Tag: java

Callisto is a simulaneous release of 10 related Eclipse projects that cover pretty much everything you would ever desire to do within your IDE.

The list includes the Eclipse platform itself, plus a whole collection of other major plugins, covering: modelling, testing, J2EE development, profiling and visual development (UI).

Timothy O’Brien has an article on the O’Reilly site giving an overview of the currently available Callisto release covering all these features plus more.

I wonder if this is the reaction to the increasing popularity of the Netbeans IDE, which has been picking up serious momentum over the last few months. The major difference I see with the Netbeans IDE is that it includes support for all the common types of development and tools a typical developer needs, without having to mess around with downloading and installing plugins like in the Eclipse world (think WTP). Callisto seems to take this to the extreme though – they are including every possible major plug-in known to man (well, almost).

SE 6.0 does not have significant language syntax changes like 5.0 did, but there are some very interesting and useful additions being added to the next release of Java, codenamed Mustang, which is currently available for download in beta.

Sun Developer Network have a concise list of the major changes on their site here.

Most interesting of the additions is the support for developing Web Service clients and exposing code as callable Web Services, through support using annotations to mark up Web Services, and the addition of XML parsing and object to XML mapping APIs previously only available in Java EE.

Danny Coward has an example of how you use these annotations in his blog, and it really cannot be any simpler that this. Mustang has includes an Http endpoint service for Web Services, so with another 1 line of code you can publish your Web Service, all within Mustang.

Other interesting additions:

• an integrated Java Database, based on Apache Derby.
• Desktop integration APIs, for example SysTray integration on Windows
• Monitoring and Management facilities
• pluggable annotation support

www.infoq.com, a software development news and article site, covering Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA and Agile methodologies, officially launched yesterday, after having been running in beta for a while.

The site was co-founded by Floyd Marinescu, who was the original founder of www.theserverside.com, before they merged with Tech Target.

So far I like what I see on infoq – I hope they keep up the momentum and keep the articles coming. This looks a lot like what www.theserverside.com used to be like 4 or 5 years ago. TheServerSide used to be ‘the’ portal site for all things J2EE, but it lost momentum I think after Floyd left, followed by Ed Roman who was the CEO of The Middleware Company, the company behind TheServerSide.com. Since that point I have gradually lost interest in the content on TheServerSide, they usually don’t have anything that catches my eye – they aggregate news story headlines (which I do myself anyway on this site), but they are missing the articles and interviews that they used to have. Plus they used to be a thriving community with many contributions from people in the community – check the site now and see how few submissions they have from anyone other than those connected with the site.

infoq.com on the otherhand looks like they are off to a good start… I’m this close to replacing my TheServerSide.com link with infoq.com …

Sun Developer Network this month have a multimedia roundup of the best of JavaOne 2006, including articles and video interviews.