Online Public Libraries: Google Books and now.. Europeana

I am sure that you know about Google Books: http://books.google.com/

Even if I truly believe that Google wants the good by publishing all this information for free - We all remember the sentence: "Don't be evil" that is part of the Google code of Conduct-. I think it is not a good idea to have only one service that provide access to the "world culture"... Competition is always good for consumer...

The French National Library (BNF) and some other public libraries (Hungarian, Portugal) have created a new site to offer a similar service in beta: http://www.europeana.eu. It is true that currently the list of books is really small compare to Google but I am inviting you to use both of then.

Tangosol is joing the Oracle family

During The Server Side Symposium in Vegas, Thomas Kurian announced that Oracle is acquiring Tangosol, during the keynote, Cameron Purdy (Tangosol's CEO) has demonstrated how cool Coherence can be, and they have presented how it could be used in the context of XTP (Extreme Transaction Processing). Soon more to come about this in the different technical side and blog of the Oracle's community.

• See Oracle and Tangosol page

Grails vs Rails Performance Benchmark

Graeme, the Grails Project Lead has published a very interesting benchmark of Grails versus Rails applications, that is available on the Grails wiki:

• Grails vs Rails Performance Benchmarking

I let you read and comment on the Wiki the results... Grails development team is open to comment and improvement of the bench to capture as much information as possible. It is also important to note that performances, productivity are very important when choosing a development environment; but something that is also key for enterprises, is the fact that Grails/Groovy "are" Java/J2EE based. This means that a Grails application is packaged, deployed, administered and monitored like any applications that already exist in the information system on J2EE application servers.

JavaEE 5 Features of OracleAS 10gR3

OracleAS 10g R3 (10.1.3.x) is a certified J2EE 1.4 container, but OracleAS provides already support to some of the features of the Java Enterprise Edition 5: JavaEE 5. One of the key driver of the new EE version was simplification of the development and deployment applications. Here is the list of the JavaEE 5 features that are supported in OracleAS 10gR3 that will simplify the development of applications (in comparison to a standard J2EE 1.x development):

• Java Persistence API (JPA) and EJB 3.0 (documention)
• Support of shared library at the EAR level (<library-directory> / applib). (documentation). This comes in addition to the OracleAS 10gR3 classloader framework that allows administrators to create, and version shared libraries that can be used into applications by referencing them in the deployment plan.
• Annotations Based Web Services (JSR181) that could be used for Java classes and EJB3 Session Beans (documentation)
• Referencing resources using annotations in the Web container: @EJB, @Resource, @Resources, @PostConstruct, @PreDestroy, @PersistenceUnit, @PersistenceContext, @WebServiceRef, @DeclaresRoles, @RunAs (documentation)

Hope that this small summary will give you the opportunity to test some of the features of OracleAS 10g.

Oracle donates Toplink to Eclipse

Oracle has announced yesterday during EclipseCon in Santa Clara (California) that it open-sources Oracle Toplink as part of the Eclipse Project.

The idea is to open source all the features of Toplink (ORM/JPA, OXM/JAXB, and EIS support), but also features that are currently under development and will be part of the Eclipse project:

• Service Data Objects (SDO) implementation and SDO Data Access Service (DAS) that leverages JPA for use with SDO.
• XR (XML-Relational) that provides a completely metadata driven approach to obtaining relational data as XML.
• DBWS which exposes XR as a web service. With DBWS, you can easily build web services that access relational data without any programming.

One part will be kept by Oracle, this is the "glue" code that is used for the integration with OracleAS that is probably not useful for anybody but Oracle.

For details check out the press release and the FAQ.

If you are at EclipseCon do not hesitate to visit the Oracle booth to learn more about this great news for the Java developers.

Netbeans : OC4J support available

It has been a long time that I did not look in the update center and development wiki of Netbeans. And I have been very pleased to see that it is possible now to register OC4J 10g as a server in Netbeans 5.5 (and 6.0). To add it in your environment just do a :

• Tools > Update Center
• Select "Netbeans Update Center Beta"
• Select OC4J 10g

You can then configure a new Server and run/stop the server from your IDE. You can follow the development of this plugin directly in the Netbeans Wiki OC4J Support page.