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"Community Dashboard Framework (CDF) is a project that allows you to create friendly, powerful, fully featured dashboards on top of the Pentaho BI server. Former Pentaho dashboards had several drawbacks from a developer's point of view. The developing process was awkward, it required know-how of web technologies and programming languages, and basically it was time-consuming. CDF emerged as a need for a framework that overcame all those difficulties. The final result is a powerful framework featuring the following: . It is based on Open Source technologies. . It separates logic (JavaScript) of the presentation (HTML, CSS) . It features a life cycle with components interacting with each other . It uses AJAX . It is extensible, which gives the users a high level of customization: . Advanced users can extend the library of components. . They also can insert their own snippets of JavaScript and jQuery code. CDF can be used: . As part of a Pentaho solution. This is the most common scenario. . In a standalone mode as an alternative to the Pentaho User Console . Integrated with Portlets, PHP applications, intranet portals and even desktop applications. "

"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 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

"MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of 2 or even more logfiles is possible. It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles (through regular expressions), for faster recognition of what is important and what not. It can also filter lines (again with regular expressions). It has interactive menus for editing given regular expressions and deleting and adding windows. One can also have windows with the output of shell scripts and other software. When viewing the output of external software, MultiTail can mimic the functionality of tools like 'watch' and such."

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, …

There is no migration system in vanilla grails (although possibly in Grails 2.0 …. ?) but there do exist several plugins that provide  some migration functionality. As of this post I am aware of three: dbMigrate, Liquibase, and Autobase. Of these, I prefer Liquibase and cannot recommend it enough. While it uses XML to describe its changesets it is a mature open-source Java project that works flawlessly (and has some excellent documentation). I did not have much luck using DbMigrate and Autobase when including in an existing project… which is a shame as Autobase (which is built on Liquibase) uses a nice DSL syntax to build the migrations.

"A lot of people have asked me to document the reasons I want to migrate Hibernate from Maven to Gradle as its build tool so I enumerate those reasons here. If you are completely new to Gradle, I suggest having a look at their overview page. Up front I want to point out that this is not intended as a "Maven bash session" nor as a means to directly compare Maven and Gradle. It is just a means to describe the issues and frustrations I have seen in my 2.5+ years of using Maven for Hibernate builds; in many cases the cause is simply an assumption or concept in Maven itself which did not line up cleanly with how I wanted to do build stuff in Hibernate. Some of the list aggregated by Paul comes directly from Hibernate use-cases; I'd suggest reading through those as well. It is also a means to describe why I decided on Gradle as opposed to other related build tools out there now (Buildr, SBT, etc). Note that there is a comparison wiki between Gradle and Maven, but that it is quite old and out of date in many respects especially in regards to Gradle. The issues I had with Maven (note that these are largely chronological, not in order of "importance") are as follows:"

""Coming from desktop application development, I have found the IT Mill Toolkit [Vaadin] to be a lot of help in the transition to web application development. With the toolkit, writing AJAX enabled web applications is as easy as writing Swing based GUI code. It hides so many frustrating details, and handles browser independence so I don't have to worry about it. Using the toolkit makes it quite easy for me to write sophisticated web applications." Bo Thorsen, Monty Program AB"

Last week I decided to challenge Scala's downscalability by trying to replace a Groovy script with a Scala pendant. In this article you will read about this little experiment and a comparision of the Scala result with the Groovy predecessor. But first some background about the script: Some time ago my company introduced a new spam notification system.  When it thinks that a mail contains spam, it keeps it in quarantine and once or twice a day sends an email to the recipient (me) reporting all the kept mails, together with an intranet web link for each  to release it. Here you see an example of such a mail (note: I have my mails displayed in plain text format):

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.

"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."

Last weekend while pondering the question "Is Scala ready for the enterprise?" I decided to write a simple Java EE 6 app entirely in Scala, without using any Java. I had three main reasons for doing this: one was just to see how easy/difficult it would be to write everything in Scala (it was easy).  Another was to document the process for others journeying down the same road (the entire project is on github).  Finally, I wanted to identify advantages of using Scala instead of Java that are specific to Java EE apps (I found several). Background The specific app I created was an adaptation of the Books example from Chapter 10 of Beginning Java™ EE 6 Platform with GlassFish™ 3. It's a simple web app that displays a list of books in a database and lets you add new books. Although it's a pretty trivial app, it does touch on several important Java EE 6 technologies: JPA 2.0, EJB 3.1 and JSF 2.0.

DdlUtils is a small, easy-to-use component for working with Database Definition (DDL) files. These are XML files that contain the definition of a database schema, e.g. tables and columns. These files can be fed into DdlUtils via its Ant task or programmatically in order to create the corresponding database or alter it so that it corresponds to the DDL. Likewise, DdlUtils can generate a DDL file for an existing database. DdlUtils uses the Turbine XML format, which is shared by Torque and OJB. This format expresses the database schema in a database-independent way by using JDBC datatypes instead of raw SQL datatypes which are inherently database specific. An example of such a file is:

"Activiti is a Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow system targeted at business people, developers and system admins. Its core is a super-fast and rock-solid BPMN 2 process engine for Java. It's open-source and distributed under the Apache license. Activiti runs in any Java application, on a server, on a cluster or in the cloud. It integrates perfectly with Spring, it is extremely lightweight and based on simple concepts. "

The release 3.0 of Spring Framework added the Spring Module OXM which supports the marshalling and unmarshalling of Java objects and XML documents.In this post, we will be using Spring OXM to take a Java object, convert it to a XML-format and save it in the hard-disk as an XML file containing information of that Java object. We will also cover how to retrieve back the serialized state of that XML file and reconstruct it back to it's original state as a Java object.

"The agile dependency manager Apache Ivy™ is a popular dependency manager focusing on flexibility and simplicity. Find out more about its unique enterprise features, what people say about it, and how it can improve your build system!"

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.

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.

"This article looks at the new Jobs API available as part of Eclipse 3.0. It describes the main portions of the Jobs API and the use of scheduling rules. It also describes some changes to Eclipse resource management including how the Resources plug-in integrates with the new API. Finally, it describes some new UI functionality that has been added to provide feedback to users about jobs that are run in the background. "

"The Frisbee module was developed as a "bag" of STK paragraphs with one common factor: social. These are the main features: CE / EE pure STK-based module drop-n-run module, with a self explaining demo website detailed instructions on module install one new Magnolia theme, frisbee, simple and clean Google Map (v3) integration . single marker map . multiple marker map, 2 demo marker-retrieval modelClass Flickr Slideshow, with custom query builder (tags, full-text search, author based search..) Facebook integration . Facebook SDK . Facebook iLike button . Facebook meta tag, reading values from page properties ShareThis and AddThis integration Twitter integration (you need Twitter4J.jar) . last tweet paragraph . last n tweets paragraphs . TweetThis button . ReTweet button Frisbee is at 1.0.0 stable version, but it is not ended here, it is open for future developments and integrations. Feel free to download it and to provide comments / contributions."