We launched Eclipse Labs this past May. The goal was to create a community for Eclipse open source projects that weren’t ‘official’ Eclipse Foundation projects. There is lots of interesting Eclipse related technology being created in open source but there was not an official home. Eclipse Labs was to be the home.

Some thoughts on how to clean up your jdbc code. By using jdk7, libraries and by simply not using java.

With the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial screencast series, you'll learn to make real, industrial-strength web applications with Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework that powers many of the web’s top sites, including Twitter, Hulu, and the Yellow Pages.

Since we switched from the SpringSource team blog to this site for publicising updates to Eclipse Virgo, traffic to the Virgo web site has increased considerably with a large proportion of new visitors. So it seems that many readers of this site may not have heard of Virgo before. If that includes you, please read on.

Tags: multimedia, Graphics, 3D Modeling, Scientific/Engineering, Mathematics, Visualization

Licenses: GPL

Release Tags: Minor feature enhancements

Tags: XML, METAR, TAF, SYNOP, Perl Modules

Licenses: GPL

Tags: Editor, texture, 3D Rendering

Licenses: LGPLv3

Tags: Library, Development

Licenses: GPLv2

Release Tags: Stable

Tags: Utilities, Archiving, backup

Licenses: GPLv2

Tags: Games/Entertainment, First Person Shooters, Arcade, Role-Playing, Internet, Linux, Mac OS X, MMO

Licenses: Non-free, Trialware

Tags: multimedia, Graphics, Graphics Conversion, Capture, Digital Camera, Software Development, Libraries

Licenses: LGPL, CDDL, LibRaw Software license

Blog and Screencast by Santiago Pericas-Geersten showing how to use video tag and events and websocket to synchronize a master video player with multiple slave players. Code runs on GlassFish 3.1. Also includes key links to HTML5 & WebSocket sites and documents

Tags: CAD

Licenses: GPL

Release Tags: Alpha

Tags: Parser Generator, Software Development, Text Processing, Code Generators, Compilers

Licenses: MIT

Oracle has issued a massive Java SE and Java for Business update to fix 29 security vulnerabilities that could be exploited to take complete control of vulnerable computers.

Some people have no idea what problem their hiring is supposed to solve.

Release Tags: Stable

Tags: C++, C++0x, peg, parsing

Licenses: MIT

By far the most popular Linux distribution ever, Ubuntu has been the forerunner in terms of development and use aimed at new linux users coming from Windows or Mac. This is "the" distro when new Linux users want to experiment and eventually migrate from Windows to the free alternative; Linux.

All that was required was something to pretend to be a real SMTP service as we didn’t need to view the messages at all.

Here’s the snippet I came up with using the smtpd module in Python:

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""A noddy fake smtp server."""

import smtpd
import asyncore

class FakeSMTPServer(smtpd.SMTPServer):
    """A Fake smtp server"""

    def __init__(*args, **kwargs):
        print "Running fake smtp server on port 25"
        smtpd.SMTPServer.__init__(*args, **kwargs)

    def process_message(*args, **kwargs):
        pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    smtp_server = FakeSMTPServer(('localhost', 25), None)
    try:
        asyncore.loop()
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        smtp_server.close()

To use this, save the above as fake_stmp.py and:

chmod +x fake_smtp.py
sudo ./fake_smtp.py

NOTE: Running this requires sudo to bind to port 25 as binding any port < 1024 requires superuser privileges.

Clearly you could easily adapt that to do something more useful if you want to see what's in the messages sent, either by writing messages to a file or printing them to stdout.

If printing them to stdout is what you need then there's also smtpd.DebuggingServer which is a subclass of SMTPServer which prints messages out to stdout. Using that is even easier and can be done with the following one liner:

sudo python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25

Again we use sudo in this case because we’re using port 25 if you don’t want that you can use a port higher than 1024.

