Back in September, when Google announced they were to make the Instantiations tool suite free for all, I thought things couldn't get better than this for Java developers. Well I was wrong, today Google trumped that announcement with their latest plan to open source both WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler. Google is donating the source and the IP for both of these former products to the open source community through the Eclipse Foundation, and creating two new Eclipse projects. All in all, this is a value of more than $5 million dollars worth of code and IP. For those unfamiliar with the products, WindowBuilder provides the best available Java GUI Designer available, integrated into Eclipse allowing you to build Swing, SWT, RCP and GWT interfaces. CodePro Profiler helps you to identify performance issues in your Java code. In answering why the projects have been donated, Google's answer is simple "because it’s the right thing to do. We received many emails after we made the former Instantiations products free, to make them open source and we think this is overall the most responsible thing we can do for the community. It's fantastic technology, and we see no reason to keep it inside Google. We can't wait to see what comes next. " The Eclipse Foundation’s Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich, states that, “this is clearly a significant new project announcement, and very good news for Java developers using Eclipse. It has been impressive to see the continued growth and popularity of WindowBuilder, as this product has always filled a much needed gap in the Eclipse offerings. We look forward to it appearing in an Eclipse release soon. We’re very pleased with Google’s generous support of Eclipse, and the Java developer community around the world.” Both WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler will become Eclipse projects in the first half of 2011. Once each one is set up as a project and available for download from the Eclipse site, the products will be accessible to use as open source code under the the standard Eclipse license. Eric Clayberg will manage the WindowBuilder project at the Eclipse Foundation and has already rallied more than a dozen volunteer committers. OnPositive will manage the CodePro Profiler project. Maybe you've had a vision for some cool features to add to WindowBuilder: now is your chance to work alongside the WindowBuilder developers to make it even better. Commercial support will be available for both projects. Genuitec will be providing the support for WindowBuilder, and OnPositive will be offering support for CodePro Profile.

There's only one weekend left until we get to EclipseCon 2009 - and I can't wait! You'll have already seen what talks I'm looking forward to. We'll have lots of coverage of the conference here at EclipseZone. Another really easy way to follow the conference is by using Twitter to follow EclipseCon people. All you need to do to find these people is head over to the EclipseCon Birds Nest. There's four different ways to partipate - as a standard follower, as a speaker, an exhibitor or an attendee. There's going to be a Twitter monitor in the lounge area for people to watch what people are saying about the conference. Twittervision - how cool is that?! Ian Skerrett is also planning a tweetup on Sunday night. Over the last few weeks I've become a Twitter addict myself - it's a great way to keep in touch with the latest goings on. (If you want to follow me, just go to my profile as dzonejames.) In other EclipseCon news, Sun Microsystems have become a Gold Sponsor for the conference. They will be showing their Eclipse support for JavaFX, GlassFish and Solaris. It's good to see Sun there. If you haven't registered yet, there's still time for advance registration, ending today. Make sure to use your DZone coupon to get 10% off, using the DZONE10 code. Otherwise you can register on site. So, if you want to stay in the loop for EclipseCon, become part of the Birds Nest , follow me around on Twitter and keep visiting EclipseZone.

Get ready for high quality video on the screens of your life. Sun has entered into a multi-year agreement with On2 Technologies, to provide immersive media and content on your JavaFX applications. "The JavaFX runtime environment is designed from the ground up to support high fidelity media, empowering content authors to deliver media-rich content and applications across all the screens of your life. On2 shares Sun's vision of driving video convergence across desktops and mobile devices and we look forward to working with On2 to deliver this capability as part of the JavaFX family of products," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software at Sun. RIAs written in JavaFX will be able to use the On2 video codecs from Fall 2008, at the same time as the 1.0 release of JavaFX desktop (an early access release is expected in July). We'll need to wait until Spring 2009 for JavaFX Mobile and JavaFX TV. The same high resolution video will run across all of these platforms. There's no doubt that JavaFX is in the spotlight for JavaONE 2008, and Sun seems intent on putting weight behind the technology so that it can rival the more established RIA offerings for Adobe and Microsoft. A new javafx.com site has been launched during the conference with tutorials, demos from the keynotes, downloads and getting started guides. Previously I've commented that the hype around JavaFX was too little, too late. The TrueMotion video codecs are a welcome and necessary addition to JavaFX. Perhaps the emphasis on JavaFX is worth it - after all, RIAs are the buzzword of the moment. Is this a sign of good things to come for JavaFX?

