor modifications, you can build a demo portal that can be run on a laptop by anyone who knows how to click an icon. |
NetBeans is more than an IDE. It is also an open-source project, community, and a rich client application platform. There is certainly more to NetBeans than just a free IDE. In this new series of articles about NetBeans I hope to introduce you to not only the NetBeans IDE but also the project as a whole. |
Many Open Source supporters greeted the news of the Apache setback with derisive disbelief ("Why would anyone in their right mind switch from Unix/Apache to Windows/IIS?"), but they miss the point. Those users who switched from Apache to IIS did so not for the superior HTTP-serving capabilities, if any, of IIS. That's commodity stuff, and Apache does it well enough for them not to look further. They switched because they had begun to look beyond Web servers to Web services. Right under the collective nose of the Open Source community, the battleground has shifted. People need vanilla Webservers today like they need Rolodexes in an age of digital organizers. |
Open source models have been tried with only limited success in non-software businesses. For example, some publishers and authors have attempted to mimic open source publishing for books and articles, publishing their work under terms of the GPL or similar open licenses. For the most part, those have not been commercially successful to the extent that open source software has found success with Red Hat Linux or MySQL (an open source database) in the software world. And the non-software open source businesses haven't achieved anywhere near the market share in their categories that open source has achieved in the software world. |
To paraphrase Mark Twain, judging by the surging crowd on opening day of the 2007 JavaOne Conference held at the San Francisco Moscone Center, the reports of Java's demise are greatly exaggerated. Even this seasoned conference attendee marveled over the almost mosh pit-like atmosphere as attendees filed into and out of Tuesday's 96 scheduled sessions. Few would deny however that just a few years ago Java was suffering its last throes, suffering a slow death at the hands of rapidly evolving competing technologies such as .NET, PHP, and Python. |
Synonymous with these trends, the Business Intelligence (BI) software market has seen the launch of several new open source projects related to reporting and data warehousing. |
Given the IT industry's present love affair with the open source development paradigm, it seems only fitting that Valentine's day was chosen as the date for announcing the 2005 Developer.com open source product of the year. This year's field of five candidates, submitted by Developer.com readers, is comprised of a pool of cinches and surprises alike. In this article, each runner-up is introduced, accompanied by discussion of other 2004 developments in the relevant sector, and forecast 2005 trends and occurrences. Keeping you in white-knuckled suspense until the very end, the article closes with an introduction to the category winner and some thoughts regarding why it won out over an otherwise very respectable field of entries. |
Since I started this column, I have been fortunate enough to meet with the developers of the Jetty, Simkin and Cactus open source projects. They and others made many interesting comments on what makes an open source project tick. Here are their views. |
Java has been historically lucky in the open source field. Sun has been committed to community and industry participation since Java's inception, and by opening up source code Sun has helped to foster innovation and customizing. This has cultivated a large collection of extensions and other multiple open source Java projects. However, critics to open source have strong opinions about the security of the software. Their arguments usually fall under one of two categories: Developer trust and secrecy. |
One of the most interesting places where open source and Java technology overlap is a little integrated development environment (IDE) known as NetBeans. NetBeans' path to open-sourcedom was a circuitous one. In 1996, a group of Czech students set out to author an IDE in pure Java. The idea was to take the best features of Delphi and create an easy-to-use, cross-platform environment where code could be edited, tested, and debugged. They called their software Xelfi. |
And that's where the story begins to acquire a bit of a Java flavor. Apache's success was so great that IBM, for example, folded all its internal efforts to develop Web servers into the free and open Apache effort. For IBM to drop its own product line in favor of Apache in the summer of 1998 was a bold step. Most commercial organizations were very suspicious of "open source" then. That's part of the reason the Apache engineers and IBM lawyers, among others, set up ASF in June of 1999. With Behlendorf as president, the ASF has buffered and protected the interests of both the technologists and the businessmen. |
Lots of folks have suggested that the open source movement will negatively impact software companies by providing free versions of their products to consumers and companies. Some of the material even made one wonder if any software company would survive and whether software company employees should be looking for new careers! |
David Herron describes some of the technical details of the OpenJDK. Learn how to get started and what tools Linux developers need to start build the OpenJDK. |