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"Quercus is Caucho Technology's 100% Java implementation of PHP 5 released under the Open Source GPL license. Quercus comes with many PHP modules and extensions like PDF, PDO, MySQL, and JSON. Quercus allows for tight integration of Java services with PHP scripts, so using PHP with JMS or Grails is a quick and painless endeavor. With Quercus, PHP applications automatically take advantage of Java application server features just as connection pooling and clustered sessions. Quercus implements PHP 5 and a growing list of PHP extensions including APC, iconv, GD, gettext, JSON, MySQL, Oracle, PDF, and Postgres. Many popular PHP application will run as well as, if not better, than the standard PHP interpreter straight out of the box. The growing list of PHP software certified running on Quercus includes DokuWiki, Drupal, Gallery2, Joomla, Mambo, Mantis, MediaWiki, Phorum, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, PHP-Nuke, Wordpress and XOOPS. Quercus presents a new mixed Java/PHP approach to web applications and services where Java and PHP tightly integrate with each other. PHP applications can choose to use Java libraries and technologies like JMS, EJB, SOA frameworks, Hibernate, and Spring. This revolutionary capability is made possible because 1) PHP code is interpreted/compiled into Java and 2) Quercus and its libraries are written entirely in Java. This architecture allows PHP applications and Java libraries to talk directly with one another at the program level. To facilitate this new Java/PHP architecture, Quercus provides and API and interface to expose Java libraries to PHP. The Quercus .war file can be run on Java application servers such as Glassfish, i.e. it can be run outside of Resin. This .war file includes the Quercus interpreter and the PHP libraries."

"Contributed and administered by ICEsoft Technologies Inc., ICEpdf.org is a place where enterprise Java developers can learn, share, and contribute information and ideas to a growing community of ICEpdf developers. ICEpdf is an open source Java PDF engine that can render, convert, or extract PDF content within any Java application or on a Web server. ICEpdf.org provides a range of development and support resources to benefit all ICEpdf developers. Source code and application reference implementations are available for download here. Numerous reference implementations and examples are available to enable rapid learning and successful use of the product. The reference implementations are commercial quality implementations that can be deployed as-is, customized to meet specific requirements, or used as learning aids on how to use various features. Visit the ICEpdf demos page to see ICEpdf in action and to evaluate the capabilities of ICEpdf as a Java PDF viewer or deployed as servlet a headless server engine. Remember that ICEpdf is completely customizable and and can be completely embedded in your Java application. We invite you to join the ICEpdf community and to participate in the user forums. The resources available here and on the ICEpdf forums will get you up and developing that much quicker. "

"I've had an opportunity recently to work on a product that needed an RIA web interface, and I chose my recent favorite tool for this, Vaadin. The services for this project needed to be highly scalable, and lent themselves well to functional techniques, so I selected Scala as my language of choice. I build my projects with Maven, for reasons I won't go into right now, and I do much of my JVM-language work in Intellij's excellent IDEA IDE. Given these tools, I found a way to facilitate very rapid development of web UI's, and I thought I'd pass it along. Another technique I use, which I'll expound on later, is creating "dummy" implementations of all of my backing services for my application. The "real" implementations are written as OSGi services, in separate modules from my UI. The UI is packaged as a war, but is also OSGi aware, with a bundle activator. This activator only gets called if the war is deployed into an OSGi container, and not otherwise. This allows the app to select which implementation of the services it uses - the "dummy" ones when it's deployed outside of OSGi, and the "real" ones when they're available. This means I can use the handy Maven jetty plugin to quickly spin up my application and test it on my local workstation, without needing all of the dependencies (like a data store and such) of my real services. That's good, in that I can get my "cycle time" down to a few seconds, where "cycle time" is the time between making a change and actually being able to test it in my browser. We can do better, though. I'm using Scala as my language of choice for building the UI as well, as it works just fine with Vaadin (and with everything else in the JVM ecosystem, for that matter, which is why I didn't choose a non-JVM language - but that's yet another rant). I compile my Scala with the Maven scala plugin - here's where the next handy bit comes into play. Turns out the Scala plugin has a goal cal

