We have a bevy of good links this week.  As usual, Brent and Ken put together their favorite web links on delicious.  Review them here:  delicious.com/developernews/4

Sponsors from this episode include SpringSource, Sun, and EngineYard.

Chariot Developer News episode #3 - February 1 2010

News Links:

You can follow all of our links on Delicious.  Head over to delicious.com/developernews/3 for the details.

Disclaimers:

The opinions expressed by Ken and Brent do not necessarily form policy decisions at Chariot, for the US State department, or in the Federation of Planets...

Ah, disclosure law.  Partners discussed in the podcast:

• SpringSource
• EngineYard (forgot it in the audio stream but we talked about Rails 3)
• Sun (discussing the Oracle merger)

Feedback:

• Brent Baxter can be reached via his blog: brentbaxter.com or twittered at @brentbaxter
• Ken Rimple can be reached at the all-encompassing rimple.com, or via @krimple
• Send us feedback publicly using #techcast on twitter, or leave a comment on the blog, or privately via email (techcastfeedback at chariotsolutions.com).

Upcoming Events:

• Philly Emerging Tech - early bird special, save $$$ before February 15!  
• Philadelphia Spring User Group Meeting - February 11th - at Chariot Solutions, 515 Pennsylvania Avenue, Suite 202, Fort Washington PA.  Details at the Philly Spring site.

On this techcast, Brian Sletten describes how the Semantic Web helps to define relationships between interconnected data, discusses the various tools and APIs, and how it is already being used, even without our knowledge.

Services like Friend of a Friend (FoaF), tools like RDFa, query tools like SPARQL, are discussed. If you don't know what the Semantic Web is or why it exists, Brian gives us a good overview and it's worth time listening to. Today, the US Government, wikipedia, and other systems are making data available via these mechanisms, as well as online retailers like Best Buy and Tesco.

Sponsor - Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise April 8-9, 2010. Still time to register for the early bird special and save! Details at phillyemergingtech.com

Developer NewsCast #2 - January 25, 2010 Hosts: Brent Baxter and Ken Rimple Our news links can be found at http://delicious.com/developernews/2 Disclosures related to show content: Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource, Sun and JBoss Partner.

For our 50th episode, I sat down with VMWare/SpringSource's Jeremy Grelle, an Open Source developer who works on the Spring WebFlow project, among others. Jeremy will be speaking about Spring's BlazeDS integration library when he comes to town for the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference in April. We talk about Spring 3.0, and about the following APIs: Spring MVC Spring WebFlow Spring Faces Spring JavaScript Spring's BlazeDS Integration library for Rich Flex applications Thanks to Jeremy for coming on the show and taking the time to talk to us.

Venkat Subramaniam is a widely acclaimed speaker, author, professor, and creator of Agile Developer, a mentoring and training company. 

He joined us on the techcast to talk about programming using dynamic languages.  He is well known for his talks and book on the Groovy language, has just published a book on Scala, and discusses his philosophy for applying languages in our talk.

Mr. Subramaniam is speaking at the 2010 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise show, to be held on April 8-9 in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  To register, head over to phillyemergingtech.com.

Links:

1. Venkat's web site - http://www.agiledeveloper.com
2. Examples of Testing with Groovy -  http://www.agiledeveloper.com/presentations/testingWithGroovy.zip
3. A great book by Venkat on Programming Groovy
4. Venkat's Scala Book
5. Java world Article on DSL

Music today was provided by FreePodcastThemes.com (free theme #3 is our opener) and by Music Alley.  The takeout music was "Jazz Breakfast" from "Gecko 3".  Warning - if you download it has a few explicit words mixed in, but it's got a great groove!  Artist Information.

This is our first Developer News podcast episode. We hope you like it. Links can be found by browsing our Delicious tags. Head over to www.delicious.com/developernews/1 for the links that made up today's show. Leave us feedback on twitter with #techcast, or email techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com.

Joe Gregorio, Google Developer Advocate and member of the Google App Engine team, is also working on Google Wave, a new collaborative environment that mixes concepts from IRC, Mail, IM, and document sharing.

1. APIs http://code.google.com/apis/wave/
2. Example bots:  builtins:  Linky automatically makes links of text typed in to the wave. 
3. For more examples, look at wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com
4. Developers can sign up for sandbox access here https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/
5. Non-Developers can request a preview account here https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/
6. No public client/server API yet, waveprotocol.org has links to wave protocol forum

Today's podcast features Jonas Bonér, the creator of the Akka framework.  If you've been listening to the podcast, especially to Episode #37 with Alex Miller on Java Concurrency, here is an alternative approach to providing scalability on the Java VM.

Akka features an implementation of Actors, Software Transactional Memory, and Transactors, a hybrid approach to working with STM inside of Actors themselves.  Jonas also provides a mechanism for writing these components inside of the Java language as well.

Actors are not a direct part of the Scala language. Rather, they are implemented as a library.  There are, in fact, at least three implementations.  Jonas Bonér's Akka framework includes actors as well as access to Software Transactional Memory.  In this episode, my colleague Jamie Allen and I interview Jonas to try to pull apart what Actors and Software Transactional Memory are, and how they can help developers write highly scalable, concurrent applications.

