jLibrary 1.1 has been released

jLibrary 1.1 has been released. jLibrary 1.1. jLibrary is a very easy to use Document Management System that can be used from the desktop using the provide Eclipse RCP based application and that is built on top of Apache Jackrabbit the JSR-170 reference implementation. You can take a look to the changes summary to see all the changes, short summary is below though.

The server has been improved with a new HTTP tunnelling layer replacing the old web services one, improving scalability and lowering memory usage. Web Services layer is now an optional add-in. Documents can also have custom properties that you can add, remove, search in, etc. Other important changes are the migration to Maven 2, a more easy to use build system and the addition of plenty of unit tests to help developers start coding with jLibrary.

In the client side many bugs have been fixed, the core system has been migrated to Eclipse 3.2, the build system is now also much easier and the stability has been improved.

And finally, thanks to the Eclipse Maven PDE plug-in and the new deployment system, there is now stable versions available for Linux 32 and 64 bits and a Mac OS X.

Hope you like it!

Fast unit and integration testing with Jackrabbit

When it´s time time do unit testing (always :D) and integration testing with Apache Jackrabbit, things can be a little awkward, specially if you don´t have a powerful computer. Creating a new repository and interacting with it can be very expensive operations without good hardware and by consequence the unit and integration testing time gets longer and longer.

Fortunately enough, since Jackrabbit 1.2.1 this has changed. Support has been added for H2 database engine and there is now in-memory file systems. Enabling both features definitely will add loads of vitamins to your testing phase.

Here is the needed config:

  <PersistenceManager
     class="org.apache.jackrabbit.core.persistence.db.SimpleDbPersistenceManager">
    <param name="url" value="jdbc:h2:${wsp.home}/db"/>
    <param name="driver" value="org.h2.Driver"/>   
    <param name="schema" value="h2"/>
    <param name="schemaObjectPrefix" value="${wsp.name}_"/>
  </PersistenceManager>

and

  <FileSystem class="org.apache.jackrabbit.core.fs.mem.MemoryFileSystem">
    <param name="path" value="${rep.home}/versions"/>
  </FileSystem>

Changing job, home, country, everything...

I'm a bit unactive right now. Until now my excuse was my recently taken vacations in Belgium and Holland. But now I have an excuse even better!!

I have a new job. From the August 21 I will be working in Dublin, Ireland for a top vendor financial company. The job is with J2EE and seems really exciting. I'm really looking forward to start this new career. Since five years ago I didn't have that feeling when you are desiring to go to your job, meet new colleagues, learn new technologies, business models, etc. In summary, I think that for me this is like a rebirth.

BTW, it would be great to meet any reader from this blog, or any other people interested in Java, J2EE, Eclipse, jLibrary :-), web services, etc. I will have to start looking for Java and Eclipse communities near the surrounding area. Now that I'm going to live in a big city I want to take this opportunity to learn as much as possible.

In the next weeks I will be looking for a home and settling in my new job, so this blog would be probably a bit innactive.

Amsterdam's Maradona

I saw this guy on my vacations in Amsterdam some days ago. It was simply awesome. I was on the other side of the street and when I looked to a little square I saw a guy doing amazing things with a soccer ball. When I came back and I browsed into youtube, I found that someone had already recorded these marvelous tricks on video.

For your enjoy: Amsterdam's Maradona.

Believe me, I saw him with my own eyes, it's absolutely real, even the final part, amazing.

Top ten ways to create a real J2EE disaster

I have been just heard and enjoyed the Cameron Purdy's JavaOne presentation Top The Top Ten Ways to Botch an Enterprise Java Technology-based Application thanks to the JavaOne multimedia sessions.

It was a pretty good presentation indeed, and a great source for better practices and useful architecting advices -ok, I'm not sure if I got this feeling because the presentation was done on a negative approach, you now maybe I'm one of those people thinking Hey, I would never do that :-), but the fact is that it worked, it was a brilliant presentation.

This could be a brief summary:

• #10 Specifying the mechanism for data access without understanding the granularity of the data model


• #9 Assuming the container will take care of transactions


• #8 Using a stateless architecture


• #7 Designing the application for deployment on a single server and leave scalability and realibility up to the container


• #6 Utilizing popular technologies such as Web Services for component integration and remoting


• #5 Rolling your own frameworks


• #4 Distributing synchronous object graphs across servers


• #3 Designing logic and data flows assuming the application is a single-user system


• #2 Compensating for a lack of knowledge of the application domain by building in systemic flexibility


• #1 Putting off system testing until the application is ready to deploy

So, this is a pretty good list. mmmm I think I would never do that... lie... I must recognize that I felt over some of those points at some time, I think that everybody did it, and that's nice, that's what we call... experience :)

Struts and Shale divorced

It seems that Struts and Shalle have divorced last Sunday. On this Mailing list entry, Martin Cooper announced the official project split:


On behalf of the ASF Board and Struts PMC, we are pleased to announce that Shale has been accepted as a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation.

As a top-level project, Shale will have its own website, mailing lists, repository space, and Project Management Committee. Shale will be an automomous ASF project, rather than a subproject of Apache Struts.


I suppose that the divorce had been germinating from months ago, but it was definitive because of this very big this thread that Floyd Marinescu has resumed.

Ok, so it seems that now the people won't get confused again with the difference between Struts and Shale. Only the time will say if this was a good move.

Evans study: Eclipse and NetBeans high usage but low rating

Evans Data Corp has just released The Developers’ Choice - IDE Scorecard, a study in which 1,200 developers worldwide rank the top IDEs they are using.

It seems a curious study. The most widely used IDE is clearly again Visual Studio. Eclipse gets a good third position while NetBeans is on the 6th position, that is also nice. So both Open Source IDEs have good health regarding users base.

But if we go to user overall rating we have that both NetBeans and Eclipse hold the last positions (in that order), while IBM Rational Application Developer gets the first place over Visual Studio. The reason that Evans give is: "this is due to their open and evolving nature".

You can download the IDE Scorecard for free.