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Java 7 is finally here! Or to be absolutely correct, will be released July 28. In this post, I will point out 7 (wonder where I got that number from…) reasons to upgrade.

1. Coins are also money
   Project Coin contains a couple of nice language changes that will make life as a programmer much easier. See the project page for details.
2. Dynamic languages
   invokedynamic adds support for dynamically typed languages on the Java platform.
3. New File System API
   File operations have always been pain in Java, but with this new API most of the issues are solved. Manipulating symbolic links for example.
4. Concurrency
   The Fork/Join Framework provides a set of utilities you would benefit from when writing concurrent programs, giving the possibility for true parallelism on the Java platform.
   
5. Modularization
   A refactoring enabling the Java SE platform to be downloaded as required by the VM as needed. 
   
6. Enhancements
   A lot of enhancements regarding classloading, unicode, locale etc.
7. It’s new
   And new things are always more motivating to work with than old, at least in the context of programming languages.

To be honest this is not very much for a major version of a programming language, especially since it has gone nearly five years since the previous version. But it shows that Java is still alive after the whole Oracle story.

Yesterday I decided to upgrade WordPress on this site. As usual I ignored the tip about backing up first and just pressed the Upgrade Now button. As you can imagine, it failed big time so my only option was to reinstall. Luckily, I was able to export my posts using phpMyAdmin, but when I was trying to import them again after the WordPress installation, the fun began… The column count did not match, so I had to update all posts manually before importing.

I think I have got it all up as it was now, with a few new features such as link to my google+ profile and the nice little +1 button below the posts. Next time I am definitely going to follow the recommendations of backing up the data…I think…

Usually, when I come home from work, I am pretty tired of programming and rarely ever do any programmin during weekends. But this weekend was different. I have been coding pretty much at work lately, so it should not be because of abstinence from coding. Anyhow, I set down and contributed to a small open source project started by a former colleague of mine. It is called Architect’s Java DAO Generator, and you can find it on Sourceforge. In short it is a maven plugin that generates most of the boilerplate code you usually have to code by hand. It also abstracts the data access layer from your domain logic in a nice way. Version 1.5 is soon going to be available and is absolutely worth a look.

While I was reading up a little on Scala recently, I found out that I might as well contribute a little while doing it. So I translated the Scala Tutorial to Norwegian since that was one of the translations missing. You can find it among the other translations on scala-lang.org or simply click on the image below to access it directly.

It is amazing what a month in South Africa does to you. Things like Twitter, Facebook and blogging becomes pretty distant… But now I have been home for a while, Sun+Oracle has been approved by EU, I have finished (almost) my kitchen renovation and celebrated yet another birthday, so it is time to get started again!

After a discussion with a colleague at a coffee break this morning, I decided to try out Google App Engine. The getting started guide is a great place to start. It gives you a great walk-through setting up the development environment and creating a sample application. Since I am no big fan of Eclipse, I installed the Google App Engine Plugin for NetBeans. After resolving a small issue regarding path settings (see solution here), it was up and running perfectly.

Next steps will be to figure out what changes that has to be made to my existing applications to be able to deploy them on app engine. Probably the server side of YouOweMe will be the first candidate. Or maybe the KanbanFX server. I haven’t decided yet…

This week Yammer was introduced to the entire company. Simply put, Yammer is a company internal twitter where coworkers can connect and share information by posting messages.

At first, I was skeptical to the whole idea thinking it would generate an overload of noise for a couple of weeks until dying slowly like most initiatives to share knowledge within companies. But after having thought about it, I really hope that will not happen. It is actually a brilliant way of building a knowledge base within the company. Everyone who has tried to establish some form of knowledge exchange know how hard it is to get people to contribute.

But by “hiding” it behind some familiar technology like twitter, people actually contribute without knowing it. If you think about it, only the things people are interested in will be posted and discussed in such a forum. People will only put energy in discussions they have strong feelings for. The things most people have feelings for are probably pretty relevant things for your organization. And it is by default fully searchable with the newest items most visible.

So with my limited experience of yammer (have used it two days), I will conclude that it is actually a good thing. Now we just have to hope that it does not die a silent death when it is not that new-and-cool anymore…

I was not present at the conference yesterday, so this is actually my second day here, and that also explains why there were no post from yesterday. Another explanation could have been that I was lazy, but that is not the case this time…

Well, over to what this post is all about: the conference. The keynote was held by Scott Hanselman. He gave an excellent talk about effectiveness and efficiency. Some really good stuff to bring back from that speech. Will try to list some of the techniques and tools he mentioned in a later blog post.

I will also summarize the rest of the sessions I attended today very soon here…

Great conference!

Despite the fact that it comes with a price tag, IntelliJ IDEA from JetBrains has since long been a very popular IDE in the Java community. The news that they now provide a free and open source community version was therefore very welcome.

If you have been reading this blog, you probably know that I am quite a big fan of NetBeans and have written quite a few comments about the areas it excels over Eclipse. I have not really tried IntelliJ IDEA yet, but now the Community Edition has been downloaded and installed. JetBrains has provided a detailed comparison between the Community and Ultimate edition.

First Impression
The first impression is that it is fast. The startup time is significantly faster than NetBeans. The editor is responsive, shortcuts and refactorings just as you expect them to be. It sure is ugly, menus and dialogs looks like some left over AWT student project hack from the 90′s, but who cares. After all we are here to code, not to enjoy the view.

Maven
The next test is to open one of my existing multi-module maven projects. Just as with NetBeans, it is just to select the root pom.xml file and open it. All sub-modules and dependencies are resolved just as expected. It scatters a lot of .ipr, .iwl and .iml files all over the place, but I can live with that as long as it updates them with changes from the pom.xml files.

When I check the Module Settings, it seems like the compiler output is set to /classes and not /target as normally by the maven convention. But when i build the project, it uses the maven configuration and puts the compiled classes under target. Why? Well, as long as it works it is okay with me…

Web and Enterprise
As the comparison table shows, there is no support for any web, mobile or enterprise frameworks in the Community edition. Nor are there support for application servers. You would have to buy the Ultimate edition for this. Fair enough, they have to make money somewhere.

Conclusion
The Community Edition of IntelliJ IDEA is the perfect choice if you are building a simple java application. It lacks support for development using web, mobile or enterprise technologies. If you want an IDE that is comparable to for example Eclipse Gallileo or NetBeans you would have to go for the Ultimate Edition. In my view NetBeans is the better choice.

Disclaimer: I  have only scratched the surface here and will continue explore the Community Edition. My opinions may change as I go…

I really like the simplicity in Kanban. It should be enough for most small projects, and especially AO teams. Even though all you really need as tool support is a white-board and a couple of post-it notes, larger organizations often require you to hook into existing tools for requirement management, issue tracking etc.

I have not been able to find any tool fulfilling this need, so I decided to create on myself. Thereby, KanbanFX was born!

KanbanFX is a JavaFX implementation of a Kanban board. Source code and a very limited demo version is available on Kenai:

http://kenai.com/projects/kanbanfx.

Please join the project if you want to contribute. I am pretty sure that I will need help with at least the graphical elements when we get to that…

NetBeans 6.8 M1 is available for download. According to the roadmap, the final release is scheduled to be released Autumn 2009.

Usually, I am pretty fast installing the absolute latest version, but this time I think I will wait at least form the M2. It has not been that long since the 6.7 and 6.7.1 releases and I am pretty satisfied. The only thing annoying me is Bug 161416. Hopefully it will be fixed in 6.8…