So, I have been coding Java for a long time, but just that subset of Java that lives within the realm of a web application server. I never really had occasion to build anything like an application with its own GUI that lived on the desktop. For one reason or another, that’s just something that had never come up.

Until now.

It may be the same language, but I have to say, it’s an entirely different world. Labels and Frames; Panels and Panes; Listeners and Layouts; TrayIcons and Popups; Bindings and Actions; GridBagLayouts, SplitPanes, Buttons, and Borders.

Timers and Workers and Threads … Oh, My!

We are definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto!

Offering Bookmarklets with icons

Now, I have to say that his little hack to make all of this magic happen is rather ingenious, and I do like it. I just could not get it to work in my version of Firefox. Everything started out great in the beginning. The first example worked just fine for me. I can take this little icon:

… and add it to this bookmarklet:

Click Me!

…. and the image shows up just as advertised. Drag it up to your browser’s tool bar and see for yourself. It works! But when I started getting into the conditional stuff, the icon would only show up when the HTML side was true, not when the Javascript side was true. In other words, I could have my choice of a working bookmarklet with no icon or a bookmarklet with a nice icon that didn’t do anything! I could never figure out how to get it to recognize the HTML side of the conditional and load the icon, yet execute the Javascript when the bookmarklet was clicked. I could get one to work, or I could get the other to work, but I could never get them both to work at the same time.

Apparently, I’m just not smart enough to figure that out, so I did the next best thing and just gave up trying, and then went with a slightly different approach:

Click Me!

This version uses the window.location.href as it’s conditional, so if you are on the page that hosts the bookmarklet you get the HTML, otherwise you get the Javascript. Now, using this approach, the bookmarklet doesn’t function on the page on which you got it, but when you are on that page, you can load the icon, and once loaded, it’s there for life. Here’s what it looks like under the hood:

<a href="javascript:if(window.location.href.indexOf('http://blog.restafarian.org/')==0)
{'%3C!DOCTYPE%20html%3E%3Chtml%3E%3Chead%3E%3Clink%20rel="icon
"%20type="image/png"%20href="http://blog.restafarian.org
/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/chat.png"/%3E%3C/head%3E%3Cbody%20onload=
"history.back();"%3E%3C/body%3E%3C/html%3E';}else{
alert('Do%20bookmarklet%20stuff%20...');}">Click Me!</a>

There’s probably a better way to do this still, but I did what I could to do what I wanted to do, and that’s going to have to be good enough for now!

Speaking of time (nice segue, no?), I have been having fun with ISO 8601 dates and times for quite a while. On the sever side, I have just been using plain old java.util.Date and java.text.DateFormat. Then I found this:

Joda Time – Java date and time API

According to their home page, “Joda-Time has been created to radically change date and time handling in Java. The JDK classes Date and Calendar are very badly designed, have had numerous bugs and have odd performance effects.”. At this point, I have only played around with DateTime, but I have to say that I like it so far.

One thing that I never did like about DateFormat was that the Time Zone component never rendered out with the colon (“:”) in between the offset hours and offset minutes. I had to add this code:

    String string = FORMAT.format(date);
    return string.substring(0, string.length() - 2) + ":" +
         string.substring(string.length() - 2);

… to this back in the day. With Joda Time, you can accomplish the same thing with this (assuming that “date” is a Joda Time DateTime object):

    String string = date.toString();

It’s one of my new standards!

Juergen Hoeller has announced that Spring 3.0.3 is now available. This minor release addresses over 100 minor issues and catches up with some recent third-party releases.

Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA

Please note that we are not providing a dependencies download anymore. The recommended way of obtaining third-party libraries for use with Spring is Maven/Ivy; you could also download third-party distributions of your choice and take the jars from there. Note that there is no reason to upgrade third-party libraries unless you want to: The simplest solution is to keep using the versions that you know and trust.

Don’t forget that Spring users can ask questions in the community forum and identify issues in JIRA as well.

Jonathan Schwartz was considered a longshot to stay at Sun after its acquisition by Oracle.