There are many approaches available to scale PostgreSQL beyond running on a single server. An outline of the terminology and basic technologies involved is at High Availability and Load Balancing. There is a presentation covering some of these solutions. There is no one-size fits all replication software. You have to understand your requirements and how various approaches fit into that. For example, here are two extremes in the replication problem space: You have a few servers connected to a local network you want to always keep current for failover and load-balancing purposes. Here you would be considering solutions that are synchronous, eager, and therefore conflict-free. Your users take a local copy of the database with them on laptops when they leave the office, make changes while they are away, and need to merge those with the main database when they return. Here you'd want an asynchronous, lazy replication approach, and will be forced to consider how to handle conflicts in cases where the same record has been modified both on the master server and on a local copy. These are both database replication problems, but the best way to solve them is very different. And as you can see from these examples, replication has a lot of specific terminology that you'll have to understand to figure out what class of solution makes sense for your requirements. A great source for this background is in the Postgres-R Terms and Definitions for Database Replication. The main theoretical topic it doesn't mention is how to resolve conflict resolution in lazy replication cases like the laptop situation, which involves voting and similar schemes.

"A hub for integrating your enterprise with the rich information available on the Web, the WSO2 Mashup Server leverages popular Web 2.0 formats and protocols into your service platform. Combining simple yet rich mashups with reusability, security, reliability, and governance, the WSO2 Mashup Server includes features for connecting Web Services to humans through Web pages, gadgets, feeds, instant messages, email and more. The WSO2 Mashup Server offers: Go Cloud-Native WSO2 Mashups as a Service gives you instant self-service provisioning, multi-tenancy and has built-in monitoring and metering capabilities. Increase productivity Reduce cost Gain more control Avoid vendor lock-in The ideal platform for defining composite services for user interfaces and mobile applications. A simple way to deploy services developed in JavaScript. Access to REST and WS-* web services, feeds, and scraped web pages with data scripted together quickly using common Web developer skills, the result being a new service, or a web page, gadget, email or instant message. The ability to secure hosted Mashups. Support for both recurring and longer-running tasks and service lifecycles. Monitoring, configuration of security and quality of service settings such as throttling. With no up-front license agreements or subscription fees, getting started with the WSO2 Mashup Server requires less developer effort, ensuring faster ROI."

I am working on a web site that will help students practice their Scala programming skills. As I labored along, writing my JSF app code, I thought "this is silly-why not practice Scala at the same time?" But I like JSF and wasn't ready to jump to Lift or Vaadin. With Eclipse, this isn't all that hard. Install the Java plugin. Make a dynamic web project in the usual way, using the Java EE perspective. Then, switch to the Scala perspective, right-click on the project, and, if all planets are aligned correctly, you will get a menu item "Add Scala nature". (If they are not, see here for a manual approach.) Add your managed beans as Scala classes. Finally, switch back to the Java EE perspective, select the project properties, and add the Scala library JAR as a Java EE module dependency. But I like NetBeans and wasn't ready to switch to Eclipse. (Unfortunately, JSF 2 support in Eclipse is pretty minimal, the Glassfish integration is a bit flaky, and the Scala plugin has very little usable code completion.) NetBeans doesn't let me add a "Scala nature" to a web project. If I add Scala files to the project, I can edit them with the Scala editor, but they just get copied to the WAR file, without any compilation. I had one look at the Ant scripts for a Scala and a web project and decided that I wasn't going to figure out how to merge them. This blog shows how you can use Maven to make a mixed Scala/Java project in NetBeans. So I gathered up JSF and Scala pom.xml files from here and here, cut out the considerable crud from the JSF POM file that was probably meant for supporting Tomcat, and merged the results to the best of my ability-see below. You use the usual Maven directory structure, but with a src/main/scala directory instead of src/main/java:

