Coming to your area: the 2010 Red Hat Road Tour. What makes this tour interesting? It's a half-day professional business conference about IT infrastructure: focusing on cloud computing, virtualization, middleware and the future of IT. These subjects will be covered by Red Hat cloud experts.

Red Hat says that their vision of IT is different in a positive way than of any other IT vendor. They know that IT infrastructure exists of many different pieces of hardware and software vendors that must cooperate with each other. They say that they recognize IT businesses want to grow and improve their IT systems and operations gradually and not through wrenching change. And they know that you want to do so in a way that preserves your strategic flexibility and keeps your options open.

They are going to visit areas in DC or Atlanta. Below you can see which cities on what date will be visited in the tour:

 "It's the most intelligent Java IDE. IntelliJ IDEA deeply understands your code and gives you a set of powerful tools without imposing any particular workflow or project structure. IntelliJ IDEA is your dream pair-programmer who knows its way around the codebase, makes great suggestions right when you need them, and is always ready to help you shape your code."

"We at JetBrains believe that making tools for developers should greatly involve listening to developers. Our Early Access Program lets development community closely participate in discussions devoted to IntelliJ IDEA and influence development planning, from early stages onwards.

 Early Access Program allows you to try pre-release versions of our software to evaluate features that will be added to the next release." 

Recently I was trying to put together a plugin system for web applications. The idea is similar to Eclipse plugins. Where you bundle your extension in a jar and then drop them in Eclipse-Home/plugins folder, restart Eclipse and you are ready to use it. Note that Eclipse plugins are OSGi plugins.

So my initial effort was to see if I could build a pluggable web application with OSGi. After few experiments with Equinox (the Eclipse OSGi engine) and Felix, I moved on to check out Spring DM as well as Spring DM server. But all I all I felt that

• OSGi / DM involves significant learning curve.
• The web server bundles are “probably” not of enterprise strength.
• Still trying to gel with JEE.
• Significant extra effort required to port applications to OSGi platform.

All in all  OSGi / DM has to go few more miles before we build Enterprise server apps using those containers / bundles. But its a very good start and promises a lot in the future.

I miss the old times, when things where simpler, when "having options" for developing a software was a luxury. Nowadays we have too many options, specially in Java, and we find ourselves constantly fighting with them, and, not seldom, we realize a bit too late that the wrong choice has been made.

My last fight was against the WS frameworks. I'm usually keen to use solutions provided by well known projects, those that are under the umbrella of communities that have proved themselves worth of trust. In this case, I narrowed my options to three: Axis, CXF and Spring WS. I've played with the three of them in the past, but it happens that this time it was for real, I had to chose one in order to implement a project for a customer, so I decided to dig a little deeper in their documentation before making my final statement.

I discarded Spring WS very soon. A few minutes reading the documentation and going through some blogs I trust and I got under the impression that it got stuck on time (if I'm wrong, please leave a comment :D). The documentation is very poor and I had to spend too much time in order to develop a more complex proof of concept.

For those who missed it: NetBeans 6.9.1 IDE is available. Also available is Java SE 6 Update 21.

NetBeans 6.9.1 IDE 

NetBeans is an IDE for developing with Java, JavaScript, C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy, Scala, and more. It is written completely in Java , you will need JVM installed to run it and a JDK is required if you plan on programming in Java.

For those who haven't seen this teaser for JavaZone yet... Check it out. It's very good, pay attention to the lyrics. ;)