This Pet Catalog app explains a web application that uses JSF 2.0, Java EE 6, GlassFish and MySQL. I took this example GlassFish and MySQL, Part 2: Building a CRUD Web Application With Data Persistence and modified it to use some of the new features of JSF 2.0 and Java EE 6. Download the sample code Explanation of the usage of JSF 2.0 and Java EE 6 in a sample Store Catalog Application The image below shows the Catalog Listing page, which allows a user to page through a list of items in a store. JSF 2.0 Facelets XHTML instead of JSP For JSF 2.0, Facelets XHTML is the preferred way to declare JSF Web Pages. JSP is supported for backwards compatibility, but not all JSF 2.0 features will be available for views using JSP as their page declaration language. JSF 2.0 Facelets has some nice features like templating (similar in functionality to Tiles) and composite components, which I'm not going to discuss here but you can read about that in this article: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jsf2fu2/index.html and in this Tech Tip Composite UI Components in JSF 2.0. The Catalog application's resources JSF 2.0 standardizes how to define web resources. Resources are any artifacts that a component may need in order to be rendered properly -- images, CSS, or JavaScript files. With JSF 2.0 you put resources in a resources directory or a subdirectory. In your Facelets pages, you can access css files with the , javascript files with the , and images with the JSF tags. The list.xhtml uses the The Catalog application uses a resource bundle to contain the static text and error messages used by the Facelets pages. Putting messages in a resource bundle makes it easier to modify and internationalize your Application text. The messages are in a properties file in a java package directory. Title=Pet Catalog Next=Next Previous=Prev Name=Name The resource bundle is configured in the faces-config.xml File (you don't need any other configuration in the faces-config.xml for JSF 2.0, as explained later you no longer have to configure managed beans and navigation with XML). web.WebMessages msgs The List.xhtml facelets page uses a JSF dataTable component to display a list of catalog items in an html table. The dataTable component is useful when you want to show a set of results in a table. In a JavaServer Faces application, the UIData component (the superclass of dataTable) supports binding to a collection of data objects. It does the work of iterating over each record in the data source. The HTML dataTable renderer displays the data as an HTML table. In the list.xhtml web page the dataTable is defined as shown below: (Note: Red colors are for Java EE tags, annotations code, and Green is for my code or variables) The value attribute of a dataTable tag references the data to be included in the table. The var attribute specifies a name that is used by the components within the dataTable tag as an alias to the data referenced in the value attribute of dataTable. In the dataTable tag from the List.jsp page, the value attribute points to a list of catalog items. The var attribute points to a single item in that list. As the dataTable component iterates through the list, each reference to dataTableItem points to the current item in the list. JSF 2.0 Annotations instead of XML configuration The dataTable's value is bound to the items property of the catalog managed bean. With JSF 2.0 managed beans do not have to be configured in the faces-config.xml file, you annotate the managed beans instead as shown below: @ManagedBean @SessionScoped public class Catalog implements Serializable { By convention, the name of a managed bean is the same as the class name, with the first letter of the class name in lowercase. To specify a managed bean name you can use the name attribute of the ManagedBean annotation, like this: @ManagedBean(name = "Catalog"). This Catalog ManagedBean items property is defined as shown below: private List items = null; public List getItems() { if (items == null) { getPagingInfo(); items = getNextItems(pagingInfo.getBatchSize(), pagingInfo.getFirstItem()); } return items; } The getItems() method returns a List of item objects. The JSF dataTable, supports data binding to a collection of data objects. The dataTable object is modeled as a collection of row objects that can be accessed by a row index. The APIs provide mechanisms to position to a specified row index, and to retrieve an object that represents the data that corresponds to the current row index. The Item properties name, imagethumburl, and priceare displayed with the column component: The column tags represent columns of data in a dataTable component. While the dataTable component is iterating over the rows of data, it processes the UIColumn component associated with each column tag for each row in the table. The dataTable component iterates through the list of items (catalog.items) and displays the item (var="row") attribute value. Each time UIData iterates through the list of items, it renders one cell in each column. The dataTable and column tags use facet to represent parts of the table that are not repeated or updated. These include headers, footers, and captions. Java EE 6: JSF 2.0, EJB 3.1, and Java Persistence API (JPA) 2.0 The Catalog ManagedBean annotates the field private ItemFacade itemFacade; with @EJB , which causes an itemFacade EJB to be injected when the managed bean is instatiated. The Catalog getNextItems method calls the ItemFacade Stateless EJB which uses the Java Persistence API EntityManager Query object to return a list of items. @ManagedBean @SessionScoped public class Catalog implements Serializable { @EJB private ItemFacade itemFacade; public List getNextItems(int maxResults, int firstResult) { return itemFacade.findRange(maxResults, firstResult); } EJB 3.1 No-interface local client View With EJB 3.1, local EJBs do not have to a implement separate interface, that is, all public methods of the bean class are automatically exposed to the caller. Simplified Packaging With Java EE 6, EJBs can be directly packaged in a WAR file just like web components. The ItemFacade EJB uses the Java Persistence API EntityManager Query object to return a list of items. The ItemFacade EJB annotates the field private EntityManager em; with @PersistenceContext , which causes an entity manager to be injected when it is instatiated. @Stateless public class ItemFacade { @PersistenceContext(unitName = "catalogPU") private EntityManager em; public List findRange(int maxResults, int firstResult) { Query q = em.createQuery("select object(o) from Item as o"); q.setMaxResults(maxResults); q.setFirstResult(firstResult); return q.getResultList(); } The Java Persistence Query APIs are used to create and execute queries that can return a list of results. The JPA Query interface provides support for pagination via the setFirstResult() and setMaxResults() methods: q.setMaxResults(int maxResult) sets the maximum number of results to retrieve. q.setFirstResult(int startPosition) sets the position of the first result to retrieve. In the code below, we show the Item entity class which maps to the ITEM table that stores the item instances. This is a typical Java Persistence entity object. There are two requirements for an entity: annotating the class with an @Entity annotation. annotating the primary key identifier with @Id Because the fields name, description.... are basic mappings from the object fields to columns of the same name in the database table, they don't have to be annotated. The O/R relationships with Address and Product are also annotated. For more information on defining JPA entities see Pro EJB 3: Java Persistence API book. @Entity public class Item implements java.io.Serializable { @Id private Integer id; private String name; private String description; private String imageurl; private String imagethumburl; private BigDecimal price; @ManyToOne private Address address; @ManyToOne private Product product; public Item() { } public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } ... } The Catalog ManagedBean pages through the list of Items by maintaining the PagingInfo.firstItem and PagingInfo.batchSize attributes and passing these as parameters to the getNextItems(firstItem, batchSize) method. The catalog's scope is defined with the annotation @SessionScoped, a JSF Managedbean with session scope will be stored in the session meaning that the bean's properties will stay alive for the life of the Http Session. A JSF commandButton is used to provide a button to click on to display the next page of items. The commandButton tag is used to submit an action event to the application. This commandButton action attribute references the catalog Managed bean next() method which calculates the next page's first row number and returns a logical outcome String, which causes the list.xhtml page to display the next page's list . The catalog next method is defined as shown below: public String next() { if (firstItem + batchSize < itemCount()) { firstItem += batchSize; } return "list"; } JSF 2.0 Simplified Navigation