Cromoteca

The English part of my blog is mainly technical. If you can read Italian, check the Italian section for articles of other kind.

The news that Oracle sued Google brought me back to what I wrote more than year ago: I don't think that Oracle will play nicely with the open source community. Unfortunately I was right.

I agree with the need of an open source Java alliance, but the need I feel now is to express my disappointment in some way that Oracle can hear. I recall an article that suggested to delete Facebook accounts due to their privacy issues, so I thought that deleting my Oracle account(s) could be a good way of being heard. For this to work, though, many people should do the same. So I ask you to consider this option.

But there is an issue with this: I tried, but I was not able to get it done. It appears that there is no way to be deleted. Furthermore, I have more than one account, since I registered on both Oracle and Sun in the past. I sent an email to the support team, but I received an automated response that explains how to unsubscribe from newsletters.

So my questions are: does anyone know…

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GWT is primarily used in the Java world for obvious reasons: apart from being an excellent tool for creating RIAs (indeed it's my favorite one), it allows to develop both the server and the client part using a single language and a single IDE, and it even allows to share classes.

But GWT can be used with any server technology, and although those advantages do not apply anymore, it is an alternative that deserves serious consideration from developers of any server platform. I happen to be a GWT fan that works in a company that uses Microsoft products, so it seems obvious to me to try to combine both. After all, should we use Flex for example, we would still need to use two languages and two IDEs, so who cares. Same applies to all JavaScript toolkits and frameworks (please don't tell me that Visual Studio is a good JavaScript IDE: it even misses matching braces highlighting).

The main issue with an ASP.NET+GWT setup (as for any non-Java server part) is that one…

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Yesterday I read a post by Jonathan Schwartz about a Java App Store. Again, I was hit by negative feelings, although most comments on that page are positive. I was hoping to have the Java runtime installation as silent as possible, as Flash does, instead we're going towards a malware-like installation. Too bad. I know that it has nothing to do with server-side development, but I'm afraid that the Java reputation will only get worse between end users and companies. I really hope I'll be proven wrong.

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The news that Oracle has acquired Sun has been like an earthquake for my development attitude. I have a long relationship with Java, I was having my first development experiences at college with FORTRAN 77 when Java 1.0 was published. It was an exciting new piece of software that tought me OO programming and let me play with fun things like image retouching.

Java helped me in a lot of situations: while in every field you can find something better, Java can do them all at a good level: desktop apps, web apps, web client apps... all with a single language, IDE and platform.

When Java became open source I was extremely happy, although it was clear that it was some sort of desperate move. Finally Java would have been included in Linux distros and would have been rewarded as an open source dev tool. It happened to some extent, but now things look different. Yes, OpenJDK is there and nobody can cancel it, but I don't think that Oracle will play nicely with the open source…

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During the summer of 2004 I started writing my first web application: MeshCMS. I already had some background in JSP and a good knowledge of Java, but it was the first time for me to get the whole thing done. I decided to use what I already knew since I wanted to complete it in a short time: I was working as a freelance web designer/developer and I saw that many customers needed a CMS that was really easy to use. I tried many open source CMSes, but they were too complicated for end users.

It was a very formative experience: the application is still working and it is based on the original code. It has many of the issues that one could expect from such an application: JSPs contain Java code, the application flow is not clear and so on. This helped me to understand why web frameworks are a good thing, so I began another search: choosing a web framework.

I have a good knowledge of the HTTP request cycle, so an action framework should be OK, but all acition frameworks I tried…

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