There was a recent outburst in blogs on the topic of Groovy and how it compares to Java. Although I respect the youthfull entusiasim of Groovy and Co. working on this little exercise I'm just perplexed by the "WHY?" in this whole discussion. Let me just say again: W H Y ?!?! 1. Practically no one cares about Groovy (let alone Groovy++ strap-on) beyond Grails community. So this language just as "widely accepted" as Ruby (at least for enterprise software development) 2. If you know Java it's equally "challenging" to pick up either Groovy or Scala. Don't let anyone insult your intelligence by claiming that Scala syntax is somehow more complex than Groovy. In both languages you will need to adapt to functional thinking - and that's where you will have to spend a couple of weekends… 3. If you know Groovy - you already know 90% of Scala (different syntax and few extra features can be picked up in the evening) 4. Scala is designed by people who have proper academic background, experience and talent in the area of language design - Groovy has never been that way (and anyone who dares to look inside of Groovy runtime or history of changes in it will attest to that). NOTE: it did come out rather strong - but that's how I feel about it and after some thinking I'll leave as is. Nothing personal to anyone reading it… 5. Scala as a post-functional language is years ahead of Groovy (static typing with best-in-business type inference, highly tuned mix of imperative and functional styles, powerful and done-right generics, etc.) 6. Groovy will ALWAYS be slower than Scala or Java (latest benchmarks put even Groovy++ about 50 times slower than Java) just by its nature unless someone changes the language and rebuilds the runtime from the ground up. 7. Once we get decent integration with Eclipse, NetBeans and IDEA for Scala, the Groovy will lose its only serious advantage

"Apache Tuscany simplifies the task of developing SOA solutions by providing a comprehensive infrastructure for SOA development and management that is based on Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard. With SCA as it's foundation, Tuscany offers solution developers the following advantages: Provides a model for creating composite applications by defining the services in the fabric and their relationships with one another. The services can be implemented in any technology. Enables service developers to create reusable services that only contain business logic. Protocols are pushed out of business logic and are handled through pluggable bindings. This lowers development cost. Applications can easily adapt to infrastructure changes without recoding since protocols are handled via pluggable bindings and quality of services (transaction, security) are handled declaratively. Existing applications can work with new SCA compositions. This allows for incremental growth towards a more flexible architecture, outsourcing or providing services to others. In addition, Tuscany is integrated with various technologies and offers: a wide range of bindings (pluggable protocols) various component types including and not limited to Java, C++, BPEL, Spring and scripting an end to end service and data solution which includes support for Jaxb and SDO a lightweight runtime that works standalone or with other application servers a modular architecture that makes it easy to integrate with different technologies and to extend Integration with web20 technologies Apache Tuscany SCA is implemented in Java and C++ (referred to as Native)"

"Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine (and the CLR ). It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs. I hope you find Clojure's combination of facilities elegant, powerful, practical and fun to use."

The aim of this paper is a brief introduction to MDA technology and a summary / comparison to the approachments to MDA of AndroMDA and Acceleo, intending to be a practical and understandable summary Introduction Model-driven architecture (MDA) is a software design approach for the development of software systems. It provides a set of guidelines for the structuring of specifications, which are expressed as models. It was launched by the Object Management Group (OMG) in 2001 The Model-Driven Architecture approach defines system functionality using a platform-independent model (PIM) using an appropriate domain-specific language (DSL). One of the main aims of the MDA is to separate design from architecture. As the concepts and technologies used to realize designs and the concepts and technologies used to realize architectures have changed at their own pace, decoupling them allows system developers to choose from the best and most fitting in both domains. The design addresses the functional (use case) requirements while architecture provides the infrastructure through which non-functional requirements like scalability, reliability and performance are realized. MDA envisages that the platform independent model (PIM), which represents a conceptual design realizing the functional requirements, will survive changes in realization technologies and software architectures.

Papyrus is aiming at providing an integrated and user-consumable environment for editing any kind of EMF model and particularly supporting UML and related modeling languages such as SysML and MARTE. Papyrus provides diagram editors for EMF-based modeling languages amongst them UML 2 and SysML and the glue required for integrating these editors (GMF-based or not) with other MBD and MDSD tools. Papyrus also offers a very advanced support of UML profiles that enables users to define editors for DSLs based on the UML 2 standard. The main feature of Papyrus regarding this latter point is a set of very powerful customization mechanisms which can be leveraged to create user-defined Papyrus perspectives and give it the same look and feel as a "pure" DSL editor.

