This is the time of the year when we start seeing the “what’s going to be hot in Java this year” posts. Actually, I might be a little late. Anyways, there seems to be two kinds. The ones that focus on the very latest buzzwords (the bad) and the ones that focus on what is beginning to take hold or mature (the good). It is sort of like how I prefer to attend JavaOne every other year. One year is full of specifications, standards, and new frameworks. The next year is specification implementations and the maturing of the previous year’s frameworks. I’m hoping this will be a good one. I am trying to focus on technologies that are not necessarily new, but that are beginning to take hold. And to add a little spice, I’m not just listing the emerging technologies. I’m also listing those that I think will be in decline.

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I’m surprised I didn’t come across this earlier. JBoss has a released a new federated repository system: DNA.

http://www.jboss.org/dna

I’ve caught up with the getting started document and the reference guide, and I quite like what I see. First things first, DNA is itself not a JCR implementation (yet). Rather, it unifies one or more repositories and provides a single point of access via the JCR API. The repositories themselves may be JCR compliant, but do not have to be. DNA comes with a variety of connectors such as the JCR, JDBC, and SVN connectors.

I find this to be quite practical. I worked with a number of clients who had multiple repositories whether they be JCR or simple databases. I’ve seen an environment with FileNet, Day Communique, Alfresco, and a number or Oracle databases. I’ve seen another with Magnolia, Day CQ, and a number of Oracle databases. I could cetainly make use of a unified repository in these environments.

I like that DNA is not simply an application, but an extensible framework for developers. It takes advantage of a very modular/pluggable architecture that allows you to write your own connectors (to connect to various repositories), sequencers (to extract metadata from repository content), and more.

Lastly, I thought there were two particular JIRA tasks that I found interesting.

https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/DNA-55 (RESTful API)
https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/DNA-46 (JCR Implementation)

Those two should have a significant impact on just how practical DNA is.

So until next time, good fight, good night.

Introduction

Here is a brief tutorial on how to setup and object content mapping with Jackrabbit (1.5) and Spring.

First things first, download this zip and import the source into your project. As mentioned in this post support for Jackrabbit OCM in Spring still hasn’t found a home. Thus you have to download the zip from the JIRA.

The source includes an updated JackrabbitSessionFactory that we are going to reference in our Spring configuration.

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I’ve realized that JAX-RS can be used to build a web applications based on the MVC pattern just like any other framework (Wicket, Stripes, etc). Typically I use JAX-RS to build services that return XML and/or JSON, but there is no reason I can’t return HTML as well. I feel that the hierarchal nature of RESTful services makes them perfect for delivering website pages too. The only thing that was missing for me was an HTML provider. I’m used to using the JAXB and JSON providers, and I didn’t see a built in one for rendering HTML. So, I decided to build a custom JAX-RS Freemarker provider.

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Its that time again. Every so often I feel the need to try out a new OS. For the last year I have been running Hardy Heron on my trusty ThinkPad T61p. It was my first ThinkPad, and now I’m thinking it won’t be my last. After all, they have quad core ThinkPads now. Although, I’ve seen more and more colleagues becoming infected and turning in to Mac zombies. I wonder how long I can avoid infection.

For several minor and not so minor reasons, I may need to move off of Ubuntu. Although, I could try out Intrepid Ibex before I do. In the meantime I have installed OpenSolaris and PC-BSD images in VirtualBox. I tried to run them (I did get them installed) in VMWare, but there were issues with both. To be honest, there are still some minor issues with VirtualBox and PC-BSD. Namely, I haven’t been able to get the guest additions installed in PC-BSD. Nor can I seem to run it at a resolution greater than 1024 by 768 or at a color depth greater than 16 bit.

Update: I installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC2 in VMWare. Back when I tried 2008.05 I followed some instructions on installing the guest tools, and just like back then I was presented with the same wonderful black screen of death after installing the guest tools and restarting 2008.11 RC2. In addition, they was no Eclipse to be found. I thought that after seeing this page and this bug status that it might just be available as a package. I didn’t see it.

Update: Eclipse is now available as December 5th via IPS!

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Introduction

A couple of weeks ago one of our clients asked me to prepare some documentation on the CQ/JCR RESTful services I had created for them.

I had previously came across this post on TSS about the latest release of enunciate. Unfortunately, I quickly forgot. Then Bill reminded me about it a couple days ago. He is working on a REST/Flex project and he too came across it. Its all coming together now.

enunciate

While enunciate can do a variety of things, I was only interested in the generated JAX-RS/JAXB documentation (HTML). My personal opinion is that the generated documentation is not only useful but also well designed. As a colleague commented, it is pretty. Here is a screenshot of the documentation for JC-Rest.

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This week I integrated CQ with Amazon S3 via the JCR observation API and Mule.

First, the business need. The client was making extensive use of the CQ media library, and that is just fine. As media library assets are requested, they are cached on the web server(s). The issue at hand is file size and bandwidth. The client wanted to push the larger files to S3 to save on bandwidth, they also wanted to continue using the CQ authoring interface to manage media assets. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

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Introduction

Content Management Interoperability Services

Specification (Alfresco) - Download
Alfresco CMIS (Wiki) - View

I read part I of the specification the other day. This part covers the services and the data model. This is just a brief summary of my notes. I suspect I’ll be reading over and over the next few days, so I plan to make updates to this post. Anyways, here are my notes…

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I’ve updated JC-Rest to include a  few new services and have updated a few others. In addition to be able to return properties for a node, the nodes services can now return attributes (is locked, is checked out, etc) too. I’ve also added a few services for creating nodes, properties, and what not. Finally, I added a service to return the repository attributes.

The result is an updated JCR browser that displays the following:

• node tree
• node properties
• node attributes
• repository attributes
• repository events

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I can’t begin to stress how important it is to get it right the first time around. Once you begin building an web content managed site, you don’t have the privilege of refactoring.

Here are a few things that I find important when architecting a web content managed site.

Information Architecture/Site Hierarchy

This may very well be the most important aspect of your site. To be honest, the information architecture is your site hierarchy. However, it still requires a great deal of thought. Building navigation components can be difficult without a well defined site hierarchy. Let us consider an ecommerce example.

- home
- - catalog
- - - books
- - - - book1
- - - - book2
- - - magazines
- - - - mag1
- - - - mag2

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