In case you missed the news, JAX-RS 1.0 (JSR-311) was the first specification scheduled for inclusion in Java EE 6 to reach the final stage. My thanks to the spec leads, Marc Hadley and Paul Sandoz, the entire expert group and the very active community around JAX-RS for making this happen!

Amazon said that its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) will start supporting Windows Server and SQL Server sometime this fall

You know the bad feeling when you start looking at a Java code base that's just wrong. Proving it is something else again. Here's one way to show it.

In this presentation from QCon London 2008, Dave Syer discusses Spring Batch. Areas covered include batch processing patterns, typical use cases for batch processing, Spring Batch concepts and capabilities, case studies of Spring Batch implementations, Spring Batch domain details and code samples, the SpringSource/Accenture partnership and the Spring Batch roadmap.

While there are many Web frameworks in the Java™ ecosystem, they all are based, directly or indirectly, on the Servlets infrastructure. The Servlets API provides a host of useful features, including state management through the HttpSession and ServletContext mechanisms, which allows the application to maintain state that persists across multiple user requests. However, some subtle (and largely unwritten) rules govern the use of shared state in Web applications, of which many applications unknowingly fall afoul. The result is that many stateful Web applications have subtle and serious flaws.

How many languages are you using on the same project? If you go counting you will see that they are many. I mean XML, Java, XSLT, HTML, CSS... etc. But the reason why you are using almost all of them is that they happen to be mainstream and, oftentimes, they are the only language choice for a needed framework. You are actually almost obliged to use them. The choice is done for you. Style? CSS. Configuration? Often XML. Web interface description? Html. However, if you want to adopt true polyglot programming, you will have to face inevitable decision of language choice.

My conference session How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters has always drawn large crowds; on InfoQ was the third most viewed content last year. When I presented this session as an invited talk at OOPSLA 2006, I was given the opportunity to write an abstract for the proceedings. In place of an ordinary abstract I decided to try something a bit unusual: I distilled the essence of the talk down to a modest collection of pithy maxims, in the spirit of Jon Bentley's classic Bumper-Sticker Computer Science, Item 6 in his excellent book, More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder (Addison-Wesley, 1988).

Everyone likes to talk about software re-use, but not everyone grasps its transformative value, which lies in reusing data rather than lines of code. That value is becoming more apparent in the consumer space, where Web 2.0 mashups—Web applications that combine data from two or more sources—have become popular.

I've blogged and written in the past about Pervasive's DataRush Framework for parallel programming and computing with Java. When I first used the framework, it involved writing a mix of components in both Java and XML. The XML portions were used to invoke prepared operators, and to instruct the flow of data and processing within the parallel application. While it proved to be a very powerful way of expressing the dataflows within an application, the XML took some getting used to. As with other software frameworks that rely on, or have relied on, XML as way of configuring or glueing together the pieces that do the work, it can be a bit tedious. Pervasive received this feedback from its customers, and decided to do something about it. The result is a release candidate of the Pervasive DataRush framework that is now an all-Java parallel programming and computing environment. All business logic and dataflows are expressed in 100% pure Java.

Faced with the demands of mission-critical applications, many enterprise developers have pushed the Java language and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to the limit. The most common issue seen in transactional environments is achieving predictable response time or latency – in other words, the time it takes the system to respond to a request or to move a transaction through the IT infrastructure. In such environments, Garbage Collection (GC) moves from being a valued feature to a major headache.

In Exchanging Data With XML and JAXB, Part 1, we saw how the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) expedites the exchange of data between systems. With JAXB 2.0's annotation support, generating XML data for a business partner is as easy as annotating your existing object model. In this tip, you'll learn how JAXB's binding customization features can facilitate XML processing for the recipient of data as well as for the sender. Binding customization offers a level of control over the characteristics of the Java classes generated by the JAXB schema compiler. This allows you to work with an object model that makes sense for your business domain even when processing XML instance documents based on a schema that is not of your own design.

In this video interview from QCon London 2008, Neal Gafter discusses upcoming language features in Java 7, superpackages, what closures are, the differences between the three major closures proposals (CICE, FCM and BGGA), optional typing systems for dynamic languages, and the next major language

Brian Goetz discusses the difficulties of creating multithreaded programs correctly, incorrect synchronization, race conditions, deadlock, Software Transactional Memory, the history of concurrency, alternatives to threads, Erlang, Scala, and recommendations for concurrency in Java.