The JavaServer Faces 2.0 NavigationHandler convention adds .xhtml to the logical outcome of the action method (in this example list) and loads that file, in this case, it loads the list .xhtml page after this method returns. If the action doesn't begin with a forward slash (/), JSF assumes that it's a relative path. You can specify an absolute path by adding the slash like this "/items/list". A JSF commandLink is used to provide a link to click on to display a page with the item details. This commandLink action attribute references The catalog showDetail() method: With JSF 2.0 you can now specify parameters in method expressions. The dataTable row object associated with the selected link is passed as a parameter in the "#{catalog.showDetail(row)}" method expression. The Catalog showDetail() method gets the item data from the input parameter, and returns a string which causes the detail.xhtml page to display the item details : public String showDetail(Item item) { this.item = item; return "detail"; } The JavaServer Faces NavigationHandler adds .xhtml to the logical outcome of the action, detail and loads that file. In this case, the JavaServer Faces implementation loads the detail.xhtml page after this method returns. The detail.xhtml uses the outputText component to display the catalog ManagedBean's item properties: GlassFish v3 is a lightweight server OSGi-based; Embedded API; RESTful admin API; Lightweight and fast startup; iterative development cycle "edit-save-refresh browser": Incremental compile of all JSF 2.0 artifacts when you save. Auto-deploy of all web or Java EE 6 artifacts Session retention: maintain sessions across re-deployments Conclusion This concludes the sample application which demonstrates a pet catalog web application which uses Java EE 6, GlassFish v3 and MySQL. Running the Sample Application Download and install NetBeans IDE 6.8 M1 with GlassFish v3 b57 (Glassfish v3 preview is Java EE 6 Preview) , and MySQL Community Server . Follow these instructions to set up a jdbc-driver for MySQL. (Normally this is already setup with Glassfish, but I got an errror message with Glassfish v3 b57 that it was missing) Download the sample code. Unzip the catalog.zip file which you downloaded, this will create a catalog directory with the project code. Create the Pet Catalog database In order to run the sample code you first have to create the Pet Catalog database and fill in the Item table. Start NetBeans IDE Ensure that GlassFish is registered in the NetBeans IDE, as follows: Click the Services tab in the NetBeans IDE. Expand the Servers node. You should see GlassFish v2 in the list of servers. If not, register GlassFish v2 as follows: Right-click the Servers node and select Add Server. This opens an Add Server Instance wizard. Select GlassFish v2 in the server list of the wizard and click the Next button. Enter the location information for the server and click the Next button. Enter the admin name and password and click the Finish button. Start the MySQL or Java DB database as follows: Click the Services tab in the NetBeans IDE. Expand the databases node. You should see the Java DB database in the list of databases. If you have installed the MySQL server database, you should also see the MySQL database in the list of databases.. Note: Java DB comes bundled with Netbeans, you can download MySQL separately. Right-mouse click on the Java DB or MySQL server database and select Start. If you installed MySQL, set the properties of the MySQL server database as follows: Right-click on the MySQL server database and select Properties. This opens the MySQL Server Properties dialog box, as shown in Figure 8. Figure 8. MySQL Server Basic Properties In the Basic Properties tab, enter the server host name and port number. The IDE specifies localhost as the default server host name and 3306 as the default server port number. Enter the administrator user name, if not displayed, and the administrator password -- the default administrator password is blank. Click the Admin Properties tab. Enter an appropriate path in the Path/URL to admin tool field. You can find the path by browsing to the location of a MySQL Administration application such as the MySQL Admin Tool. Enter an appropriate path in the Path to start command. You can find the path by browsing to the location of the MySQL start command. To find the start command, look for mysqld in the bin folder of the MySQL installation directory. Enter an appropriate path in the Path to stop command field. You can find the path by browsing to the location of the MySQL stop command. This is usually the path to mysqladmin in the bin folder of the MySQL installation directory. If the command is mysqladmin, in the Arguments field, type -u root stop to grant root permissions for stopping the server. The Admin Properties tab should look similar to Figure 9. Figure 9. MySQL Server Administration Properties Click the OK button. Right-click on the MySQL server or Java DB database and select Start. Create the petcatalog database as follows: Right-mouse click on the Java DB or MySQL server database and select Create Database. This will open a create Database window. Enter the database name catalog for Java DB or petcatalog for MySQL. For Java DB enter userid password app app as shown below: Click O.K. to accept the displayed settings. Create the tables in the catalog database as follows: Underneath Databases you should see a database connection for the petcatalog database. For example MySQL: or Java DB: Right-mouse click on the petcatalog connection and select Connect. Right-mouse click on the petcatalog connection and select Execute Command. This will open up a SQL command window. Copy the contents of the catalog.sql file in the catalog directory and paste the contents into the SQL command window, as shown in below: Click the Run SQL icon (Ctrl+Shift+E) above the SQL command window. Note: It is ok to see this: "Error code -1, SQL state 42Y55: 'DROP TABLE' cannot be performed on 'ITEM' because it does not exist. Line 2, column 1" . This just means you are deleting a table that does not exist. If you need to delete and recreate the tables you will not see this message the second time. View the data in the Pet Catalog database Item table as follows: Underneath Databases you should see a database connection for the petcatalog database. For example MySQL: or Java DB: If the database connection is broken like in the following diagram: Right-mouse click on the petcatalog connection and select Connect. as shown below: if prompted for a password, for MySQL leave it blank, for JavaDB enter user app password app. Expand the Tables node below the petcatalog database in the Services window. You should see the item table under the Tables node. You can expand the item table node to see the table columns, indexes, and any foreign keys, as shown in below : Figure 12. An Expanded Table Node You can view the contents of a table or column by right-clicking the table or column and selecting View Data as shown below: Figure 13. Viewing the Contents of a Table Follow these instructions to Create a JDBC Connection pool and JDBC resource. Name the pool mysql_petcatalog_rootPool and the jndi resource jdbc/petcatalog. Note: you do not have to create a JDBC connection pool and resource if you use the Netbeans wizard to generate JPA entities from database tables as described in this article GlassFish and MySQL, Part 2: Building a CRUD Web Application With Data Persistence. Open the catalog/setup/sun-resources.xml file and verify that the property values it specifies match those of the petcatalog database and jdbc resources you created. Edit the property values as necessary. Running the Sample solution: If you want to run the sample solution, you have to create the catalog database tables first as described above. Open the catalog project as follows: In NetBeans IDE, click Open Project in the File menu. This opens the Open Project dialog. Navigate in the Open Project dialog to the catalog directory and click the Open Project button. In response, the IDE opens the catalog project. You can view the logical structure of the project in the Projects window (Ctrl-1). Run the catalog by right-clicking on the catalog project in the Projects window and selecting Run Project. The NetBeans IDE compiles the application, deploys it on Glassfish, and brings up the default page in your browser. (at http://localhost:8080/catalog/). For more information see the following resources: A Sampling of EJB 3.1 Java EE 6 Technologies JSF 2.0 Home page Project Mojarra SDN JavaServer Faces Page JSF 2 fu, Part 1: Streamline Web application development Composite UI Components in JSF 2.0 Creating Your First Java EE 6 Application Roger Kitain's Blog (co-spec lead for JSF 2.0) Ed Burns's Blog (co-spec lead for JSF 2.0) Cay Horstmann's Blog: JSF 2.0 specifying parameters in method expressions JavaServer Faces 2.0 Ref Card Jim Driscoll's Blog Top reasons why GlassFish v3 is a lightweight server Beginning Java™ EE 6 Platform with GlassFish™ 3: From Novice to Professional Book

