Bye bye blogger

This is the last post in blogger.com.
You can find my new blog here

Strategies for document based web services

I found a very interesting article on strategies for document based web services.

Sameer Tyagi:

To recap, the Document-Based Web Services pattern can be realized using the following eight strategies, each with its own advantages and disadvantages:

• Using XML in the SOAP body
• Starting with a Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
• Starting with Java code
• Using string in the SOAP body
• Using base64-encoded or raw bytes in the SOAP body
• Switching off data binding
• Using the xsd:any element in WSDL
• Using the xsd:anyType in WSDL
• Using an external Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to reference the business document
• Using message attachments in the SOAP message

Maven archetype for MyFaces

I found two usefull links that describe how a Maven archetype can be used to produce the initial directory structure for a MyFaces based project.

Links

• MyFaces Wiki - Building with Maven and,
• Matthias Wessendorf's Blog - maven2 Magics for MyFaces

Oracle SQL Developer

Oracle offers a new tool for coping with with its RDBMS; Oracle SQL Developer. Although, the tool supports only Oracle RDBMS, I found very usefull the tool compared to SQL*Plus.

The tool belongs to a new generation of Oralcle products that are based on java and have simplified installation processes (for example Oracle XE). So, the good news is that the tool does not require the installation of Oracle Client kit. The only requirement is the existence of a JRE 1.5.

The SQL Developer cannot be compared to full featured products, like TOAD, but I would highly recommended.

Free Maven 2 Book

A free book about Maven is available from Margere.

The good think is that the book does not mess with the legacy Maven 1 that differs very much from Maven 2.

Besides the first introductory chapters I found very useful chapter 4 that address the topic of building J2EE applications with maven. The chapters also provides many examples of using the profiling options of Maven2 with the cargo plugin, for deploying and testing J2EE applications into J2EE applications servers.

Unfortunately, the cargo plugin does not support JOnAS my favorite application server.

Java Generics - Stay away

The well known Bruce Eckel, has a nice article that criticizes the implementation of generics in java 5.

Personally, I totaly agree with the conclusion of Eckel that

"So generics are really autoboxing"

There is not a serious advantage by adopting java generics over simple interfaces.

spring-oxm - Why do we have to use another abstraction layer?

Java is known for its wealth of options when it comes to choose an API to manipulate XML, and XML Schema.

This wealth is both a bless and a curse. For sure, it is very good to have many options to choose from, since each API - JDOM, DOM4J, Xerces, JAXB, XMLBeans, Castor, Jixb, Aegis and many more – has its own merits and drawbacks.

But at the same time, this plethora is a nightmare for the one who has to take the decision which to choose.

Hopefully, to the rescue, comes a new API developed under the umbrella of spring framework the spring-oxm.

Spring Object-to-XML is a very small library that acts as a mediate between your program and the code that actually manipulates XML using a particular API.

Someone could argue “Why do we have to use another abstraction layer?”. Actually, you don’t have. Yet again, spring-oxm offers the same benefits as spring-dao, or commons-logging offer:

• Independence from actual implementation. Your main code establishes a contract with spring-oxm and not any particular XML API
• Ease to compare different implementation. Write your tests against spring-oxm, and just provide two different implementations.
• Low risk choice. Are you disappointed by one XML API? Go ahead a choose another. The rest of your application does not have to change.

Just to summarize, if you are confused about which XML API to choose adopt spring-oxm to minimize your headaches. You can find introductory material here.

Google Calendar - First impression

Google Calendar is very impressive, but there are some minor pitfalls:

• It does not yet support import of Outlook CSV files that contain non Latin characters. I tried to upload my Greek calendar using UTF8, Cp1253 and ISO-8858-7 encodings, but Google Calendar messes always the encoding.
• It does not yet support Greek user interface.
• It does not contain Greek holydays. Though I found and successfully imported a Greek Orthodox, and Greek Holidays calendar.

Besides these minor problems I found the new service of Google very promissing.

Firefox - Share your bookmarks across many computers

For those who use many computers and want to keep their bookmarks synchronized, there is the Foxmarks extension for Firefox.
It uses WebDAV in order to keep in sync your bookmarks across multiple computers.

Configuring Springframework, Hibernate and MyFaces

Recently I discorved a fantastic enty at Rick Hightower blog on how to configure Spring Framework, Hibernate3, and MyFaces.