[vox] What is you opinion on having a Java EE talk for March?

[Brian Lavender]

Let me preface the Java seems to be encumbered at times with verbosity.

System.out.println("Some text");

Or, the following, has got to make one wonder.

public static void main() {
}

Yet, with its strong typing, it can at times promote better safety. Yet,
I know the Python guys have a lot of good stuff going. 

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 06:10:05PM -0800, Eric Rasmussen wrote:
>    Let me preface this by saying that according to some web development
>    communities, Java's niche seems to be enterprise web development by
>    large teams. The reasons I hear (warning: possible stereotypes and
>    faulty assumptions ahead!) are:
>    1) The language itself is limited and results in a lot of boilerplate
>    code, requiring more development and maintenance time

I think with EJB 2.1 the whole thing to stubs and skeletons and
configuration files scared people off. EJB 3.1 is a whole lot easier. If
you are writing Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) and not having to focus on
all this outside infrastructure, life is a lot better. Today's measurment
of success usually measures whether or not you can focus on POJOs. Yet,
Context Dependency Injection (CDI) also brings a better separation
of concern.

>    2) Deployment requires powerful servers, tons of configuration, etc.

A little more overhead. But, if you all you want is a servlet container to
serve up your pages, jetty is relatively light weight. If you want to see
something cool, try the following:

$ sudo apt-get install maven2

Using the the following will create default web application that uses 
Wicket framework.

$ mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.wicket \
-DarchetypeArtifactId=wicket-archetype-quickstart \
-DarchetypeVersion=1.5.4 -DgroupId=com.mycompany \
-DartifactId=myproject -DarchetypeRepository=https://repository.apache.org/ \
-DinteractiveMode=false

$ cd myproject
$ mvn jetty:run

Point your browser to http://localhost:8080 . It's pretty lightweight. Not to mention,
if you send your source code to someone, they can run it too without having to grab
a whole bunch of jar dependencies. Pack up and send your project to a friend using
the following:

$ mvn clean
$ tar zcvf myproject.tgz myproject
$ ls -l myproject.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 brian brian 20K 2012-02-22 10:11 myproject.tgz



>    3) The apps use a lot of memory so many web hosts don't support it
>    It sounds like some of the libraries you've found might mitigate that
>    and give people a reason to rethink Ruby on Rails or Django for their
>    next app. In particular I'm really interested in how Java might benefit
>    lone developers and small teams, either in terms of increased
>    productivity or the security/stability/performance of the end product,
>    and maybe a basic rundown of how to affordably launch a Java app.

Unpredictable Garbage Collection can be a hinderance, yet ehcache is supposed
to do a good job at managing memory. I believe it uses a slab allocator so there
are less system calls to alloc and free. 

So, I would like to invite people to download Netbeans 7.1. Get the version that 
does either Java EE or "All". It has the application server, the database. You will
also need to have the OpenJDK installed. If not do a "sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk".
You can also use OpenJDK 7 if you like. 

Once you have downloaded OpenJDK, run it similar to what follows:

$ sh ./netbeans-7.1-ml.linux.sh

Now that you have it installed, create a new web project.

File->New Project

Select a web project:

Java Web     Web Application

Choose the defaults. Enter the name as SimpleWebApp

Once the project has been created, right click the project and select "Run". 

Voila, you have a running Java Web Application. Netbeans has some great tools at facilitating the
process. Netbeans should launch your web browser with the url referencing your application. It launched
it using the included GlassFish application server.

I worked through the book titled: 
Java EE 6 Development with NetBeans 7
by David R. Heffelfinger

It walks you through many of the features of creating Java EE Applications.

brian
-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture