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How many times have we heard that LAMP or .NET is better than Java EE? There’s an interesting discussion about this going on over at The Server Side. I for one will be sticking with Java EE. I think frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, Struts, EJB3 are all things I wouldn’t like to give up. Java has made huge leaps forward in the last year or so, lets hope the momentum keeps going.

It seems that we are going to get much tighter integration with Struts and JSF in NetBeans 4.2. Geertjan describes whats going to be available in NetBeans 4.2. It looks as though Struts and JSF will be tightly integrated – the whole process of creating a new project using these technologiues can be described in 4 pictures! Its not difficult to create a Struts project in NetBeans 4.1, but little things like this make the IDE so much nicer.

Netbeans has announced a preview of their new CVS support. I don’t use CVS, I much prefer Subversion so this new release doesn’t interest me too much. However, according to the release notes: …it is critical for us to know what you think before we release the final version and move to integrating support for more versioning systems such as Subversion and MS SourceSafe! So, please can everyone using Netbeans and CVS give this a try and give feedback. Then it hopefully won’t be too long before we get a similar level of Subversion integration in Netbeans.

JBoss has announced that version 4.0.3 RC2 of the JBoss App Server has been released. Highlights include: Support for platform mbeans under Java5 Support for Tomcat GlobalNamingResources New startup parameters to control cluster partition and udp group Improved farm service Xerces J 2.7.0 JBoss Bean deployer (early access JBoss5 microkernel)

For those of us still using Struts, there’s a good tutorial on using Struts Validator over on developerWorks . This is worth a read if you’re new to Struts of haven’t used the Validator stuff before.

I’ve just found this linked to from the Hibernate home page. It looks kinda cool. Linguine Maps for Hibernate is an open-source utility that will automatically produce easy to read UML-style entity-relation diagrams from Hibernate mapping files.

I’ve just taken my first steps in EJB3 and started writing some small sample applications so that I can get up to speed on it. I’ve been doing J2EE for some time now so I thought I’d have a look at the new EJB 3 stuff and see how it differs. I’m a fan of JBoss, which provides a version of EJB3 on JBoss 4.0.3RC1. The EJB3 support can also be ported to run on JBoss 4.0.2. Installing JBoss with EJB3 support is a doddle. I used the webstart installer on the JBoss website and installation proceeded smoothly without any problems. During the installation, you are asked which configuration of JBoss you want (all, default, ejb3 etc.). Both the all and ejb3 configurations provide EJB3 support. So far, I’ve primarily been looking at Session beans. I’m impressed at the lack of verbose XML that needs to be written to deploy the beans (i.e. there was none!). The lack of boilerplate code required to develop these beens is very impressive, in fact my ant script was by far the most complex thing ...

Swing seems to be en vogue at the moment, whereas not long ago it was SWT that was fashionable. I’ve never developed with SWT before, but I’m finding that there’s less reason to do so now that before. JDK1.5 enhanced the Windows look and feel to make Java apps look more like Windows native apps. If you want to take it a step further, you can use something like the Plastic L&F which will give you excellent results. Taking it one step further again, Romain Guy explains how to get more from the Plastic L&F. I’ve no doubt you can get similar results with SWT, but is it worth it? I’d be interested in other peoples opinions. Do you develop with Swing or SWT?

I’ve just come across this tip over on devx.com listing JDBC drivers and their connection strings for many different database vendors. It may come in handy someday so I’ve bookmarked it here. I was surprised though that it doesn’t contain details of the jTDS driver for SQL Server.

There’s a lot of debate at the moment on the merits of GUI builders, in particular Matisse – the new GUI builder for NetBeans. I’ve heard people suggest that GUI builders shouldn’t be used and all user interfaces should be manually coded. I don’t really subscribe to this line of thought. I can’t imagine that any serious GUI is completely manually coded nowadays – thats the sort of think I used to do in the mid-90s developing Windows 3.1 software. Surely things have moved on a lot since then? When you’re considering GUI builders, I believe you have to think about how the “other side” (i.e. Microsoft) do things. Its impossible to deny that Visual Studio allows users to create fantastic looking GUIs in a fraction of the time that it takes to develop a similar Swing GUI. I’m not saying that you can’t develop professional looking GUIs in Swing (just take a look at IntelliJ IDEA for example), but that they take a lot longer to develop in Swing. I for one, am looking forward to Matisse. I...