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, an advocate of Web 2.0, used Twitter early Thursday to announce his resignation. He was named CEO in 2006 as Sun faced a switch in strategic direction away from proprietary systems and toward open source code, including its valued Solaris 10 operating system.

“Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it,” he said in a tweet to his followers, reported the New York Times on its Web site at 1:12 a.m. Thursday. He added a bit of haiku: “Financial crisis, Stalled too many customers, CEO no more.”

Schwartz was the first CEO of a major company to use the blogging format to announce his positions and comment on issues in the industry. He advocated that blogs be given the same status as press releases with the Securities Exchange Commission. The New York Times observed that he’s the first Fortune 200 executive to use Twitter to announce his resignation.

Read the whole article on Information Week.

SpringSource is looking for some talented engineers to join the team of experts in the Research and Development group. If you enjoy challenging, genuinely rewarding roles that offer unique opportunities to work with industry leading technologists on open source based projects and products, then be sure to take a look at the following positions:

• Software Engineer – SpringSource System Test Strategies (North East US)
• Member of Technical Staff – SpringSource Tools Developer (San Francisco, CA)
• Sr. Member of Technical Staff – SpringSource Tools Developer (Vancouver, Canada)
• Sr. Member of Technical Staff – SpringSource Grails Developer (Eastern US)
• Sr. Member Technical Staff – Java Server-Side Developer (San Francisco, CA)
• Sr. Member Technical Staff – Java Server-Side Developer (San Francisco, CA)

Second, if you were successfully using the last Spring 3 release candidate in your Maven project, you cannot simply pull up the pom.xml in an editor and change all “.RC3″ to “”. Actually, to be completely accurate, you can do that — you’ll just get a “Build Failed” when you attempt to build your project. The official name of the GA release of Spring 3 is not 3.0.0 — it’s 3.0.0.RELEASE. So … you can do a change all “.RC3″ to “.RELEASE” and that will actually work:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 3 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Thu Dec 17 07:33:41 PST 2009
[INFO] Final Memory: 4M/26M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

And since the artifacts are now coming from the main Maven repository, you can also remove this from your pom.xml:

<repositories>
 <repository>
  <id>Springframework milestone</id>
  <url>http://maven.springframework.org/milestone</url>
 </repository>
</repositories>

… unless, of course, you are also using the release candidates for Spring Security 3, which does not have a GA version out just yet. In that case, you just shot yourself in the foot by pulling that out prematurely. Not that I know anyone who would do that; I’m just saying …

It’s here just in time for the holidays! Arjen Poutsma has just announced that Spring 3.0.0 is now final and Juergen Hoeller has blogged about the features in the release.

Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA

Congratulations to Juergen, Arjen and all the other SpringSource engineers that worked so hard on the release. Also a huge thank you to all of the dedicated community members that have given feedback and identified issues along the way. Please keep up the good work so that we can continue to make all the Spring projects better and better.

It’s getting closer. Arjen Poutsma has just announced that Spring 3.0.0.RC3 is now available. This release candidate contains lots of fixes to issues raised by community members.

Download | Documentation | Javadoc API | Change Log | JIRA

Thank you to all of the dedicated community members that have given feedback and identified issues. Please keep up the good work so that we can get a high quality 3.0 GA release.

So, another quick “change all” and BAM!:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 22 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Fri Dec 04 10:38:33 PST 2009
[INFO] Final Memory: 3M/48M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just the way I like it!

Spring 3.0.0.RC2 is (tentatively) scheduled to be released today!

Regards,

Sam

p.s. if you check JIRA now, you’ll notice that there are no more open issues on the RC2 road map.

I did a “change all <version>3.0.0.RC1</version> to <version>3.0.0.RC2</version>” in my pom.xml, but that was a little overzealous, since this announcement does not include Spring Security. So, I had to go back in and reset those back to RC1, after which I was rewarded with my favorite build/install outcome:

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 9 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Fri Nov 13 10:05:25 PST 2009
[INFO] Final Memory: 3M/52M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pretty cool!