Introduction to the Java EE 5 Platform

Read about streamlined features and added convenience in the
Java EE 5 platform that help improve performance, reduce
development time, and get products to market sooner.

With version 5 of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE, formerly referred to as J2EE), development of Java enterprise applications has never been easier or faster. J2EE 1.4, the predecessor to the Java EE 5 platform, has many powerful features. The aim of the Java EE 5 platform design has been to streamline these features and add convenience, improve performance, reduce development time, and help developers get products to market that much sooner.

UML2HBM: Generating hbm.xml files from Class Diagrams

If you are trying to drive the development with UML models and want to use Hibernate, there is the problem of defining the mapping information and generating the mapping files from the source UML model.

This blog has detail about Eclipse plugin for above situation.

XQuery engine integrated with Oracle Database 10g Release 2.

With the release of Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Oracle introduced a full-featured, native XQuery engine integrated with the database that can be used to accomplish various tasks involved in developing an XML-enabled application. A query language designed to work with the XML data model, XQuery can actually operate on any kind of data that can be expressed in XML. Although the Oracle XQuery implementation enables you to work with both database data and external sources, Oracle XML DB generally provides significant performance improvements when processing structured data stored in the database.

The examples presented in this article demonstrate not only where and how XQuery can be used to query, construct, and transform XML, but also how to monitor and analyze the performance execution of XQuery expressions, finding more-efficient ways to process the same workload.

Article from OTN

IBM Websphere reading list

Friend of mine forward few details about IBM Websphere resources.

This article give reading list to learn about IBM® WebSphere® Application Server compiled for customers, consultants, and other technical specialists, by IBM Software Services for WebSphere.

Also, we can read lot of books from IBM Redbooks also. It has got lot tutorial, books and articles.

Thanks to my friend.

Share information between IBM portlets and JSR 168 portlets:

Share information between IBM portlets and JSR 168 portlets: Write a custom portlet service to enable legacy IBM portlets and Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 portlets to share information as properties. (WebSphere)

JMS Clients to Utilize Free Computer Resources

Use JMS Clients to Utilize Free Computer Resources by Nimish Doshi -- In this article, Nimish Doshi proposes using JMS to distribute work to underutilized computer resources. He presents two solutions, one of which uses WebLogic Workshop and WebLogic Integration to control the workflow of job distribution.

Oracle JDeveloper with WebLogic 8.1

Developing for WebLogic Server 8.1 with Oracle JDeveloper 10g by Deepak Vohra -- In this tutorial, Deepak Vohra demonstrates how to develop and debug applications on WebLogic Server 8.1 using the Oracle JDeveloper 10g IDE.

Dependency injection with AspectJ and Spring

This article explains Dependency injection with AspectJ and Spring.

Dependency injection and aspect-oriented programming are complementary techniques, so it's natural to want to use them together. Follow along as Adrian Colyer explores the relationship between the two and shows you how you can combine them to facilitate advanced dependency injection scenarios.

Virtual Directory Mapping feature in WebLogic - Tips

In WebLogic server, using deployment descriptor elements we can define Virtual directory for application.

Each weblogic application will have "weblogic.xml". This file will have deployment descriptor elelments for the application. One of the deployment descriptor element is .

We can use the virtual-directory-mapping element to specify document roots other than the default document root of the Web application for certain kinds of requests, such as image requests. When we run multiple applications, which requires same image files then all images can be stored in single location. This way we can avoid loading all the images with each application also increasing the volume of the application EAR file.

For an incoming request, if a virtual directory has been specified servlet container will search for the requested resource first in the virtual directory and then in the Web application's original document root. This defines the precedence if the same document exists in both places.

Example:

<virtual-directory-mapping>

     <local-path>c:/usr/gifs</local-path>

     <url-pattern>/images/*</url-pattern>

     <url-pattern>*.jpg</url-pattern>

</virtual-directory-mapping>

<virtual-directory-mapping>

     <local-path>c:/usr/common_jsps.jar</local-path>

     <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>

</virtual-directory-mapping>

REMEMBER: The WebLogic Server implementation of virtual directory mapping requires that you have a directory that matches the url-pattern of the mapping. The image example requires that you create a directory named images at c:/usr/gifs/images. This allows the servlet container to find images for multiple Web applications in the images directory.

BEA to Open Source its Kodo Java Persistence APIs

BEA Systems has announced that it will open source a significant portion of BEA Kodo, its persistence engine, under the name Open JPA. BEA acquired Kodo as part of its purchase of SolarMetric, Inc. in November 2005. Open JPA will implement the persistence architecture described in the EJB 3.0 specification (and implements the early draft specification today.) Open JPA is expected to be available in the first half of 2006. BEA Kodo - the source for Open JPA - is available today for free evaluation and purchase.

