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I’ve just created Team Software Developers for the Einstein @ Home project. Einstein @ Home is described as … a program that uses your computer’s idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Einstein@Home is a World Year of Physics 2005 project supported by the American Physical Society (APS) and by a number of international organizations. If you’ve got some spare CPU cycles, why not join the team. All software developers are welcome to join the team if they want. You can get details on how to join the team at: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/team_display.php?teamid=6956

A recent poll on java.net is currently showing that out of 1488 votes, Hibernate is the most common persistence API with 30.2% of the votes, whereas JDBC only has 11.3% of the votes. Its interesting and encouraging to see the number of people using EJB3 persistence is 18.6% This is encouraging given the short time that EJB3 has been available and also the limited number of app servers that support EJB3. I’m surprised (but pleased) that the number of people using JDBC is relatively low. There is often the impression that JDBC is easier to develop with than ORM solutions such as Hibernate or EJB3 – this isn’t something I generally agree with. Hopefully as Java Enterprise Edition 5 gets more traction, the adoption of EJB3 will increase and developers will see the benefits it (and other ORM solutions) provide.

I’ve been trying to get the Subversion support working within NetBeans 5.5 on my Mac and have been getting the following error message when I try to access the repository: NetBeans Subversion support requires Subversion executable! Install Subversion 1.3 (http://subversion.tigris.org) or later, add it to PATH, test by running 'svn --version' from command line, and finally restart the IDE, please. I’ve got the subversion client installed and can access it correctly from a terminal – its just NetBeans that doesn’t seem to like it. After a bit of Googling, I came up with the answer. You need to edit theNetBeans.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/bin/netbeans file and add a line near the beginning to set the path to include the directory Subversion is installed to: PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin Restart NetBeans and the Subversion support works!

On Roman Strobl’s Blog , Roman provides a 7 minute flash presentation showing some of the features of the new Visual Web Pack (essentially Java Studio Creator functionality) for NetBeans. The demo shows how to visually configure page flows in JSF and how to do data binding to a table, including pagination. The demo is impressive and shows how the Java Studio Creator functionality is being moved into NetBeans. Java Studio Creator is a good IDE for generating web apps, but I feel it is let down by not supporting Java Enterprise Edition 5 functionality. This new Visual Web Pack will however give us the JSC functionality in NetBeans which has supported Java EE 5 for quite a while now. Thanks for the demo Roman. I’m looking forward ot the technical preview!

I’ve had quite a few issues with NetBeans Beta 2 running on my Mac. Occasionally (particularly when opening projects), NetBeans beta 2 presents a stack trace before completing an operation. I’ve just downloaded the new RC1 and I’m pleased to say these issues have now been fixed. According to the NetBeans Roadmap , we can expect the full release of 5.5 towards the end of this month.