Spring Security is a powerful and highly customizable authentication and access-control framework. It is the de-facto standard for securing Spring-based applications Spring Security is one of the most mature and widely used Spring projects. Founded in 2003 and actively maintained by SpringSource since, today it is used to secure numerous demanding environments including government agencies, military applications and central banks. It is released under an Apache 2.0 license so you can confidently use it in your projects. Spring Security is also easy to learn, deploy and manage. Our dedicated security namespace provides directives for most common operations, allowing complete application security in just a few lines of XML. We also offer complete tooling integration in SpringSource Tool Suite, plus our Spring Roo rapid application development framework. The Spring Community Forum and SpringSource offer a variety of free and paid support services. Spring Security is also integrated with many other Spring technologies, including Spring Web Flow, Spring Web Services, SpringSource Enterprise, SpringSource Application Management Suite and SpringSource tc Server.

ModeShape (formerly "JBoss DNA") is a JCR 2.0 (JSR-283) implementation that provides access to content stored in many different kinds of systems. A ModeShape repository isn't yet another silo of isolated information, but rather it's a JCR view of the information you already have in your environment: files systems, databases, other repositories, services, applications, etc. To your applications, ModeShape looks and behaves like a regular JCR repository. Using the standard JCR API, applications can search, navigate, version, and listen for changes in the content. But under the covers, ModeShape gets its content by federating multiple back-end systems (like databases, services, other repositories, etc.), allowing those systems to continue "owning" the information while ensuring the unified repository stays up-to-date and in sync. ModeShape repositories can be used in a variety of applications. One of the most obvious ones is in provisioning and management, where it's critical to understand and keep track of the metadata for models, database, services, components, applications, clusters, machines, and other systems used in an enterprise. Governance takes that a step farther, by also tracking the policies and expectations against which performance can be verified. In these cases, a repository is an excellent mechanism for managing this complex and highly-varied information. But a ModeShape repository doesn't have to be large and complex: it could just manage configuration information for an application, or it could just provide a JCR interface on top of a couple of non-JCR systems.

"The past year I've been learning a lot of Scala and I'm currently working on a new project using Scala. I use LiquiBase, which is a database-independent library for tracking, managing and applying database changes. I'm also using the simple-build-tool (SBT) for my project. So I've put together a little SBT plug-in for running LiquiBase maintenance commands (update, rollback, …) from within SBT. For example, whenever I want to apply new database changes with LiquiBase I can now simply run sbt liquibase-update which sets up a new instance of LiquiBase and executes the LiquiBase update command which migrates my database to the latest version. At the moment the plug-in supports the following commands: liquibase-update, liquibase-drop, liquibase-tag, liquibase-rollback and liquibase-validate. What are the benefits of using the plug-in and not just the LiquiBase CLI? * no download/install of LiquiBase * classpath handled by SBT * no need to provide a big list of parameters or writing shell scripts The plug-in is called liquibase-sbt-plugin and you can find it here on GitHub. Feel free to use it or fork it and suggest changes. I'm still relatively new to Scala and especially SBT so any remarks are very welcome."

UNICASE is a CASE-Tool integrating models from the different development acitivities, such as requirements, use cases, UML models, schedules, bug and feature models into a unified model. This unified model is highly traceable by design. The UNICASE client allows to view and edit these models in a textual, tabular and diagram visualization. The models are stored and versioned on a server comparable to svn but customized for models. Client and server are easily extensible to support integrating new models into the unified model. UNICASE is based on the Eclipse platform including EMF and GMF. It can also be used as a framework to build modeling applications that reuse its repository and visualization capabilities. The project is open-source and released under the Eclipse Public License v 1.0 (EPL). It builds on our experience from the Sysiphus project in building a CASE tool.

