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.

I was recently using the 1.1 release of Craig MacKay’s Spring Module for NetBeans which supports the latest Spring Framework 2.5. Spring Framework tutorial hosted at NetBeans.org provides details on how to use this module in NetBeans IDE. Thomas Risberg’s Developing a Spring Framework MVC Application Step-by-Step tutorial is a good one which explains end-to-end web application development using Spring Framework 2.5. The sample in this tutorial was developed using Eclipse 3.3 and the application was deployed to Apache Tomcat 6.0.14. Spring supports JEE technologies, this sample application should run on any JEE compatible servers without much porting effort. I was able to run this tutorial using NetBeans IDE 6.0 and GlassFish V2 UR1 without any hassle. In fact, this combination worked out great for me with Craig MacKay’s plugin. A very useful plugin for Spring development on NetBeans IDE. I modified the original tutorial to use NetBeans and GlassFish infrastructure, and these tools should definitely help increase the productivity for Spring developers.

You can access the tutorial “Developing a Spring Framework MVC application step-by-step using NetBeans and GlassFish” here.

I was driving from Des Moines to Chicago on Friday 12/21 to send off my parents from O’HARE the next day. The seasonal affair was in effect as usual in Iowa. We started driving at 8am and we were navigating through the dense fog through I-80 and I-88. It was a black hole experience. The visibility was less than a quarter mile. Though, it was not so adventurous, we managed to reach Chicago around 2pm. I knew this would become worser when I return back to Des Moines as they had predicted a snowstorm across central Iowa on 12/22. I was checking the weather every often to make sure I plan my return trip safely. I decided to return on the next day and I wanted to take a chance against the predicted snow storm across mid west, the only place on earth where one could experience all unusual weather phenomenons on the same day.

My return journey was a roller-coaster ride as expected. I started from O’HARE at 4pm and I sailed through I-88 and I could travel only upto Dekalb (60 miles west off Chicago), where I decided to fuel and rest for some time as the dense fog advisory was in effect until 6pm. But, I rested until 7pm when the fogs were slightly gone. I resumed my journey towards the snow storm. I experienced severe winds gusting at the speeds of 30-40mph and I managed to drive through them. The temperature was around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. When I was nearing the Moline across the Mississippi river valley, the temperature started falling drastically. I experienced heavy rains and the fog was gone for the most parts of the sky. The temperature dropped to 30 degrees in 50 miles and as I was nearing the borders of Iowa, where the rain turned into snow and the temperature nose dived to 25 degrees.

The worser started, I could not drive as my windshield fluid was not enough to clear the blowing snow and I had to take an immediate exit where I filled my windshield fluid. I waited for 30 minutes near the gas station and then I decided to leave from there. The snow fall was heavy and the highway was already active with snow mowers spraying salt and premature cleaning began. But, it became very difficult for me to drive as the snow was 2 inches on the highway and it was not cleared for most part of the highway. I saw many vehicles falling into the sides of the highway and I even saw many trucks collapse on the highway. This was so dangerous as my speed was not more than 15mph on a highway in these hazardous conditions. I decided to quit my travel on that night as I was nearing Iowa City. I took the exit-242 to Holiday Inn, but there were no rooms left. The hotel guy suggested that there are some hotels near exit-246 which has less occupancy. So, I had to go back to the scary highway and take the exit-246. The temperature dropped to almost 15 degrees. Finally, I took the exit-246 and managed to stay in Hampton Inn in Coralville. It was midnight when I checked in. I planned to leave early in the morning when the weather subsides as it was only 100 miles to my final destination.

I recalled my stupid decision to travel that night. But, I learned how to drive safely and be extra cautious during these bizarre conditions. Nevertheless, I had an opportunity to witness the aftermath of a snowstorm which badly hit the holiday travelers across this region. I started my journey next day at 8am and I reached home safely by 1030am. I saw many vehicles out of the highway and I feel sad for them and hope they are in time for their Christmas eve.

Merry Christmas and Safe Holidays.

Today, Google released the Android platform SDK to the developer community. It comes with tools and APIs to develop applications on the open mobile platform using the Java programming language. It comes with an emulator and Eclipse plugin for development. The SDK is already available on Windows, Mac OS X (intel), and Linux (i386) platforms.

As part of today’s announcement, Google unveiled $10 million android developer challenge for developing applications on the Android platform. Android runtime is based on Dalvik VM. Each android application has its own VM which runs in its own process. The stack is built on top of Linux kernel version 2.6. The VM relies on the underlying kernel for threading and low-level memory management.

Google rocks!

Below are some screen shots of Android emulator in action.

[singlepic=12,200,200,,left][singlepic=13,200,200,,left][singlepic=11,200,200,,left]