About ten years after the Java Grande effort, this paper aims at providing a snapshot of the current status of Java for High Performance Computing. Multi-core chips are becoming mainstream, offering many ways for a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to take advantage of such systems for critical tasks such as Just-In-Time compilation or Garbage Collection. We first perform some micro benchmarks for various JVMs, showing the overall good performance for basic arithmetic operations. Then we study a Java implementation of the Nas Parallel Benchmarks, using the ProActive middleware for distribution. Comparing this implementation with a Fortran/MPI one, we show that they have similar performance on computation intensive benchmarks, but still have scalability issues when performing intensive communications. Using experiments on clusters and multi-core machines, we show that the performance varies greatly, depending on the Java Virtual Machine used (version and vendor) and the kind of computation performed.

What Is Model-View-Controller (MVC)? If you've programmed with graphical user interface (GUI) libraries in the past 10 years or so, you have likely come across the model-view-controller (MVC) design. MVC was first introduced by Trygve Reenskaug, a Smalltalk developer at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979, and helps to decouple data access and business logic from the manner in which it is displayed to the user...

One reason Wuala stands out from the crowded field of online storage is that it's based on Java. This gives it some of the advantages of desktop applications and of Web apps. Like a desktop application, it can perform tasks such as encryption using the local machine's hardware, rather than remotely on a server. Like a Web application, it can be launched from a browser, and requires no installation, meaning it will work on public Internet stations.

JAXB simplifies the use of XML data in Java applications by shielding you and your code from the low-level details of working with XML. Essentially, JAXB allows you to move easily back-and-forth between XML and Java. A JAXB implementation supplies a schema compiler, which takes in an XML schema and generates Java classes which map to that schema. Data from XML documents which are instances of the schema can be bound automatically to the generated classes by JAXB's binding runtime framework

This is an open source project to develop a research Virtual Machine that is written in the Java(TM) Programming Language. It is backed by the Maxine Research Project at Sun Labs, the research organization of Sun Microsystems.

Aonix, the provider of the PERC product line for embedded and real-time Java developers, announces the release of PERC Ultra 5.1 cross development and target support on Wind River's VxWorks 6.6 real-time operating system and Wind River Workbench development suite. With more than 1 million field systems in markets such as aerospace, defense, telecommunications, industrial control and robotics, PERC Ultra well suits the broad real-time market leadership of VxWorks.

Did Apple bite off more than it could chew? It apparently made promises to MobileMe users that it's having trouble keeping.It appears, however, that Apple's reputation is being tarnished by the MobileMe fiasco, with many observers saying the service was rushed to consumers before it was tested adequately. Only time will tell if this will affect the company's bottom line.

...in-depth studies of 20 companies found a 50% complete failure rate, while another 30% were considered neither successful nor wholly failed... Many of them had deployed multiple successful projects, but most of those projects were focused on just one integration problem. It was just a bunch of Web services... The service is only built for one application and it’s never going to be used again

This overview looks at the economics, cost of entry, and learning curve in using Java ME technology to penetrate the mobile market. It introduces the JSRs included in the Mobile Services Architecture (MSA) standard. The mobile handset market is very large and growing. In 2007, annual unit sales exceeded 1 billion units for the first time -- that's over 2.7 million units per day.

There are several different approaches to scheduling GC within a real-time environment, each with benefits and weaknesses. These include work-based and time-based incremental collection approaches, which are aimed at minimizing the effect of GC on scheduling.

The SDN has posted an edit of a white paper by Brian Goetz as An Introduction to Real-Time Java Technology: Part 1, The Real-Time Specification for Java (JSR 1). "Real-time computing is often associated with high speed, but this is only one part of the picture. At its core, real-time computing is about predictability -- the knowledge that the system will always perform within the required time frame. The deadlines involved need not be very short -- though they sometimes are -- and the consequences of missing a deadline may not be dire -- though they sometimes are. The key to whether an application is a real-time one has to do with whether its requirements include temporal constraints.

So I just learned that Java's GUI-framework "Swing" is not thread-safe (and neither is Microsoft's "Windows Forms"). What that means is that GUI components may only be manipulated by a single thread. If you ignore this fact (or simply assume that the framework has to be thread-safe when in reality it is not), you better be prepared for some really weird errors (aka race conditions) or in the case of WinForms, exceptions.