Effective Java second edition finally started shipping this week. I dreamed of this day in one of my earlier blog post As predicted, it finally made it this year during JavaOne. Even this year, Joshua had a session on “More ‘Effective Java’” - third in a row since 2006.

The book was published on May 8, 2008 and I pre-ordered at Amazon thinking the book will hit the stores only on May 28 as per their website. But, I then decided to order it at informIT as it was available immediately (not to mention the best deal I could get on the Internet). I should be getting it next week. You can read sample chapters from here and here. I had gone through the Generics chapter and its pretty impressive.

As always, its definitely a programmer’s asset. This second edition is reloaded with 21 more best programming practice primarily from JDK 1.5. You can read Joshua Bloch’s recent interviews at InfoQ and java.sun.com.

You can even buy an autographed version from craigslist. It comes at a premium of $50. Josh is always a rock star in the Java community.

Apache CXF is an open services framework. It is more than just a Web Services stack. Its simple, powerful, and promising. Today, the CXF project graduated from incubation as a top-level Apache project. It has made several stable releases since its incubation. I know projects which still prefer to use first generation Axis due to its simplicity. XFire is also popular like Axis, but made a significant difference in providing highly performing XML based web services. The power and simplicity of XFire and feature rich Celtix (branded as ESB) merged to form Apache CeltixXFire (CXF).

IMO, CXF wins over Axis2 programming model. CXF documentation is an area for improvement. It has a lot of powerful undocumented features. The primary source of getting these information is cxf-user mailing list. The people are amazingly helpful. It features most of its core developers offering their timely help to the user community.

I developed a simple loan processing application based on JPA and CXF using the NetBeans 6.1. This is a simple standalone Java application, but still demonstrates the power of persistence and integration technologies in combination with a powerful IDE which provides a platform for developing quality software. I specifically used NetBeans for this illustration because its very productive and intuitive for developer of any class. MySQL support in NetBeans 6.1 has improved phenomenally. You can manage the MySQL database from within NetBeans IDE. This is yet another useful integration for RAD apart from many of its other key offerings which I am not going to discuss in this post.

You can access this step-by-step tutorial in the NetBeans community website.

Rock with NetBeans 6.1 today and contribute to the community.

(4/30/08 Update): Changed the new Apache CXF project URL. Also, updated the tutorial to use Apache CXF 2.1 release and NetBeans 6.1 final release and used soapUI plugin for testing secure web services. Thanks to Vidhya for suggesting soapUI tool. Nice tooling around web services testing.

This week’s major acquisition announcements of Bea by Oracle and MySQL by Sun are considered significant milestone in consolidating J2EE application servers and open source database servers. The application server market is witnessing a strong convergence with 9 Java EE 5 compatible implementations vs 17 J2EE 1.4 vs 22 J2EE 1.3. The players are WebLogic Server (BEA), WebSphere Application Server (IBM), OC4J (Oracle), Sun Java System Application Server (Sun), NetWeaver (SAP), GlassFish (Sun), Geronimo (ASF/IBM), JEUS (TmaxSoft), Apusic (Kingdee). There is a decent choice for customers who either opt for commercial products or use the open source versions. This number can be further reduced to just 5 popular offerings, as Sun extends GlassFish, IBM extends Geronimo and Bea (BEAS) and Oracle is going to be one or two depending on Oracle’s new strategy. For the sake of this discussion, I am not considering other popular open source and commercial J2EE implementations which has a huge deployment base.

Historically, such acquisitions were not so successful at least for app server vendors : HP (HPQ) acquiring Bluestone, Novell (NOVL) acquiring SilverStream, Adobe (ADBE) acquiring Macromedia (Allaire JRun), Borland (BORL) acquiring TogetherSoft, RedHat (RHT) acquiring JBoss. It will be reasonable to compare RedHat vs JBoss with Sun vs MySQL acquisition, because they both acquired most popular open source products. While it is interesting to see JBoss lacking momentum after its RedHat acquisition, this may not be the case with MySQL’s future and still be a successful open source product in the hands of Sun. All we know for fact that Sun does not earn much of its penny from Java, JEE products and its recent efforts in open sourcing various products including the Java language has proven its commitment to the open source community. This is a strong message to the open source community. So, don’t be surprised by similar acquistions in the future. Did I say  framework vendors?

Oracle’s acquisition may rewrite this history, as OC4J is not so popular than its competitors. So, Oracle may just provide drop-in-replacement using WebLogic in its Fusion middleware stack. But, there is whole lot of Bea products which complements Oracle’s offerings. For instance, Oracle will benefit by having its own JVM (JRockit), TP Monitor (Tuxedo), Integration Server (WLI), and its huge installation base. So, the compelling truth is that Oracle is aligning its forces to compete with IBM. Sun was never a tough competitor in any of these markets.  Just to balance the equation with IBM, Oracle is missing its own OS platform.

App servers are becoming commodity software, so why would one pay for it?

My web site has reached its maximum bandwidth limit on Jan 16. Unfortunately, I was traveling on this day, so I could not fix this problem immediately. I have hosted Spring MVC tutorial using NetBeans on my website which would have been worsely hit as this is referenced from NetBeans.org. Any ways, I will be moving this content to NetBeans.org soon. Good news is that my site is getting hits and I upgraded to a higher bandwidth.

Effective Java Second Edition slips to ship in 2007, though Ted originally predicted in his 2006 Tech predictions. Finally, it is likely to be released around the time frame of Java One 2008 in May. I hope that Joshua does not change his original 2007 title “Effective Java: This Time It’s for Real” in JavaOne 2008. May be this time he carries a copy of this edition to the session hall:) His earlier two presentations shows only a glimpse of this book and he is busy debating closures controversy, which is a good thing for the future of the language.

Effective Java Reloaded in JavaOne 2008 : This Time It’s Not for Real

Effective Java Reloaded in JavaOne 2007 : This Time It’s Not for Real

Effective Java Reloaded in JavaOne 2006

Would the closure controversy come to an end this year? Joshua’s talk on “The Closures Controversy” in JavaPolis’07 may bring reasonable momentum in the Java community voicing concerns about the BGGA proposal. Remember this is just one proposal on closures. Bruce Eckel’s “Java: Evolutionary Dead End” is just the beginning. Neal defends on “Restricted Closures” and “What flavor of closures?” and how this can be accommodated as part of the JSR.

Who wins closure war: “Do Nothing” OR CICE+ARM OR BGGA ?

Java API recommendations from Kevin, Joshua and Doug “Java Class Libraries minor API change recommendations for JDK 7” may not make a big impact and its sole purpose is to fix the glitches. The next talk of the community is whether OpenJDK 6, JDK 7 will be shipping this year? Would Google Collections make its version 1.0 release, and possibly marry into Java Collections?

Does all this make the language powerful, and still retain “programmer portability”? Yes, I would think so.