Vaadin for Rapid Application Development with cool UI

• Stunning Web ApplicationsThe look and feel makes a difference. Vaadin comes with great-looking components and many customizable themes.
• Browser Independent Web ApplicationsBuilt on GWT-based widgets, Vaadin applications provide rich user experience, and they support all Ajax-capable browsers, with no plugins.
• Rapid Application DevelopmentWith Vaadin, you create web applications in minutes. A few lines of Java code and Vaadin takes care of the rest. No complex XML configurations, no JavaScript, no RPC.
• Secure Web ApplicationsThe proven server-side architecture ensures that your application code is hidden from the world.
• Maintainable ApplicationsPure Java gives you the power to build applications that can be easily extended and maintained for years to come.

After trying out few samples, Vaadin looks very promising if you are looking for quick web application development with cool UI. Additionally it has plugins for eclipse supporting drag and drop widgets.

Hate JSP?

Here is Thymeleaf

Thymeleaf is a Java library. It is an XML / XHTML / HTML5 template engine that can work both in web and non-web environments. It is better suited for serving XHTML/HTML5 at the view layer of web applications, but it can process any XML file even in offline environments.

It provides an optional module for integration with Spring MVC, so that you can use it as a complete substitute of JSP in your applications made with this technology, even with HTML5.

The main goal of Thymeleaf is to provide an elegant and well-formed way of creating templates. Its Standard and SpringStandard dialects allow you to create powerful natural templates, that can be correctly displayed by browsers and therefore work also as static prototypes. You can also extend Thymeleaf by developing your own dialects.

Get started here

How to access office 2007(OOXML) from Java

Apache POI is the solution you are looking for. The project made java developers life simple to read and write excel, word and powerpoint files. I have used Apache POI 3.1 which helped me to read Office 2003 documents.

When microsoft released office 2007 it used OOXML formats such as XLSX and DOCX, which limited POIs capabilities. The earlier versions of POI used OLE 2 Compound Document format, and now you can easily read or write excel, doc(97-2007).

The latest release POI 3.5 final came out in 28-September-09 and I am very eager to use it for my project and I swear u will be eager too.

P6Spy Open Source Framework to detect database performance bottlenecks in Java applications

What is P6Spy?

P6Spy is an open source framework for applications that intercept and optionally modify database statements. The P6Spy distribution includes the following modules:

1. P6Log. P6Log intercepts and logs the database statements of any application that uses JDBC. This application is particularly useful for developers to monitor the SQL statements produced by EJB servers, enabling the developer to write code that achieves maximum efficiency on the server. P6Spy is designed to be installed in minutes and requires no code changes.
2. P6Outage. P6Outage detects long-running statements that may be indicative of a database outage proble and will log any statement that surpasses the configurable time boundary during its execution. P6Outage was designed to minimize any logging performance penalty by logging only long running statements.

P6Spy includes installation instructions for JBoss, ATG, Orion, JOnAS, iPlanet, WebLogic, WebSphere, Resin and Tomcat.

What if you want it inside your favorite Eclipse IDE?

Don't worry there is an eclipse plugin for you here.

Debate on best framework for developing JEE applications

Frameworks, Frameworks everywhere. Listing frameworks for developing JEE applications:

1. Echo
2. Struts
3. RIFE
4. JPublish
5. Verge
6. Action Framework
7. Expresso
8. OpenEmcee
9. JWAA
10. Smile
11. Jeenius
12. Dovetail
13. Japple
14. Nacho
15. Click
16. Cocoon
17. SOFIA
18. Spring MVC
19. JATO
20. Niggle
21. Shocks
22. Bento
23. Turbine
24. Jaffa
25. MyFaces
26. JWarp
27. Cameleon
28. Helma
29. Cassandra
30. GWT
31. Millstone
32. Tapestry
33. Canyamo
34. Folium
35. Bishop
36. TeaServlet
37. jStatemachine
38. Scope
39. Jacquard
40. Chiba
41. Genie
42. JFormular
43. Dinamica
44. Baritus
45. OXF
46. WebWork
47. Maverick
48. Jucas
49. Barracuda
50. wingS
51. jZonic
52. Warfare
53. Macaw
54. JBanana
55. Melati
56. Xoplon
57. WebOnSwing
58. Stripes
59. JSF

May be more...