Finally, some very good news for the Java community. For those who were worried about the future of Java on OSX, don't worry: Apple have just announced that they will be working with Oracle on the OpenJDK project. Apple will contribute most of the key components, tools and technology required for Java SE 7 on Mac OS X. Following the announcement that Apple would not longer be maintaining further JDK updates on Mac OS X beyond the most recent update, this comes as very welcome news to Oracle: “We are excited to welcome Apple as a significant contributor in the growing OpenJDK community,” said Hasan Rizvi, Oracle’s senior vice president of Development. “The availability of Java on Mac OS X plays a key role in the cross-platform promise of the Java platform. The Java developer community can rest assured that the leading edge Java environment will continue to be available on Mac OS X in the future. Combined with last month’s announcement of IBM joining the OpenJDK, the project now has the backing of three of the biggest names in software.” And of course, Apple are happy to keep Java developers happy: “We’re delighted to be working with Oracle to insure that there continues to be a great version of Java on the Mac,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “The best way for our users to always have the most up to date and secure version of Java will be to get it directly from Oracle.” Apple also confirmed that Java SE 6 will continue to be available from Apple for Mac OS X Snow Leopard® and the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion. Java SE 7 and future versions of Java for Mac OS X will be available from Oracle. Henrick has already blogged about this, answering some of questions that are likely to be on developers minds: Q: When will JDK 7 be available for OSX? A: My expectation is that we will release on current supported platforms first, and that OSX support will follow later. The JDK 7 schedule can not easily accomodate large changes like the addition of a new platform. This is great news. Once again we're seeing Oracle listening to community comments, and it's good to see that recent pleas to Apple to contribute their work to the OpenJDK haven't fallen on deaf ears. Kudos to both companies for a continued committment to Java.