Single Sign On

I was googling today to find solution, how to integerate Waveset product Lighthouse with other systems to implement Single Sign On.

Learned about Liberty and SAML.

what is SAML?
- Security Assertion Markup Language

SAML is a framework for exchanging authentication and authorization information. Security typically involves checking the credentials presented by a party for authentication and authorization. SAML standardizes the representation of these credentials in an XML format called assertions, enhancing the interoperability between disparate applications.

What is Liberty Protocol?

The Liberty Alliance Project specifications provide a single sign-on mechanism for both Websites and Web services.

This article lists a number of Liberty Protocol and fundamentals that help to protect an SSO

Another sso presentation article by Sun systems.

OpenSource Portal Frameworks

Yesterday, I came to know about list of OpenSource Portal Frameworks.

Apache Jetspeed 2
Liferay
JBosss Portal
Gridsphere


All three framework are JSR-168 Compliant.

Apache Jetspeed from Jakarta opensource community.

Liferay got nice Portal UI features.

JBoss Portal is nice.

Gridsphere is part of the Gridlab Project. GridLab was funded by the European Commission under the Fifth Framework Programme of the Information Society Technology, contract number IST-2001-32133. The GridLab Project officially ended in April 2005 and eagerly waiting for Grid Lab 2!

Personally, I would go with Gridsphere!!

Skype - Free Tool to talk

Skype is a little program for making free calls over the internet to anyone else who also has Skype. It’s free and easy to download and use, and works with most computers. Download Skype now or learn more about Skype (incl. screenshots).

Skype in a nutshell.

Our software’s quick and easy to get started with. Download, register, install, plug in your headset, speakers or USB phone and start calling your friends. The calls have excellent sound quality and are highly secure with end-to-end encryption. You don’t even need to configure your firewall or router or any other networking gear. It just, you know… works.

Bridging the gap.

And it doesn’t just work on Windows, like some other software you may know. Skype is also for Mac OS X, Linux and PDAs using Pocket PC, with a native look and feel for each platform. Talking, sending instant messages or even file transfers work between different platforms like a charm.

Calling regular phone numbers.

If there weren’t enough ways for you to contact your friends, we have a little thing called SkypeOut. It lets you make calls to old-fashioned phone numbers all around the world. Landlines, mobile phones... it works with almost all of them. SkypeOut is not free but it is pretty cheap, actually.

You can also forward your Skype calls to a traditional phone or mobile. It won’t cost others any extra to call, and you simply pay the standard SkypeOut rate to call the number that you forward to.

Ajax JSP Tag Library

Yesterday I found out that, there is a OpenSource project in SourceForge for Ajax JSP tags.

AjaxTags is project name.

It has got very nice examples and source code with that.

Thanks to opensource community.

Spring and Hibernate in GlassFish

Today I was checking to get latest Spring version, then found this blog entry at SpringFramework site.

In the blog, Jerome Dochez, talks about how to implement Spring and Hibernate in GlassFish.

Jerome Dochez is GlassFish architect and overall technical lead.

Blog gives detail steps how to run Spring and Hibernate with GlassFish.

Few days back, Matt Raible complained in his blog that Spring and Hibernate do not work in GlassFish.

Jeorme take this technical challenge to prove Matt Raible is wrong.

What is GlassFish Project?

GlassFish is the name for the open source development project for bulding a Java EE 5 application server. It is based on the source code for Sun Java System Application Server PE 9 donated by Sun Microsystems and TopLink persistence code donated by Oracle. This project provides a structured process for developing a high quality application server that makes new features available faster than ever before. It is the response to Java developers who want access to the source code and the ability to contribute to the development of Sun's next generation application server which is based on GlassFish. This project is designed to encourage communication between Sun and Oracle engineers and the community and will enable all developers to participate in the application server development process.

GlassFish is a free, open source application server which implements the newest features in the Java EE 5 platform (the next version of the J2EE platform). The Java EE 5 platform includes the latest versions of technologies such as such as JavaServer Pages(JSP) 2.1, JavaServer Faces(JSF) 1.2, Servlet 2.4, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, Java API for Web Services(JAX-WS) 2.0, Java Architecture for XML Binding(JAXB) 2.0, Web Services Metadata for the Java Platform 1.0, and many other new technologies.

We can download now

AJAX Toolkit Framework(ATF) Project

The Eclipse community has accepted the AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) Project as a project proposal, to provide tooling support for AJAX. The framework is supposed to provide a basis for building tools for various AJAX projects (Dojo, Zimbra, and OpenRico are mentioned specifically) as modules under Eclipse.

The framework as proposed will have two majour components: ATF Tools, which focus on JavaScript editing, debugging, and inspection, and the ATF Personality Framework, which focuses on specific API support.

As the proposal suggests, typical use will involve using the ATF Personality Framework as a basis to provide support for a specific AJAX toolkit.