Back with a not-so-weekly news update…
* Try out Windows 7 Beta in VirtualBox
… on Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris
* Ten examples of SOA at work, circa 2008
… interesting requirements/uses
… SOA projects add value even while budgets shrink
* Year in Review: Java development in 2009
… New directions for the Java platform
* Sun’s JDK7, OpenJDK & IcedTea: Disambiguation
… what’s coming (maybe)
Category: general, java, netbeans, open source, virtualbox
Posted by: Mike Wright on: January 16, 2009
In the Open ESB project (and its documentation, examples, wiki pages) there are too many references to .jar files where technically speaking the artifacts are actually misnamed zip files. Even some of the tooling file wizards default to looking for .jar file extension names for artifacts that the JSR-208 specification clearly describes as zip files.
This has lead to some confusion. One customer reasonably asked if he could just add an Open JBI Component .jar file to his classpath (no, since the component archives are actually zip files containing jbi.xml and implementation files).
When using some NetBeans-based tools, I always have to remember to change the file pattern filter from the inappropriate default *.jar to find a .zip file I’m trying to install or deploy.
Technically, jar files contain class files and can be added to a classpath. JBI archives (components and service assemblies) really should be (named as) zip files, since they almost never can be added to a classpath (I’ll leave it as an exercise how to make a JBI archive actually also usable on a classpath, but I haven’t seen a use-case for this yet).
JBI zip files usually contain nested archives (sometimes also misnamed as .jar files). In the case of a component installation archive, the nested files are, in fact, .jar files containing the actual component implementation. However, theoretically they could just contain class files, and these don’t have to be in the standard place for class files within a normal jar file.
For JBI Service Assemblies, the nested Service Unit archives are zip files, generally containing XML. However, the Service Units can contain anything in addition to the jbi.xml; the rest is specified to be “opaque” to the JBI management layer and only needs to make sense to the target component. (In rare cases, a Service Unit could contain classes or nested jar files, if it was being deployed to some JBI Binding or Engine that was provisioned somehow via compiled Java instead of XML.)
So, if you create a JBI artifact, try to remember to name it with a .zip file extension. Please 
Category: glassfish esb, jbi, netbeans, open-esb
Posted by: Mike Wright on: December 19, 2008
Some weekly SOA news:
Category: camel se, glassfish, glassfish esb, netbeans, open-esb
Posted by: Mike Wright on: November 21, 2008
From a recent JavaWorld article:
Category: glassfish, mysql, netbeans, open source
Posted by: Mike Wright on: November 21, 2008
| NetBeans 6.5 is out and it supports developing PHP5 applications |
Category: netbeans
Posted by: Mike Wright on: November 20, 2008
(trying to get back to summarizing some somewhat-SOA-related news each week)
Fuji Milestone 2 is available (watch the screencast demo)Category: glassfish, netbeans, open source, open-esb, project fuji
Posted by: Mike Wright on: October 24, 2008
From this week’s edition of the Netbeans Weekly Newsletter,
here are a couple of highlights:
- Under Projects:
“Project OpenESB is an Open Source project that is building an ESB that consists of both a runtime and a design time tooling based completely on NetBeans. In the last few years, OpenESB has made important contributions to the NetBeans IDE, for example, the WSDL editor, the CASA editor, the BPEL editor, and more. GlassFish ESB, the first milestone of a commercially supported binary distribution, is now available. The distribution includes NetBeans and adds extra components, such as JAXB based code seeding, a JCA wizard, and more, that are not available in the IDE’s standard downloads.”
You can also subscribe to the newsletter(s).
Category: glassfish esb, netbeans, open source, open-esb
Posted by: Mike Wright on: September 16, 2008