Trails seems to have stalled these days, but it looks like Grails might go somewhere now…

Oracle gets Groovy with open-source project | CNET News.com

Oracle said it will participate in Grails, an open-source project that seeks to make Java programmers more productive through a close tie-in to the Groovy scripting language. Grails is a project to create a development framework, a set of prewritten software components designed to speed Web-application creation using Groovy. The name Grails was inspired by Ruby on Rails, a productivity framework for another language called Ruby.

This may not seem like big news, but for the thousands of FreeBSD users, it’s huge.

FreeBSD Foundation Java Downloads

The FreeBSD Foundation has a license with Sun Microsystems to distribute FreeBSD binaries for the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and Java Development Kit (JDK). These implementations have been made possible through the hard work of the FreeBSD Java team as well as through donations to the FreeBSD Foundation that supported hardware, developer costs, and legal fees.

Joe McGlynn

We’re already hard at work on the next release of JBuilder, codenamed “Peloton”. At the same time, we’re working on Service Pack 1 for JBuilder 2006.

So get on to Quality Central and enter your bugs, and vote for bugs NOW, while they still have time to work on them.

Rubernate Overview

Rubernate is an object-oriented storage for Ruby objects based on relational database.

For all you Hibernate addicts…

Continuous Integration Server Feature Matrix – DamageControl – Confluence

Stumbled across this great comparison of continuous integration tools. If it stays up-to-date, this will be a great way of figuring out which tool works best for your next project.

Grails – Home

Grails aims to bring the “coding by convention” paradigm to Groovy. It’s an open-source web application framework that leverages the Groovy language and complements Java Web development. You can use Grails as a standalone development environment that hides all configuration details or integrate your Java business logic

It will be interesting to see where this project goes. My gut feel, without having looked deeply into either project, leads me to believe that Grails (based on a scripting language) stands a better chance of succeeding than Trails. I’d love to see someone compare the two projects.

java.net: Testing Java in an Object-Oriented Way

This article introduces a list of object-oriented testing methodologies to test your Java programs, implementing a few important design patterns, using the JUnit testing framework.

This article on testing is a little thin on concrete examples, but conceptually I can’t argue with it. Introducing testing on an architectural level is a brilliant idea.

Basic test driven development makes it very obvious when we’ve gone off the rails… if it is hard to test, then there is usually something wrong with my implementation or design. I expect that introducing the same concepts at the architectural level will have a similar effect.

java.net: Agile Legacies: Using Iterative Methods to Import Legacy Data

Indeed, importing legacy data is a crucial part of most software projects. It is also a task that rarely evokes a great deal of enthusiasm among developers. And yet it is of vital importance for the end user. These old databases often contain years of valuable business records that the user needs to access from the new application.

This is an interesting article. Since I’ve been working with Ruby for the past few months, I was reading this through my Ruby glasses ;-) and decided it was interesting to note that although Ruby on Rails developers tend to be focused on new development with new databases, there are built-in features of Rails that are particularly well suited to solving the problem of importing legacy data. ActiveRecord makes referencing existing data seem like a walk in the park. And the Migrations stuff is really tailor-made for the task of massaging databases and their contents into new forms.

The great part about this is that you can use Ruby to do it, because it’s usually a “one-shot” sort of task, and the code will not be an integral part of the production system, so who cares what language you use to accomplish this goal? So, if you are a Java programmer, and you’d like to take Ruby out for a spin in a “real world” kind of way, think of using it for your next legacy data migration task. Who knows? You might even have fun doing it…