ApacheCon Europe 2009 community meetup experiences
In this guest post, Minze Tolsma, software developer at Capgemini shares his experiences attending the ApacheCon community meetups.
This year I went to the ApacheCon community meetups. There were several, but I chose to attend the Maven and the Wicket meetup. I made some short notes on the most interesting things.
Monday 23-03-2009: Maven
The meetup on Maven was about new features and new projects.
Eclipse Integration
The community is working on a new tool for Eclipse Integration called Eclipse IAM (Integration for Apache Maven). The plugin aims at simplicity and will bring the best Eclipse integration for what Maven offers. It will integrate with JDT and WTP. The following features will be in the package:
- Direct project import with a POM. Instead of using the Eclipse archetype.
- You can setup projects in Eclipse by using predefined archetypes.
- You can configure autobuilds so building isn’t annoying.
- There will be a FormBased POM editor, just like you are used to in Eclipse.
- Dependency search
- Dependency management
- Dependency graphing and analysis
Eclipse IAM will be worth looking at, it can be found at http://www.eclipse.org/iam/.
Maven 3.0 new features
The community is working on Maven 3.0. Some new features:
- Embeddable, so it will be faster
- Some improvements to make it easier to use with the repository
- New transport mechanism for simultaneous downloads.
Eclipse 3.0 projectpage: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Maven+3.0.x
After this two subjects and some live demos there was an open discussion. Because it was late in the evening I left. One thing I wrote down is that SourceSense made an Alfresco archetype for Maven.
Tuesday 24-03-2009: Wicket
The Wicket meetup was quite different in comparison with the Wicket meeting. There where several presentations about testing, Scala and Wicket, Wicket and DB4O.
JDave
For testing nothing was really new… Except the following framework for Behaviour Driven Development: JDave. More info on: http://www.jdave.org/.
Presentation of the ApacheCon and examples on: http://www.jdave.org/bdd-wicket/.
DB4O
DB4O is a Object Database for Java and .NET shipped with two different licenses. More detailed information about DB4O can be found on the DB4O website.
You can look at DB4O as a large factory (like the Factory design pattern (GoF)) just for storage. It is a good practice to use some XML storage together with DB4O. For this you can use XStream. Using XML for storage together with object storage offers you a good backup mechanism.
Some disadvantages of DB4O are:
- When data is corrupt there are strange exceptions.
- Version Management for the objects is hard to do.
Scala and Wicket
The presentation about Scala and Wicket was really a hands-on presentation. The slides, code examples and handouts can be found at http://stuq.nl/weblog/2009-02-04/download-the-basic-and-wicket-scala-talk-materials. Just try it and get introduced to the concepts of functional programming using the JVM and Wicket.
After all I had two nice evenings and learned a lot. I hope this article gives you some nice and hopefully new useful information!
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