Introducing Wicket

JSP is by far the worst offender, allowing the embedding of Java code directly in web pages, but to some degree almost all of the frameworks from the list (except Tapestry) above introduce some kind of special syntax to your HTML code.

Special syntax is highly undesirable because it changes the nature of HTML from the kind of pure-and-simple HTML markup that web designers are familiar with, to some kind of special HTML. This special HTML can be more difficult to preview, edit and understand.

Wicket does not introduce any special syntax to HTML. Instead, it extends HTML in a standards-compliant way via a Wicket namespace that is fully compliant with the XHTML standard. This means that you can use Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft Front Page, Word, Adobe Go Live, or any other existing HTML editor to work on your web pages and Wicket components.

A comment on struts

Struts is great for small to medium size application. When the application gets big, especially when presentation logic gets complicated, it is really a big hassle to maintain the a big xml config file. Also a problem to maintain a big properties file for message used all over the application.

This URL discusses on struts and introduces shine.

Too much frameworks, my take will be do not ignore any. Though we may not able to master many.

Struts vs JSF

A good article on Struts vs JSF. http://www.simplica.com/strutsvsjsf.htm

Choosing a java web framework

A comparison presentation given in 2008 javaone conference. http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2008/pdf/TS-6457.pdf

This blog by Manoj maniraj has few more important points to be considered while picking your framework.

Just put in your views on the best framework.

Smooks a Java framework for processing XML and few non XML data

Smooks is a Java Framework/Engine for processing XML and non XML data (CSV, EDI etc).

Smooks can be used to:

• Perform a wide range of Data Transforms - XML to XML, CSV to XML, EDI to XML, XML to EDI, XML to CSV, Java to XML, Java to EDI, Java to CSV, Java to Java, XML to Java, EDI to Java etc.
• Populate a Java Object Model from a data source (CSV, EDI, XML, Java etc). Populated object models can be used as a transformation result itself, or can be used by (e.g.) Templating resources for generating XML or other character based results. Also supports Virtual Object Models (Maps and Lists of typed data), which can be used by EL and Templating functionality.
• Process huge messages (GBs) - Split, Transform and Route message fragments to JMS, File, Database etc destinations.
• Enrich a message with data from a Database, or other Datasources.
• Perform Extract Transform Load (ETL) operations by leveraging Smooks' Transformation, Routing and Persistence functionality.

Smooks supports both DOM and SAX processing models, but adds a more "code friendly" layer on top of them. It allows you to plug in your own "ContentHandler" implementations (written in Java or Groovy), or reuse the many existing handlers.

Smooks is an ideal fit as part of an overall Integration Solution

Hadoop and Distributed Computing at Yahoo!

Apache Hadoop* is an open source Java software framework for running data-intensive applications on large clusters of commodity hardware. Hadoop, which was invented by Doug Cutting (now a Yahoo! employee), is a top level Apache project. It relies on an active community of contributors from all over the world for its success.

Hadoop implements two important elements. The first is a computational paradigm called Map/Reduce, which takes an application and divides it into multiple fragments of work, each of which can be executed on any node in the cluster. The second is a distributed file system called HDFS. HDFS stores data on nodes in the cluster with the goal of providing greater bandwidth across the cluster.

Cewolf - Charting framework for web

Cewolf can be used inside a Servlet/JSP based web application to embed complex graphical charts of all kinds (e.g. line, pie, bar chart, plots, etc.) into a web page. Therefore it provides a full featured tag library to define all properties of the chart (colors, strokes, legend, etc.). Thus the JSP which embedds the chart is not polluted with any java code. Everything is described with XML conform tags.

Cewolf is based on JFreeChart and uses it's rendering engine to render the final chart image into the clients response stream. No files are created on server side. Everything is based on lightweight session objects and dynamic data analysis. Cewolf consists of one servlet which handles the chart rendering and a taglibrary which translates the chart definition included in the JSP into an HTML img tag which consults the rendering servlet for retrieval of the appropriate chart.

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