thejavajar

Last night I got to spend a little time with a book I will be reviewing, Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development. I had a few other things going on last night, but I read through the table of contents and the preface to get an idea of what to expect. I think that Spring Web Flow is a great technology and I look forward to getting more intimate with the subject. I am not familiar with the authors, Sven Lüppken and Markus Stäuble, but I have read a little about them at the Packt Publishing Web site and I am excited to see how they present a great technology like Spring Web Flow 2. Chapter 4 is available as a sample chapter along with the code from the book and a few other resources at the publisher’s Web site.

I am proud to say that axiomaticIT.com and axiomaticIT.org are now officially running on Grails, Tomcat and MySQL. It took about 2-3 hours to create and test this simple Grails application locally and then a few hours to get everything deployed and configured with Tomcat and MySQL on the server. The application is not too complex, but it does what it needs to do and I only spent a few evenings putting it all together. I basically took a small static site and made it dynamic so content could be updated a bit easier. Grails provided the productivity, no doubt about it.

On March 31st, 2009 I discussed Spring’s dynamic language support with a focus on Groovy and JRuby at the Tampa JUG. There were quite a few people in attendance who were interested in leveraging the power and simplicity of Spring and Groovy. The presentation material can be found here and the demo Web application can be found here. Thanks to all who attended, the Tampa JUG’s sponsors GCA and Hudson and Vladimir Vivien.

Although many people believe that IBM and Sun Microsystems are synonymous with Java, especially in the corporate environment, I do believe that there is a need for keeping things separate. The concept is somewhat similar to the separation of church and state here in the United States. On one side, we have the belief and ability to make changes and foster ideas to keep things open and less constrained. Then on the other side, we have walls and boundaries that limit when and where we can go. We don’t have to mix our beliefs with every aspect of what we do and we surely do not want our limitations to constrain our ideology and options. I appreciate what each company does within their own space but I am a bit weary about IBM purchasing Sun.