To test this out we can use telnet like so:

$ telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 localhost6.localdomain6 Python SMTP proxy version 0.2
HELO localhost
250 localhost6.localdomain6
MAIL FROM: test@test.com
250 Ok
RCPT TO: test@testing.com
250 Ok
DATA
354 End data with .
subject: Hello
to: test@test.com
This is my message
.
250 Ok
QUIT
221 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host.

Over on the terminal running the debugging server you should see the following:

$ sudo python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25
[sudo] password for moo:
---------- MESSAGE FOLLOWS ----------
subject: Hello
to: test@test.com
This is my message
------------ END MESSAGE ------------

Tags: Information Management, Document Repositories, Internet, Web, Dynamic Content, Site Management

Licenses: LGPL

Yesterday, one of my inter-web buddies IM’d me and asked if I had used Typhoeus before. I said yes, so he asked me if it was possible to follow redirects using it. He said he google’d it and nothing turned up. I sharply responded, “LOOK AT THE CODE!”

Have Oracle's latest moves really done anything negative?

Release Tags: Stable, Minor bugfixes

Tags: Internet, Web

Licenses: GPL

Release Tags: Stable

Tags: Animation, Image Processing

Licenses: GPLv3

Tags: joomla!, Web

Licenses: GPLv2

Release Tags: Stable, Minor feature enhancements

Tags: Audio, music

Licenses: GPLv2

A nice post discussing about what things to keep in mind w.r.t security when writing Java code. The rules described in the post can serve as a security checklist.

With a lot of big Java companies migrating to Git, it's apparent Subversion is on the downturn, heading to the attic.

We've gotten very good (in the Java space) at building framework solutions targeted at solving enterprise problems with a relatively large amount of complexity. Because of this, we don't tend to build the quick one-off types of apps (e.g. various flavors of Twitter aggregators) with Java-based technologies. While our frameworks are quite capable of producing solutions to this scale of problem, it's rare that we actually apply them. The inherent complexity in the frameworks tends to get in the way. I say all of that to remind us of the fact that we need to use the right tools to solve jobs.

I’m 37, and I’ve been a (professional) developer for 16 years. You would have thought that in that time, I’d have figured out an effective work style which delivered the desired outcomes (code cut, products shipped etc) without causing detrimental knock-on effects – but, sadly, you’d be wrong. I think the style in which I practiced my craft for the first 15 years of my career was much the same as every other enthusiastic developer: you put a ton of hours in. 12-16+ hour days, evening and weekend coding marathons, pizza in the keyboard, crunch times, 3am debugging sessions where you just can’t go to bed because you can feel the source of that bug just beyond your fingertips, dammit, desperate last-minute sprints to deadlines where you manage to slot that last piece in, Jack Bauer-like, just before the world goes to hell.

What do OLAP cubes offer? The ability of OLAP cubes to facilitate multifaceted data analysis in response to complex business queries, will see them maintain some degree of usefulness, as businesses accumulate increasingly large data volumes of increasing complexity. Because OLAP cubes can be made up of more than three dimensions (hypercube), in-depth analysis is enabled, allowing users to gain comprehensive and valuable business insights. Virtually unlimited numbers of dimensions can be added to the data structure (OLAP cube), allowing for detailed data analysis. Analysts can view data sets from different angels or pivots; a process if involving large data volumes, would take hours on a relational database.

There is no so-called asynchronous execution support in JDBC mainly because most of the time you want to wait for the result of your DML or DDL, or because there is too much complexity involved between the back-end database and the front end JDBC driver. Some database vendors do provide such support in their native drives. For example Oracle supports non-blocking calls in its native OCI driver. Unfortunately it is based on polling instead of callback or interrupt. Neither Hibernate or Spring supports this feature.