If you're developing for iOS, you're probably particularly interested in how iOS handles HTML5. Even if you love Flash, you might want to think about redirecting some of that affection, given today's news from Adobe. Good news for iOS developers, though: iOS 5 handles HTML5 really, really well. In fact, after firing a battery of HTML5 tests at iOS 5, Sencha concluded in no uncertain terms: Mobile Safari continues to hold the crown as the best mobile browser, providing the best HTML5 developer platform. That's a pretty ringing endorsement. HTML5 Canvas is particularly impressive. Sencha's testers report: In iOS 5, Canvas is between 5x – 8x faster. We tried two examples to see this work. First, the IE HTML5 Speed Reading Test. In iOS 4.x, the draw durations last roughly ~850ms, versus iOS 5, where they are a constant 10ms. Blaze.io agrees, as this video vividly demonstrates: iOS 5 also added support for Web Workers, which run JavaScript threads in the background in order to keep the main thread free. Sencha tested Web Workers on iOS, and their results came back fine. WebGL works too -- officially for iAds only, although there is a workaround (but the resulting app can't be listed in the app store). For more on these upgrades, consider the quick tabular overview of mobile HTML5 support at mobilehtml5.org; read Sencha's discussion of their test results, which concentrate on HTML5; or check out Blaze.io's full performance report, which addresses non-HTML5 improvements too.

