For the people who haven't read it on the internet yet: Netbeans IDE 6.9 Beta just released:).
Even though it's just a beta release, everyone is excited.
Because with this release, there is finally a visual designer for JavaFX: JavaFX Composer ( similar to the Swing GUI builder)

Other features are:
OSGi
Develop OSGi bundles with Maven, Bundled Felix container and ability to register other containers such as Equinox

NetBeans Platform
OSGi interoperability: Developing and consuming OSGi bundles in Platform-based applications, Felix 2.0.3 OSGi support, experimental Equinox support

JavaFX
JavaFX Composer for form-like UI components with states and access to various data sources, Added and improved editor hints and refactoring and supports the latest JavaFX SDK 1.3

Java EE
Support for Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) (JSR-299), Spring Framework 3.0 support

Java
Java Debugger: Breakpoint grouping, attach parameter history, Support for annotation processors in the editor, configurable in the Project Properties

PHP
Zend Framework support, “Overrides/Implements” and “Is Overridden/Implemented” annotations

Ruby
Ruby on Rails 3.0 support

C/C++
“Overrides/Is Overridden” annotations and hyperlink navigation, Console type “Internal Terminal”

Click here for the full list of new features.

Download Netbeans 6.9 Beta right here.

I haven't had time to look into the JavaFX Composer plugin yet, but I definitely will.
If any one has already experimented with it, please leave a comment and tell me what you think about it.



(The Netbeans IDE 6.9 release is scheduled in June)

Ehcache is an open source, standards-based cache used to boost performance, offload the database and simplify scalability. It can scale from in-process with one or more nodes through to a mixed in-process/out-of-process configuration with terabyte-sized caches. For applications needing a coherent distributed cache, Ehcache uses the open source Terracotta Sever Array. Ehcache is widely used in open source projects such as Hibernate and Spring.

 

Release of Ehcache 2.1 Beta focusses on 3 primary goals

After my previous blogentry about the 3rd and final milestone, it is now time for the release of JRebel 3.0.
This version of JRebel has better Java EE support:
It contains plugins so you can make use of e.g. EJB, CDI, JSF and JPA.
As for new framework support: JBoss Seam and Hibernate.

Here is a small list of all changes:

• EJB
• JSP scriptlets
• JSF
• CDI
• JPA
• JBoss Seam
• Hibternate
• Support for adding static fields and changing enums
• Startup time improvements
• 25%-30% less memory use
• Better Proxy Support
• rebel.xml Editor

The details about the changes from the list above can be found here.

When I was looking into JRebel I found that for promotional reasons,
you can get a free JRebel 3.0 license ( only for the first 10 participants ).

A new milestone is set for Lift 2.0.
This time it is Milestone 4 and it comes with a lot of changes.

For the people who don't know about Lift:
Lift is a powerful web framework for Scala and Java developers.
Its familiar platform (JVM) includes enterprise tools like Eclipse and Maven.
It has clean templating, supports Ajax and comet
and provides a quick way to get CRUD functionality running.

In the previous 3 milestones these where some big changes for Lift:
CouchDB support.
Upgraded to jQuery 1.4.1.
Updated hibernate-entitymanager to 3.4.0 GA
OAuth support ( this is thanks to the FourSquare developers )
Multidimensional arrays supported in JSON serialization and extraction

Now with M4 they updated lift-core_pl.properties,
added support for HTTP Reason Phrase and a new ImageResizer utility class.

Full list of M4 changes

List of old Milestones

And if you are just installing Lift, I can suggest this tutorial.

ZeroTurnAround is proud to announce the final milestone on the way to the JRebel 3.0. JRebel is a productivity tool for Java EE development:

By eliminating the wasteful build and redeploy phases from the development cycle, teams can focus on adding new features, improving code quality and finishing projects faster.
So, when you change any class or resource in your IDE, you can immediately see the change in your application, skipping the build and redeploy phases.

The release of JRebel 3.0 M3 comes with the following exciting new features:

• More EJB Support
• Better Proxy Support
• Hibernate plugin
• Mojarra JSF plugin
• Seam plugin
• Weld Plugin
• rebel.xml Editor

ZeroTurnAround has also posted a very interesting article about measuring TurnAround time.

After some previous 3.2.0 ALPHA releases, this is the first 3.2.0 BETA release. It comes with some new features and some improvements.
The Netty 3.2.0 ALPHA3 already came with Web Sockets support and now the BETA also contains the zero-copy file transfer feature. It also contains a more user-friendly API ( 3.1 deprecated methods are removed ) and it has a higher performance.

About the netty project:
The Netty project is an effort to provide an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework and tools for rapid development of maintainable, high-performance, high-scalability protocol server and clients. 

What the future will bring:
Since the HTTP tunneling transport has been rescheduled to the next major feature release (3.3), all planned features have been implemented. Unless there is a critical issue, they will proceed to release candidate phase.

 

For more information, click here

The Griffon team is happy to announce the release of Griffon 0.3, nicknamed "Leopardus pardalis" - and is the fourth major release of Griffon. Griffon is a Grails inspired framework for writing RIA's , ( which are web applications that have most of the characteristics of desktop applications ) on the JVM using Groovy.

 

Some new features are:
* Upgraded to Groovy 1.7.1
* New Artifact inspection API -- adds the ability to inspect artifacts at runtime and apply meta-programming.
* New plugins: i18n, artifacts, db4o, berkleleydb, erlang, flyingsaucer, p6spy, jmx and more!

At the moment my project team and me are programming a Bank web application.

 

It is build using JBoss with JSF, and we are using JAAS for security reasons.
Since there can be many errors, a custom 404 error page can come in handy.
With JBoss, it isn’t all that difficult …  you just need to know how.

To do so ... edit your web.xml. You have to add this:
< web-app>
    ...
        < error-page>
            < error-code>404< /error-code>
            < location>/YourLocation/YourErrorPage.html< /location>
        < /error-page>
    ...
< /web-app>

Since much is done dynamically, you don’t have to define anything else but this.
(Of course you have to create your own error page)

As for complications:
I’m running Firefox and it all worked fine, but a member of my team is running Internet Explorer,
He got a “This webage cannot be found” message … after a little bit of googling, this was the trick:
Go to: Internet Options … Advanced Tab … and uncheck “Show friendly HTTP error messages”

This release does not have any new features, since its just a minor bugfix. But its still important news for the Spring Security projects out there, because Spring Security is a framework that provides advanced authentication, authorization and other even security features for enterprise applications. Its not really a framework you want any bugs in.

When doing a little research about the new release of Spring Security I also found a nice blogpost from Glen Smith: hacking custom authentication providers with grails spring security, which is also very recently posted.

So if you have a Spring Security project running, here is the changelog.

Here is just a small intro to recursive methods; Basically, a recursive method is a method that calls itself; e.g.

int fibonacci(int n) {
    if(n <= 1)     {
        return n;
    }     else     {
        return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2);
    }
}    (this method returns the n'th value of the Fibonacci sequence)

As you can see in the example above, the part that makes this method recursive is:
       return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n – 2);
because there, the method calls his own function again.

 In my opinion there are benefits to recursive methods ( but not always ) like: a problem can be defined as a recursive problem or because of a recursive method your programming code can be shorter.

Anyway, be carefull not to end up in an endless loop!!