Release Tags: Minor feature enhancements, Minor bugfixes

Tags: Office/Business, Information Management, notes, note-taking, notes software

Licenses: GPL v2 Or Later

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) is the official supported product from Red Hat Inc based on the popular open source JBoss Application Server (AS). It incorporates all the features of the community release as well additional features required for enterprise deployments (for paying customers). In this article we will show you some of the noteworthy security features of JBoss EAP 5.1. Most of the features should be application to the EAP 5.0.x versions also.

Terracotta has developed a new product called BigMemory, which helps eliminate the headache and frustration of GC.

An enterprise development perspective on the four main Android platform components: Activity, Service, Content Provider, and Broadcast Receiver

Tags: multimedia, Video, Non-Linear Editor, Sound/Audio, Editors

Licenses: GPL

Just when we thought that the great SpringSource vs. Everyone brawl had died down, Redhat returns with a new webinar taking aim directly at SpringSource and "other proprietary frameworks" titled: Java EE 6 and CDI: Moving away from the clutter of Spring and other frameworks.

Release Tags: Android

Tags: Database, Database Engines/Servers, Java

Licenses: MPL

Ruby on rails is really but ones current work environment may not be interesting unless there are compelling reason to even try it out nevermind use it on a day to day basis. Hopefully this blog post could convice people to give it a go.

A good starting point for thinking about the consequences of the Oracle + IBM deal is in the blog of Gianugo Rabellino:

Tags: messaging, Networking

Licenses: LGPLv3

Release Tags: Alpha, buggy

Tags: Android, navigation, bicycle, Java, GIS, osmdroid, openstreetmaps

Licenses: GPLv2

I've spent years using phpMyAdmin (much to my chagrin). And I've recently warmed up to MySQL Workbench. But it wasn't until this week that I stumbled across Adminer, a single-file PHP application for MySQL administration. It's hard not to be impressed by Adminer, which is both devilishly simple and elegantly designed. The file downloads as adminer-2.3.2.php; save it as index.php in a folder named adminer, then navigate to http://servername.com/adminer/. Supply the name of your MySQL server (adding a colon if it's hosted on a non-standard port), your username, and password, and you're off!

He includes a few screenshots of the interface to create tables and manage them. If you've used the phpMyAdmin interface, you'll find a lot of things that are familiar in Adminer. If you're interesting in grabbing the latest source, you can pull it from SourceForge.

This happens all the time on projects: assuming there is consensus when none exists. While good teams can roll with these punches and adapt as they go, it’s a form of waste that can hurt or kill the unwary before they even get out of the gate. To nip this problem in the bud, at ThoughtWorks we created a lightweight project chartering tool called “The Agile Inception Deck: 10 questions and exercises you’d be crazy not to ask before starting your project.”

I recently reflected on my daily breakfast, and noticed that I didn’t really enjoy it. Swallowing two slices of bread, and one glass of juice, was just my way of getting through the morning without fainting. So I made a note to find myself more enjoyable things to eat.

I really enjoyed giving this talk, since I work so much with APIs and enjoy sharing my ideas. The audio is now online so if you missed the talk, feel free to have a listen. You can also see the slides (on slideshare) and also read the series of blog posts I wrote on this topic which originally inspired the talk.

Lorna has also posted slides for several other of her web services talks including Working with Web Services, PHP and Web Services and Archtecting Web Service Applications.

Project Coin includes the following proposals that will make into Java 7. - Binary literals and underscores in literals - Strings in switch - Simplified Varargs Method Invocation - Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation (Diamond) - Improved Exception Handling for Java - try-with-resources (ARM) I have briefly touched upon try-with-resources construct in my earlier post. In this installment, I will give you an overview of other Coin proposals.

As we bring our initial Android TweetDeck beta period to a close, we wanted to quickly reflect on the Android ecosystem and what might be considered extreme fragmentation. To date we've had 36,427 active beta testers and below you can see the massive variety of phones and Android OS versions everyone is running. We were really shocked to see the number of custom roms, crazy phones and general level of customization/hackalicious nature of Android. From our perspective it's pretty cool to have our app work on such a wide variety of devices and Android OS variations.