sampa : colin’s blog

I just got an email from Appie with the following text
ANY PLATFORM, ANY LANGUAGE, ANYWHERE
Why are the hottest new applications being developed on the Mac? Because the Intel-based Mac lets you easily develop for virtually any platform, language, and programming environment. And now, you can test and run applications on UNIX, Linux, and even Windows, […]

Basing your business around open-source is pretty tough sometimes, but it all becomes worth it when you get a private forum message like this:
“You guys are clowns for making me register to be able to browse your archives.
CLOWNS.” –AnnoyedInSF
Of course, this genius couldn’t figure out that in fact you don’t have to […]

EclipseCon have graciously offered Spring Framework one of the 10 ‘pods’ in the open-source pavilion at EclipseCon 2006. The closest tie right now between Spring and Eclipse is probably the Spring-IDE plugin for Eclipse (also used as the basis for Spring support in MyEclipse IDE), but you can also expect to see some Spring integration […]

I find it a little bit distressing how few Java developers understand that using JTA does not automatically get you XA/Two-Phase-Commit capabilities.
Here we’ve got Matt Raible, who really should know better, or at least should not be blogging about it, posting on Two Phase Commit in Tomcat with JOTM and Spring. Somebody flew out to […]

This is pretty big news. Back in November, BEA acquired SolarMetric, makers of the excellent KODO JDO persistence library. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Kodo JDO, as it’s very performant, is very flexible in terms of mapping complex schemas, has excellent error messages, and comes with good tools and excellent documentation. Now […]

I was reading Diego Parilla’s Spring is not designed for scalability, and simply had to respond. I actually first wrote a comment directly on his blog, but I guess he’s not going to allow the comment to be posted, as some other stuff has appeared but not mine, after a number of hours…
(Edited […]

A couple of years ago, I used Groovy a decent amount for database ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Loading) work with an ongoing project. This weekend I had occasion to do more of the same sort of work and see how the Groovy experience has changed…
Basically in the project two years ago, we versioned the DB […]

I’m here in North Miami for the Spring Experience 2005, which kicked off last night with a dinner followed by a keynote talk, during which Spring 2.0 M1 was announced. The room was packed, at around 270+ people. It was incredibly gratifying to look around at that room full of Spring enthusiasts and think about […]

Tomorrow night, Nov. 16th, I’ll be speaking on Spring at the NYJavaSIG. Since there’s never actually been a talk on Spring there (hard to believe), I’ll be giving a general overview of all that Spring offers, but trying to focus on the areas of most interest to this crowd.
I’ll actually be in NY from tomorrow […]

Spring 1.2.6 was released yesterday. Thanks to Juergen and Rob for the coding heroics over the last while to get this out.
At this time CVS HEAD is now dedicated to Spring 1.3 development, and over the course of this week, we’ll move already prepared 1.3 features from the sandbox over to the main sources. Starting […]

I’m really pleased to announced that I’ve checked in the initial code into Spring Web Flow’s CVS, for seamlessly integrating with JSF.
The integration code, which was developed in collaboration with Craig McClanahan and Keith Donald, is still somewhat preliminary and needs some polish and tweaking before final release as part of Web Flow 1.0. That […]

I was in San Jose last week and spent the first half focused on BEAWorld, where BEA and Interface21 showed off the fruits of the collaboration announced a few months ago at JavaOne.
I had a blast talking to people about Spring on WLS, and taking part in a panel discussion one day and a technical […]

I don’t normally like turning to the blogosphere for help, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why TomCat 5.5 refuses to release 4-5 jars from some web-apps when they’re undeployed. It’s like the old CCR song is talking about jars:
I put a spell on you
Because you’re mine.
You better stop
The things that […]

Spring has from the beginning provided a powerful transaction abstraction. This abstraction provides several key benefits:

Allows you to specify transaction demaraction policies for your code, either declaratively or programatically.
Abstracts away the low-level transaction manager with a common transaction management abstraction, allowing for you to change TX strategies (for example, JTA (global) vs. local transactions) without […]

On May 25th, the Los Angeles Java Users Group will hold a special meeting where I’ll be presenting on the Spring Framework.
Since there are still a decent number of people without hands-on Spring Framework experience, I’ll for the most part be doing a general Spring overview which walks through most of the features, and should […]

Spring Framework 1.2 final is out. This release definitely has a focus on persistence related enhancements. Read the announcement here.

Now that Ivy 1.0 is out, I’d strongly encourage every Java developer to pull it down and consider using it to manage dependencies in their Ant builds. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a complete no-brainer.
Ivy does one thing, manage dependencies, and does it quite well. What’s nice is that it has a decent set […]

The new alias tag in Spring’s XML bean definition format makes using Spring in a (lightweight) component oriented fashion significantly easier.
Spring has always had the ability to assign multiple IDs to components (via combined usage of the id and name attributes) which made it possible to link up components somewhat. Consider a library called ComponentA. […]

I’m very pleased to announce that Spring Framework 1.2RC1 is now available for download! Thanks again to Juergen for all the gruntwork packaging things up.
While this is only a Release Candidate, and you can expect (despite the name) that at least one or two other Release Candiate builds will come out before 1.2 final, […]

I’ve been working with an ant-based dependency management tool called Ivy:
http://www.jayasoft.fr/org/modules/ivy/overview.php
We’ve been talking about restructuring the Spring Framework source layout at some point relatively soon (although it almost certainly won’t happen for 1.2), so that the individual components of Spring each have their own source level projects, instead of living under one big fat project […]