I want no monuments

Following two posts on the echo2 forums, Matt Brooks has written a nice review about his experience using a stack made of Echo2, JBoss, EJB3 and ServiceMix ESB.

Matt’s app seems really cool. Its loading page is the cooooooolest thing ever seen so far in the ajax multiverse!

Taken from the architectural point of view, it’s a nice reading especially because I’ve heard too many “w00t!”s while I’m not aware of any good enterprise application (but Google’s, of course).

I haven’t looked for them actually, but I think I should have heard of them, at least from the javaposse guys, who are well aware of RIAs (as one of them is from Google and as they’ve interviewed the GWT team).

Am I wrong? Or blind? Or this ajax plane is actually taking too much time to take off?

By the way, even my two apps are going to be released in the next few months. But they won’t be public. Argh! I wanna go public!

On December, the 5th, I’ll have my very first public speech!! I’m very excited about that. I’m even worried, actually.

I’ve just completed a draft of the slide show. Although a very busy period, I’ll hope to have time to add some more info about the projects related to Echo2 such as HSE, the Extras and EchoPointNG.

So: do you have a dinner planned for the 5th of December? No? Do you want to learn something more about JSF (by Michele Sciabarrà) and Echo2? Do you like pizza? :)

Hurry up! Get the details!

On November the 11th, the Java team held a meeting.

References:

• agenda
• meeting log

Present developers

• betelgeuse (Petteri Räty)
• karltk (Karl Trygve Kalleberg)
• nichoj (Joshua Nichols)
• sanchan (Sandro Bonazzola)
• wltjr (William Thomson)

Present contributor

• ali_bush (Alistair Bush)
• fordfrog (Miroslav Šulc)
• fridrik (Federico Fissore)

Announcements
Most of you already knew that: the new java system is gone stable on all the archictures supported by the java team, ie x86, ppc, ppc64, amd64, and ia64

This year will probably end with two big news: Sun JDK 1.6 (ETA: December) and ANT 1.7.
Sun JDK is already packaged and available from the migrated-java-experimental-overlay. We have been using it for a couple of months and the transition from 5 to 6 is going to be smooth.
ANT 1.7 is currently managed by Caster (Vlastimil Babka), who set up the split-ant-overlay. Developers and contributors are invited to use it for testing purposes, particularly regarding

• how ant is now handling “source” and “target” attributes from javac task
• DEPEND, as new ebuild will depend on single needed tasks instead of ant-tasks

New contributors: ali_bush, fordfrog and fridrik recently joined the java team

The main portage tree is available for reading to anonymous users. The point here is the ability to create a patch against the tree (like bumping a package or adding a patch) and then send it to the appropriate herd, that will review and apply it. Get more info here.

Non-bin Azureus is gone stable on x86 and amd64. Thx to Betelgeuse

Topics
Migration and stabilization
There are about 195 packages that still need to be migrated to the new java system. While reminding everyone not to forget ARCH users, we agreed in filing a stabilization bug for every version bump we do. After a period of about 30 days, if no bugs are filed, the stabilization bug is filed and eventually the bumped package will be promoted to stable.

Staffing needs
Contributors were told by devs how to step up. This is summarized in the following steps:

1. start contributing
2. be asked to become a developer
3. be mentored by a developer
4. take quizzes
5. collaborate with the mentor to correct/improve/learn the answers to the quiz
6. submit the quizzes to the recruiter
7. have an irc meeting with him/her to elaborate
8. if you pass, start working as a developer

More info can be found here.

Plus, more contributors are welcome. So if you see people consistently contributing (bugs, irc, mailing list), report to nichoj.

QA
Many thoughts were said about QA. Starting from the idea of improving current tools, we ended by admitting it will require a full-time effort and by postponing the issue to the next summer, wrt the GSOC.

Also, wltjr proposed to throw away the “java” use flag and use a more generic “jni” use flag. Java packages with jni use flag set will compile even non-java code, while non-java packages will build java code, ie bindings.

Builds that auto detect the version of the JDK
Packages that “suffer” of this feature (particularly jdbc drivers) should build every single version they can: one mega-ebuild is currently the preferred way wrt to maintainability. wltjr will take an initial look at it.

More effective overlay
In order to improve the way we use overlays and contributors work, these steps have been set up:

1. open a bug for each ebuild/package in overlay by contributors with “InOverlay” in the keywords
2. update the Status Whiteboard field with the keywords “InProgress”, “NeedsReview”, “ReadyForPortage” accordingly

These steps will apply until the java-experimental-overlay will be completely migrated and therefor deleted. Then two new overlays will be created, java-experimental-overlay for things that are actually experimental and java-overlay for things ready to go into portage. The steps will then become:

1. work the ebuild/package into java-experimental-overlay
2. previous step 1
3. previous step 2
4. move the ebuild/package to the java-overlay when it’s ReadyForPortage

Plus, contributors are invited creating ChangeLog entries and metadata.xml files. ChangeLog entries could be managed by echangelog or by sunrise-commit

Project page lifting and project documentation
Project page should be lifted. Some ideas regards a “contributors” section, and sub projects sections like “J2EE”, “Netbeans”, “Eclipse” and “Tomcat”.
Having anonymous access to main cvs, contributors could send devs the patches related to the section they want added.

Fixing incongruities between actual eclasses APIs and related documentation should also be managed.

2007.0
New Gentoo release is going to see the light in February: next meeting agenda will have the apps we want to mark stable and to include onto the livecd.

Bugs
Java team has more than 200 bugs assigned. Devs and contributors are invited in keeping an eye open on them. Contributors can add java@g.o to “users to watch” field on bugzilla.

I’ve just committed the latest eclipse ebuild into Gentoo Java overlay.

It’s a revbump: not a new eclipse release actually but some days of work trying to get a complete and readable ebuild.

Check what’s changed on the overlay’s wiki.

You may update it by getting the ebuild here or by adding the migrated-java-experimental-overlay to your PORTDIR_OVERLAY variable.

Uhmm, this post is boring…