In this article, we will discuss the advantages of using AWS and Terraform and provide an example of this collaboration for better understanding.

PrimeReact components can be easily used/integrated with React Hook Form. In this example, a register panel is simulated using React Hook Form.

Using Java and Marqeta, we’ll build out a fully functioning card payment system your users can use for payments anywhere that a debit or credit card is accepted.

In this article, the reader will learn about the difference between the get method and the load method in hibernate using get() and load().

Learn how to combine two or more streams of data together in real-time with a streaming database, run SQL queries and create a materialized view.

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Kubernetes security is more important than ever and should be top-of-mind for most teams. Walk through the latest in k8s security solutions from KubeCon 2023.

After a brief test-drive, IntelliJ IDEA has migrated its bugs and feature requests from JIRA to YouTrack, the new bug and issue tracker from JetBrains announced a few weeks ago. As usual, you can report IntelliJ IDEA bugs or feature requests to IDEA: Feedback, with two more projects available to view and comment: IDEA: Backlog and IDEA: Development. YouTrack, currently in 1.0 Beta stage, provides the following advantages over competition: Keyboard-centric approach lets you use easy shortcuts for major operations, including creating, modifying, and searching for issues. (Read more.) Query-based search with intelligent query completion helps you find (and save) any set of issues in seconds, across projects. (Read more.) Powerful commands enable you to batch-modify multiple selected issues, including fixing, specifying priority, types, writing comments etc. (Read more.) The following resources should help you get used to YouTrack: YouTrack features. YouTrack demos and documentation. YouTrack blog. YouTrack is also used to track issues in other JetBrains products, including TeamCity, dotTrace, MPS, and Web IDE. You can download YouTrack beta as a JAR or WAR distribution, and try it out in your own environment. YouTrack 1.0 final release is scheduled for autumn. Watch YouTrack blog for latest news and tips.

Back in August when Google acquired Instantiations, the speculation was that Google would possibly provide Instantiations GWT Designer as a free tool for all to use. Today, Google has made my day, because not only is GWT Designer relaunched as a free tool, but so are their three other core products. This is a huge day for Java developers, particularly those focussed on the desktop, as these tools are among the best of breed: as commercial tools they were worth the cost as they boosted productivity, but as free tools they are now an indispensible part of your software development workflow. The importance of this announcement can not be overstated. Firstly, Java developers now have a production quality UI builder for fast prototyping of their desktop application using either Swing, SWT or RCP, as well as GWT and XWT. I've used WindowBuilder in the past, and it's a great way to get started quickly. The code generated is very usable. There has been no convincing free solution available for this range of UI frameworks in the past: today that all changes. High quality static analysis of code is important for Java developers. Before you walk into a code review, it's always worth taking a scan over your code. Typically developers skip this, or else they use a free static analysis tool (e.g. FindBugs). Working CodePro AnalytiX into your development process, or just your nightly build, will help you identify bugs, and possible security issues, with your codebase earlier. Finally, automated UI testing is one of the most difficult areas to get right. While there are free solutions available, the commercial products have always seemed one step better. WindowTesterPro will allow you to automated tests for your Swing, SWT or RCP applications. It includes record and playback functionality to get you started with an automation test suite quickly. Here's a quick overview of the tools, now relaunched as Google products GWT Designer Powerful Eclipse-based development tools that enable Java developers to quickly create Ajax user interfaces using Google Web Toolkit (GWT) CodePro AnalytiX Comprehensive automated software code quality and security analysis tools to improve software quality, reliability, and maintainability WindowBuilder Pro Java graphical user interface designer for Swing, SWT, GWT, RCP, and XWT UI frameworks WindowTester Pro Test GUI interactions within Java client rich applications for the SWT and Swing UI frameworks Google plans to unify the products into the Google Plugin for Eclipse. You can download any of the tools from the GWT download page. Check out Google's announcement to find out more.

