Happy New Year!

As 2010 winds down, I want to thank those who have been reading my blog posts and learning about the Spring Framework in the process.  Since the beginning of July 2010, my site stats have jumped by a nice 12,173 views compared to 1,690 total views in the first half of 2010.  I haven’t posted anything in a while and I hope to post something new soon.  There’s a lot of new things that have come out in the Spring community, ripe for blogging about.  Just read Gordon Dickens blog and you’ll see lots of new things.

SpringOne 2GX

This year I attended SpringOne 2GX in Chicago.  What an amazing event.  It was nice to see the great advancements the Spring Framework is making.  I especially enjoyed some of the sessions by Keith Donald, Stefan Schmidt and Jeremy Grelle just to name a few.  I hope to attend SpringOne 2GX in 2011 to see even more innovation from the Spring team.

Closing out 2010

I hope you all have a Happy New Year!  I’m looking forward to what’s coming out for the Spring Framework in 2011, especially from the Roo team.  I’m eagerly awaiting Alan Stewart’s JSF 2.0 Roo addon.  Here’s a roundup of my most popular blog posts this year.

1. Tutorial: Spring MVC and Hibernate made simple with Annotations for beginners
   4,501 views
2. Tutorial: Spring Roo with Hibernate EntityManager plus JSONP for cross-domain AJAX
   4,128 views
3. Tutorial: Implementing a Servlet Filter for JSONP callback with Spring’s DelegatingFilterProxy
   1,971 views

A look at NetBeans and the Enclojure plugin for Clojure

I’ve been using Eclipse for a long time now and have grown very accustomed to it.  Even my new shiny Lotus Notes 8.5.1 is built on Eclipse and the Domino Designer 8.5.1 built on top of Eclipse has been extremely polished and enhanced since release 8.5.  Eclipse has pretty much everything I need and more.  The past couple days I’ve decided to to start learning Clojure having heard of it while reading posts on Howard Lewis Ship’s blog.  There are several IDE plugins under active development for the standard issue environments.  Naturally I installed the Eclipse plugin.  I haven’t fully tested it yet.  Tonight I found myself downloading NetBeans 6.8 for no apparent reason other than to see how the Clojure plugin for NetBeans looks.  The plugin is available on GitHub at http://github.com/EricThorsen/enclojure.  Not being an experienced Clojure developer, all I can say about the NetBeans plugin is WOW!  For me some of the most important parts of a new plugin for a programming language are, does it have code assist, does it have code completion, does it close braces/brackets etc.  The NetBeans plugin does all of that for Clojure and very nicely, but don’t get me wrong, so does the Eclipse plugin.  What I really liked about the NetBeans plugin is the ability to run your Clojure app in REPL right from within NetBeans and it’s quite easy.  Maybe it is in the Eclipse plugin too, but I haven’t tried it.

On a separate note, I find the NetBeans IDE to be a very polished looking environment.  With some of the extra windows minimized, it almost looks as though it was inspired by an Adobe interface.

SpringSource announces new Extension Project: Spring Surf

Yesterday after browsing to SpringSource.org, I was greeted with the announcement of Spring Surf, the new view framework for Spring MVC.  Although still in incubation status, it’s future might hold great things for a scripted view that it seems might work with various scripting languages.  I think I’m going to give it a try to get my feet wet in Groovy which appears to be on the supported languages list.

SpringSource in collaboration with Alfresco is excited to announce a new Spring Extension Project: Spring Surf. Spring Surf is a view composition framework for Spring MVC that plugs into your existing Spring applications. It provides a scriptable and content-centric approach to building web applications. You can drop Spring Surf right into your existing Spring web applications or you can begin building new Spring Surf applications using SpringSource Tool Suite or Spring Roo‘s command-line magic.

Adobe Flex first impression

JavaFX should have been my first choice being a Java developer

Today while browsing Manning.com for what books they’ve recently released, I stumbled upon “Hello Flex 4.”  Not to say I’ve bought this book, but decided I wanted to have a look at Adobe Flex.  Did some quick overviews of it and being a Java developer decided maybe JavaFX would be worth my time.  At first look JavaFX looked cool and the JavaFX Script did not seem very daunting.  A quick “Hello World!” in JavaFX was pretty straight forward with the JavaFX Eclipse plugin installed.  What JavaFX seemed to lack though was straight forward integration into a Maven webapp, specifically a Spring MVC webapp.  I had found a couple blog posts and articles that pointed me to a couple different JavaFX maven compilers, one on SourceForge at http://m2-javafxc.sourceforge.net and another at http://wiki.jfrog.org/confluence/display/JP/JavaFX+Maven+Plugin.  It just didn’t seem simple or much fun.  The other thing is being a realest, I figured most visitors to a website now are likely to have the Flash player installed, so I decided to give Adobe Flex a second look.

Adobe Flex round 2

My very first impression of Adobe Flex was before taking a look at JavaFX.  I saw the screencast at http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/media/flexapp which looked really cool.  At first I thought Flex applications could only be developed using Flex Builder which wasn’t free, but then discovered I could download the Flex SDK.  I downloaded the Flex 4 SDK.  After that I looked around for some Eclipse plugin and found the AXDT plugins.  Then following the documentation and using the code examples on AXDT’s website, I quickly created the examples in Eclipse in both ActionScript and MXML.  ActionScript resembles closely the Java syntax, so wasn’t too complicated.  MXML to me was pretty neat.  In the end all of this allowed me to compile either the ActionScript and MXML examples into SWF files that can be embedded in pretty well any web application.

Conclusion

This in no means has been an exhaustive depiction of Adobe Flex’s feature set, or was it meant to be a good comparison to JavaFX, or other competitors like Microsoft Silverlight which I didn’t even bother looking into since I’m not a fan of Microsoft.  All I can say is that even as a Java advocate, Adobe Flex seems pretty impressive and I’ve already thought of a few enterprise projects for the company I work for where it could be used in cool ways.