Links:

1. The Akka Mountain in Sweden (Akka is named after the mountain)
2. The Akka framework homepage is www.akkasource.org (or www.akkasource.com or even www.letitcrash.com)
3. A good blog entry about Akka 
4. The high level overview of Akka from the akkasource site
5. Jonas' home page and the Akka twitter handle

Today's interview features the Groovy luminary Guillaume LaForge.  Guiallume's work on improving the Groovy language paved the way for the innovative frameworks such as Grails and Griffon, and showed a whole generation of Java developers to stop worrying and love dynamic programming.

Guiallaume is the Groovy project lead, and is constantly improving the language.  One of his newer efforts is the App Engine framework Gaelyk.  Running on top of Groovy, this framework allows developers to build Google App Engine web sites with very little effort.  We talked to Guillaume about the project, and about his thoughts on Java 7 as well.  This week we took questions from the 'twitterverse', and I started using Google Wave to edit my show notes.   

Upcoming Groovy 1.7 features...

1. Support for anonymous inner classes (before suggested you use closures)
2. Providing an AST Builder, to make it easier to provide AST transformations (such as @Singleton, @Delegate).  AST transformations are compiled into bytecode.

Gaelyk - The Google App Engine framework

1. Groovlets, small groovy web scripts - just write a script!
2. Templates - separate Groovy code from view
3. Injects Google features into scripts, not abstract them too much
4. Sitemesh templating: Guillaume is researching sitemesh integration but likely not including it directly (providing instructions at some point)
5. Question asked by @wmacguyver on what Groovy
   
   1. DataStore was easy to wrap with a thin veneer - is hoping to more groovify and add a DSL around it
   2. Mail - added ONE method to enrich base class to make it eaiser to use from scripting
   3. Route support in 0.32 - was more work but not complex to do...
6. Asked about what projects running in Gaelyk - early days... but check out groovyconsole.appspot.com - a way of executing Groovy code online and sharing snippets.  Written by Guillaume.  Another one out there is a javascript toolkit for writing iphone web apps iui - demo app is built on Gaelyk (no link avaialble)
7. Also hosted on Gaelyk:  Gaelyk project itself
8. Community feedback - will drive some enhancements, obviously Guillaume is very committed to Groovy language too!
9. Users have become contributors - submitting suggested changes / patches, these are very welcome.
10. Future feature:   Querying support on deck potentially for datastore, simple SQL queries don't work on a NO-SQL database.

Question from twitter user @HamletDRC: @techcast Which JDK7 feature will effect Groovy the most: Closures, Jigsaw, or something else? (question for @glaforge)

Java 1.7 Closures -

1. The working document - mentions dynamic interfaces for closures, groovyc compiler could create same interfaces under the hood - could be interoperable POTENTIALLY...
2. Could we pass groovy closures to a java class?  No implementation yet, so we need to see how languages work together...
3. Java closures - cannot access non-final vars, etc... Shouldn't replace Groovy closures with Java closures...

Jigsaw (JDK modularity)

1. Interesting to investigate.  Would be nice to modularize Groovy a bit - maybe pull pieces into modules (groovlets, etc)... OSGi is an option as well, need to evaluate. 

Thanks also to lucaxtex for his tweet: lucastex @glaforge incredible work on #gaelyk UrlRoutes! This is getting sweeter each day :)

Ben Alex carved out some time to talk to me about the SpringSource Roo project, a very interesting and different take on Convention over Configuration Frameworks.

All of the major prior frameworks seem to use dynamic and meta-programming tricks to get work done.  Ben's team focused on taking advantage of the Java platform, and hence Roo is a fast, java-and-AOP solution for getting things done using existing APIs like JPA and Spring's APIs.  Applications are built using a command-line shell (even with code completion, just hit tab!) but in the end, they are just maven-based Spring projects.

You can find out more about Roo itself by visiting
www.springsource.org/roo

Mentioned in the podcast is the book "The Humane Interface" by Jeff Raskin.  Ben says that reading that book helped him form the basis for his ideas about Roo.

Ben Alex can be reached via twitter as @benalexau, and the #roo hashtag gets quite a workout.  We also suggest visiting the forums, as JIRA issues posted there are generally answered promptly. 

Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource education and consulting partner.

Today's guest is Manik Surtani, from the JBoss Infinispan project. 

Infinispan is a data grid project that grew out of JBoss Cache, and is able to dynamically ramp up and down cache nodes at will.  Manik discusses the various features of the engine, including querying, monitoring, scalability, and more.

Visit the Infinispan project site at www.jboss.org/infinispan

Infinispan tweets on the @Infinispan username, and you can watch all tweets related to Infinispan at #infinispan. 

If you are in Antwerp, Belgium attending DEVOXX '09, head on over to the announcement page and register with this URL.

JBoss is a Chariot Solutions partner.

A recap of the events of the last two days of SpringOne, with Brent Baxter and Dmitry Sklyut. Show notes will be available soon. Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource partner.

Gordon Dickens is a consultant and trainer with Chariot Solutions. We caught just before the wrap-up on Thursday to see Gordon's impressions (ask him to do Charlie Chaplain)… Gordon discusses Spring 3.0 & Java 6, JPA 2 support, Spring Integration, Spring Roo, Grails, and more. Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource consulting and training partner.

Here is another perspective on SpringOne from Chariot Solutions' Brent Baxter.