From PC World and other sources…

SpringSource just purchased G2One, the company backing Groovy and Grails. I think this is a great, if somewhat expected, move, for several reasons:

First, G2One is giving SpringSource the agile development platform it needs to stay competitive with other Java-based rapid application platforms, such as JBoss Seam.

The Seam framework seems to be geared toward building applications rapidly, gluing together JSF front-end web applications with back-end EJB, JPA and Hibernate. From my limited research, it seems to do a pretty good job at simplifying JSF and at gluing together components into a simple, easy to access context. However, Seam still generates lots of descriptors, and is more heavyweight when it comes to deployment (you generally should deploy in a full container such as JBoss). You could argue that Seam, while building more heavyweight components, still runs the standard Java EE component stack.

Grails is a tremendously productive platform. You can build applications using Groovy, taking advantage of the dynamic typing and closures, as well as the fantastic GORM relational mapping tool (which is backed by Hibernate). The front-end supports scaffolding, so that you can dynamically generate prototype web pages for CRUD operations, all while validating and imporoving your domain model.

Reading through the Merger FAQ, it appears that G2One users will be able to gain support by purchasing a SpringSource license, SpringSource / Covalent will now help maintain / enhance Grails, and that they will keep the framework free via the Apache Software License.

This will be a huge leg up for the Grails platform and the Groovy community. I’m looking forward to seeing more Grails opportunities in the future.

I’ve just released the Chariot Solutions Fall Forecast, Computing Among the Clouds Panel Discussion on the Tech Cast. Join me, Chris Cera, Chris Richardson, Kortina and Toby DiPasquale as we discuss Amazon, Google, and Cloud Computing in general.

Take a listen; the blog page is http://chariottechcast.libsyn.org/. The panel discussion is Episode 19 (click to download the MP3). You may subscribe to the RSS Feed here.

Enjoy!

Rob Harrop from SpringSource presented a talk at the Philadelphia Spring User Group last night entitled “Getting Started with SpringSource dm Server”.

Rob has a good set of resources on the main page, and the presentation is here.

If you’re interested in the 2008 Chariot Solutions Fall Forecast, Computing Among the Clouds Conference, you may view the website at www.cloudconeast.com or view my informative pages:

• My Fall Forecast Information Page
• The Fall Forecast Panel Discussion Summary Page - I’ll update that after the show with questions/answers, key links, etc..

Not that I’m a big .NET fan, but I read through the Mono 2.0 release article at Ars Technica and I’m intruiged. I’m a mac guy, so the 2.0 beta isn’t out yet. However, they do have a 780 MB VMWare instance, running OpenSUSE with the Mono 2.0 toolkit installed.

I’m downloading it and will kick a few tires. If I find anything particularly interesting I’ll update the blog.

Note: I’m updating this article’s title. Rod had noted it’s not a licensing change, rather a distribution change. I made the change to my post text, but not the URL or the article title.

Read the updated SpringSource distribution decision on Rod Johnson’s Blog Page. This is a change to a recent policy decision by SpringSource to provide updates for 3 months after a new major/minor release.

The change provides for releases of builds to the open source community until a new major/minor version is delivered. For example, the current 2.5.5 release would be revved to 2.5.6 (based on Rod’s information) and once a 3.0 release is provided, the 2.5.x line would be provided but not updated (unless your organization is a SpringSource licensee under support contract).

This is a fair agreement, as open source teams can now continue building applications based on Spring and decide when they are ready to update to a newer version of the software, without worrying about purchasing support. Concordant with this change are upcoming licensing models for small business and systems integrators.

This is the first in a series of articles on Google Guice. I’ve been working with Chariot Architect Lyle Anderson, who has done a lot of research on wiring together an application using this Inversion of Control framework.

Overview

Guice is an annotation-driven IoC framework, meaning that, once bootstrapped, Guice will inject classes based on annotated code, rather than XML files. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, so I’m not espousing either one, but if you’re into XML-driven configuration, you should probably look at Spring or another XML-based platform.

A simple Maven build

To start building Guice, you need to construct a build file. I use Maven for much of my development, so I started with a very thin build file. An excerpt of the maven build file:
(more…)

I’ve just edited and posted a podcast with Dan Diephouse of MuleSource on the Chariot Tech Cast site. We talk about SOA, specifically Apache XFire, CxF, and MuleSource’s Mule. We also discuss REST -vs- the WS-* model.

You can listen to the podcast here or view the show notes here.

Enjoy,

Ken

It’s been a busy month for the Amazon Web Services teams. In reading the October newsletter, I’m amazed at how much they have added recently:

• Ready to go Oracle AMI Images
• Upcoming support for Microsoft SQL Server
• Upcoming support for Windows Server
• Recent addition of permanent storage volumes with Amazon Elastic Block Store

If I had more time, I’d become proficient in all of these technologies. However, you and I can both benefit by meeting and listening to Amazon’s Jeff Barr at our Fall Forecast Cloud Conference (shameless plug) held on October 17th in Malvern, PA. I’m wondering what Google has up their sleeves (they are there too!). Register now, time is getting short!

Chariot Solutions is sponsoring a conference on Cloud Computing on Friday, October 17th at the Penn State Great Valley campus.

We have some big names attending:

• Jeff Barr of Amazon.com speaking about Amazon’s EC2 and S3 Cloud Computing platform
• Joe Gregorio and Johnathan Rochelle of Google, talking about Google App Engine and Google Spreadsheets
• Justin McCarthy and Britt Crawford of Cafe Press, the developers of HiveDB, a cloud-capable database platform
• Prasaad Chakka of Facebook, speaking about data warehousing in the cloud with Hive
• Chris Richardson, author of “POJOs in Action” and developer of CloudTools, a mechanism for deploying Java and Groovy applications in the cloud
• Ezra Zygmuntowicz of Engine Yard, a Rubyist, developer of MERB (a high performance alternative to Ruby on Rails) and author of Vertebra, a cloud computing platform

There are several more sessions, including an hour-long panel talk hosted by yours truly on using Amazon and other cloud platforms with local experts Toby DiPasquale, Chis Cera, and Andrew Kortina. We are also in talks with Microsoft about their attendance, and they would like to get the word out on their new Windows Cloud Computing platform. Stay tuned!

If you’re interested, the web site is http://www.cloudconeast.com. I hope to see you there!