Last week I wrote a brief introduction to Kristof Degrave's ongoing, multi-stage IndexedDB tutorial. Judging by the number of reads, it looks like quite a few of you are interested in learning more about HTML5's IndexedDB. I'm following Kristof's tutorial anyway, so I might as well keep posting about it here. Today Kristof has posted his next IndexedDB tutorial -- Transactions -- and here's where IndexedDB begins to get exciting, where the work of creation and definition begins to pay off. We're preparing for actual data retrieval and manipulation, so we'll be creating a READ_WRITE transaction. At this point, if you're trying to understand IndexedDB formally as well as use it pragmatically, you might want to get more comfortable with W3C's conceptual treatment of transactions along with the formal object description, and maybe the IDBTransaction interface too. (For me, it especially helps to understand emerging tech like HTML5 a little more abstractly, just in case the standard takes a different turn than previously expected.) If you prefer learning by doing, here's how Kristof explains transactions: Today, I’ll handle the transaction subject. As said in previous posts, every request made to the database needs to be done in a transaction. So for every read or write request we need to create a new transaction. There for we need a database connection and 2 argument that we will pass to the transaction method. The post is, like his previous tutorials, quite straightforward -- painlessly showing you how to use what is potentially one of the most powerful features of HTML5. Take a look, create an IndexedDB transaction, and get ready to retrieve and manipulate data.

Well, after hubbub, including some here at DZone, the HTML5 element has returned. Paul Cotton, on behalf of the chairs of the working group, issued a revert request -- and his explanation is interesting: The Chairs have received multiple requests to revert change r6783. This change is related to bug 13240 [1] which was never sent to the HTML WG since it used a possibly incorrect Bugzilla component. Since WG members were NOT notified of the creation of this bug the Chairs have decided that this change should be subject to the Enhanced Change Control rules in the WG Decision Policy [2]: "Therefore during a pre-LC review, or during a Last Call, feature additions or removals should only be done with sufficient prior notice to the group, in the form of a bug, a WG decision, or an on-list discussion. This applies only to LC-track drafts and does not apply to drafts that may include material for future versions of HTML." We therefore ask for a revert of this change to be completed no later than the end of day on Tuesday 8th of November. If this revert is not complete by that time, we will instruct W3C staff to make this change. In other words: people don't like it, and we never really meant to approve, and we're not really sure how it got through in the first place. Now, the decision policy quoted sounds as though it would not invalidate the change, since the 'bug' was listed (and discussed) since July. I don't know what 'possibly incorrect Bugzilla component' means -- did they actually find something misconfigured in Bugzilla? -- but the vague hedging on 'possibly incorrect' raises my suspicions a bit. The meeting minutes don't help much (though it's neat to glimpse at how these conversations go). After the decision, a proposal to modify the reverted element was posted on the W3C wiki. This might map the near future of , so it's worth checking out for that reason alone -- though also, again, to help understand how HTML5-spec decisions are made. But however it happened, is back. So: did the W3C WG actually bow to popular outcry? or was there really just a bug in their bug-review system? I don't know, but I'm curious. What do you think? Update: Discussion has re-opened in the original bugpost since the revert command came through -- some deductive, some inductive. Results from the blekko web grep mentioned in the last comment might be very interesting...

So affirms Sencha, in the latest installment of their HTML5 developer scorecards series. Four-sentence version: After putting the Galaxy Nexus through our test wringer, we can say that Ice Cream Sandwich is a major step for the Android browser. However, it still falls short of iOS 5. It’s a solid browser for normal page browsing and it adds major new features that support most of the HTML5 spec. It also has taken a big step forward in correctness of rendering, which is a welcome change for people who want to push their mobile browsers to the limit. The most exciting new feature support, in Sencha's opinion: tons of CSS3, including the more nativey-slick, like animations, refletions, transformations, and transitions. Some specific missing features: Web Workers Web Sockets WebGL datetime and range input types overflow-scrolling Shared Workers The device Sencha used was a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which meant that some performance and zoom issues might tell you as much about the hardware as about the OS. But the biggest rendering improvement: rendering was simply correct. One way Ice Cream Sandwich beat iOS 5? Embedded inline HTML5 video. They actually played inline on the Galaxy Nexus, in Sencha's tests; they didn't on the iPad and iPhone running iOS 5. Here's Sencha's rather glowing closing summary: In summary, the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich are a major step forward for the Android platform. Feature by feature, HTML5 support has gotten much better, rendering has become more accurate, and performance has gotten much faster. Although still behind the current HTML5 gold standard of iOS5, Android 4.0 is night and day compared to previous versions. That 'night and day' is pretty strong, and definitely great news for HTML5 developers. If you're developing HTML5 apps for mobile, you should probably read the full report, which includes JavaScript performance numbers via SunSpider, Acid3 scores, and detailed results of Sencha's own touch-specific test suite.