"Apache Camel is a powerful open source integration framework based on known Enterprise Integration Patterns with powerful Bean Integration. Camel lets you create the Enterprise Integration Patterns to implement routing and mediation rules in either a Java based Domain Specific Language (or Fluent API), via Spring based Xml Configuration files or via the Scala DSL. This means you get smart completion of routing rules in your IDE whether in your Java, Scala or XML editor. Apache Camel uses URIs so that it can easily work directly with any kind of Transport or messaging model such as HTTP, ActiveMQ, JMS, JBI, SCA, MINA or CXF Bus API together with working with pluggable Data Format options. Apache Camel is a small library which has minimal dependencies for easy embedding in any Java application. Apache Camel lets you work with the same API regardless which kind of Transport used, so learn the API once and you will be able to interact with all the Components that is provided out-of-the-box. Apache Camel has powerful Bean Binding and integrated seamless with popular frameworks such as Spring and Guice. Apache Camel has extensive Testing support allowing you to easily unit test your routes. Apache Camel can be used as a routing and mediation engine for the following projects: * Apache ServiceMix which is the most popular and powerful distributed open source ESB and JBI container * Apache ActiveMQ which is the most popular and powerful open source message broker * Apache CXF which is a smart web services suite (JAX-WS) * Apache MINA a networking framework"

Akka is the platform for the next generation event-driven, scalable and fault-tolerant architectures on the JVM We believe that writing correct concurrent, fault-tolerant and scalable applications is too hard. Most of the time it's because we are using the wrong tools and the wrong level of abstraction. Akka is here to change that. Using the Actor Model together with Software Transactional Memory we raise the abstraction level and provide a better platform to build correct concurrent and scalable applications. For fault-tolerance we adopt the "Let it crash" / "Embrace failure" model which have been used with great success in the telecom industry to build applications that self-heal, systems that never stop. Actors also provides the abstraction for transparent distribution and the basis for truly scalable and fault-tolerant applications. Akka is Open Source and available under the Apache 2 License.

" The UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java is a fast, powerful, user-friendly, and completely free Java API for communicating with LDAP directory servers. It offers better performance, better ease of use, and more features than other Java-based LDAP APIs, and it's the only one that's being actively developed and enhanced. The UnboundID LDAP SDK for Java is free to use and redistribute in open source or proprietary applications under the GPLv2, LGPLv2.1 and the UnboundID Free Use License. It doesn't have any third-party dependencies and commercial support is available from UnboundID. Get quick answers and all the details you need from our LDAP SDK Documentation »"

"SwitchYard is a lightweight service delivery framework providing full lifecycle support for developing, deploying, and managing service-oriented applications. Wait, what? You mean like an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? Yeah, kind of. At it's core, SwitchYard provides an embeddable services runtime with limited dependencies, allowing you to deploy and run services where you need them: inside unit tests, embedded in your own applications, as modules in an OSGi framework, or within an application server. Of course, there will be modular components on top of core to provide connectivity, transformation, routing and orchestration, and all the other features that are typically associated with an ESB. The main difference between SwitchYard and traditional ESB offerings is that we are trying to make the runtime a transparent detail in the service lifecycle. SwitchYard aims to keep you focused on your services by providing tooling to help define, test, and manage the important details of a service - it's contract, policies, configuration, composition, and management . After all, the least important detail of your service is where it runs."

Vaadin is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) framework for RIA applications. I only know it for a few months but since I started experimenting with it, I'm really in favor of it. I see a lot of advantages compared to Sun's Java EE standard front-end framework JSF. First of all Vaadin is a java library, so you only have to write Java to build a complete frontend. No need for a specific frontend language, no need for converters (for comboboxes),… This also implies that you can use the full Java power on the frontend side and that's an huge advantage because frontend code is now type-safe and easily refactorable. You can unit test your frontend with JUnit. You can also use all existing java libraries on the frontend side, for example LOG4J. Another advantage is the fact that Vaadin is easy to learn (JSF isn't!) and to use: it's straigtforward. It feels like developing desktop apps and for me developing desktop apps feels much more intuitive than developing web-apps the way I'm used to. Vaadin uses convention over configuration. No need to register new components, validators or whatever in different xml files. Themes have a default folder and a default folder structure. Vaadin is very well documented. There's the book of Vaadin wich explains every aspect of the framework very clear. On the site there's a blog, a FAQ section, a wiki, a forum, examples with Java source code, … It's very easy to extend. Want to create your own Validator? Just implement an interface or extend another Validator and use it. Want to create your own custom server side component? Just extend the CustomComponent class or extend from another component. There's also an add-on directory where you can download UI components, data components, tools, themes, …