Serious local database support is probably one of the coolest new features of Windows Phone 7.1(5). For the Windows Phone developer, it's not hard to create a local database, or add some columns, indexes or tables. But if you're using a SQL CE database then you are, after all, developing for a phone. And one of phones' most exciting powers isn't their hard drives -- it's their cameras. And it turns out that Mango makes storing camera photos -- or any image data for that matter -- pretty easy. To see how easy, look at this HowTo from Anton Swanevelder, posted a few days ago on his blog. Anton breaks SQL CE image-storage into three steps (the CRU in CRUD), and every step takes less than 20 lines. For example, you can create a column to store image data like this: [Column] public byte[] ItemImage { get { return _ItemImage; } set { if (_ItemImage != value) { _ItemImage = value; NotifyPropertyChanging("ItemImage"); NotifyPropertyChanged("ItemImage"); } } } The other two steps are more interesting (converting a camera stream to a storable byte array, then converting the byte array to a bitmap markup-able in XAML), but no more difficult. Read the full post for the full implementation.

Suffering a little whiplash after the rapid-fire removal and return of HTML5's element, I became curious about how the working groups at W3C actually, well, work. In particular, I noticed something about the wording of Steve Faulkner's original revert request: the editor of the HTML5 specification has made a change to the specification that is not supported for good reasons (see below, source: http://willyou.typewith.me/p/9Zl7I2dOKs) I therefore request a revert of this change http://html5.org/r/6783, so that it can be further discussed and decided within the consensus based HTML WG process. Emphasis (er, offset) added. The editor-vs.consensus theme chimed with an early, rather severe response to the original decision, calling Hickson's move 'self-contained'. Okay, everybody likes consensus, especially about standards. But the once-upon-a-time student of decision theory and commitment devices in me perks up skeptically at (even implicit) accusations of unilateralism. Lucky for me, an Invited Expert from the CSS Working Group at W3C has already posted a thorough treatment of how the CSS group works. The inside-view really gives a better feel for how people really act in the CSS group -- more than, for example, the official charter and process document of the HTML Working Group (which are very top-down, as presumably documents of this sort must be). CSS isn't HTML, of course. But CSS is now being developed in modules, rather than tangled, monolithic versions; and one of the differences between W3C and WHATWG (the 'other' HTML5 standards group) is that W3C is maintaining the kinda-versioned 'HTML5' designation, while WHATWG now treats HTML as a 'living standard' (complete with an exacting list of differences between the W3C and WHATWG specs). So versioning is a bit of a thorny point in both HTML(5) and CSS, and the issue of versioning must deeply affect any standards-regarding decision-making process. Indeed, the 'Inside View' grants modularization a whole page to itself. The full site goes into a lot of gritty details -- interesting for anyone interested in decision-making at this level, but especially for anyone involved in defining new web standards. But most of us aren't defining new web standards. So, for the rest of us, here's an outline of how the CSS Working Group does its thing, in tl;dr form: People and Roles: module editors (in charge of each module) CSS WG members (inner group of discussants) www-style contributors (all other discussants) Communication: mailing lists (technical discussions; high volume; members follow closely) telecons (1hr, once/wk; chair presides, scribe takes minutes) face-to-face meetings (3 full workdays, 3-4 times a year; half in USA, half split between Europe and Asia; one meeting takes place along with other W3C groups; addresses deepest/hardest/complexest issues) IRC (side-discussions during official telecons; unofficial chats) internal mailing list (mostly just planning meetings and other administrative tasks; any technical discussion is immediately moved to the public www-style list) www.w3.org (homepage with specs and blog) dev.w3.org (editor's draft specs, with revision history) wiki.csswg.org (lots of stuff, technical and administrative; general-purpose, like any good wiki) test.csswg.org (subdomain=giveaway) Making Decisions (usually somewhat informal; for this one read the full treatment) Modularization (first formulated during 2007 CSS-WG meeting in Beijing; page includes history and rationale) Spec Process: working draft (with numbered iterations, until Last Call Working Draft) candidate recommendation (calls for implementations; this usually means lots of implementations already exist) recommendation (=finished; arrived at only after two correct independent implementations exist) Sources of Innovation (full post discusses three different sources for CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders) Makes sense to me. The site is much more discursive than this outline summary -- and the discursiveness gives a better feel for what it's like to participate in the WG, so the read is pretty fascinating.