Oh No! More Ajax

Ok, now things are starting to become ridicule. Ajax this, Ajax that... everything has to be Ajax-enabled to be considered cool. What else can they think of ? An Ajax operating system ? Well...yes :)
Welcome to the wonderful world of AjaxOS, a place where every file is free... I know I'm being a little sarcastic...but just hearing the name sounds a little silly, to say the least. But I don't blame them. At this time, the word sells, so it's a perfect way of getting attention.
Anyway, this new operating system is in fact based on the well known Linspire Linux distribution. What they did was to integrate web (ajax enabled web) applications into the desktop. As cited on their site:

By seamlessly integrating the power of web based applications with Linspire, ajaxOS recognizes any compatible file (doc, svg, odf, txt, xls, etc...) and launches the most up-to-date AJAX software from a Firefox browser.

Actually it can be a good idea if it works well. I'm not saying this will be the future, but it's an alternative that has a few advantages, like a small installation or the ability to open any file format without having to install first the corresponding viewer/player. In some cases, this might be useful, like public-access computers as it reduces configuration and maintenance effort drastically, and may even provide a better service (public-access computers don't usually have all the software one might need at some time).
Anyway, it's still not availalable yet. Let's wait and see...

Ajax toolkits

Well, it appears Ajax is here to stay. I've already used some Ajax-like features in some projects but nothing too big yet. The thing that I like less in Ajax is JavaScript....yes, I know that without it, it's not Ajax :)
However, my gripe with JavaScript is not unique...
Recently I discovered two new frameworks for dealing with Ajax and both of them minimize JavaScript code to zero! At least, from the developers point of view. These are Google Web Toolkit and ZK. Both of them are Java frameworks, and they hide all the JavaScript away from the developer. The idea is to create an event-driven framework filled with rich GUI widgets that resemble desktop apps. The thing I liked in both frameworks is how Ajax is put inside the framework and away from the developer. It's not a framework to build Ajax, it's a framework to build rich web interfaces, that is powered on the inside by Ajax. How is this done ?
In these kind of applications there's three parts: client-side code, server-side code and the glue to bind them. Client-side code has to be JavaScript (along with html, CSS, etc) for the browser to interpret. Server-side code can be in almost any language, but in this case, it's Java. The third and the hardest to accomplish is the communication between the previous two. Ajax provided us with a way to create that communication, but coding it by hand is complicated and troublesome (although interesting to learn). What both frameworks provides us to simplify these tasks are:
First, they provide a way of building the web interface that is more similar to the way we build desktop apps. They both provide a rich set of graphical widgets, typical of desktop apps (of course, inside, this is translated into something the browser understands ;)). Second, and more importantly, all communication to the server-side is done automatically and transparently. From the point of view of interface design, you layout widgets that have events. From the point of view of the server, you have a simple Java API that handles events. Everything in between is given by the frameworks and executed automatically. This way, server code is like a traditional desktop app: event-driven.
Despite its similarities, GWT and ZK implement this idea quite differently. In GWT you do everything in Java, even specifying the layout and widgets. But instead of compiling your java files with good old javac, you use a compiler provided by GWT. This compiler will translate the java code you happily wrote into JavaScript. This is basically creating JavaScript without actually writing it :)
In ZK you create the widgets and the layout in XUL and XHTML (actually ZUML, which in the future may also support XAML and XQuery). Then create the event handlers in Java to do the server work. Binding Widgets and event handlers is done in ZUML, and it's easy to do.
I still don't have an opinion of which I like more. At first sight GWT seems easier to work with, but I'm always suspicious of generated code. ZK seems more flexible and it's based on several interesting technologies, like XUL. I believe both can have success, but I'm pretty sure the name google will show its weight, at least at first ;)

How much ?

Being a Java Developer I'm of course interested in knowing how other Java Developers are doing, specially in other parts of the world. I'm talking about money, of course... how much Java developers earn in "insert_country_name" ? It's not that I'm not happy with my current income, but we always want more if we can get it :)
Anyway, this JavaLobby's forum thread is a very interesting reading.

Online Office

For some reason, I've never been too fond of applets. Maybe because I saw too many bad examples on how to use an applet. However, my opinion changed dramatically, when I saw ThinkFree Office. Basically, it's the regular office you are used to, but inside an applet!!
You have Word, Excel and PowerPoint with all the features you can imagine. It's truly amazing how similar it is to the real thing. It works so good you could use it to substitute the real Office and save a few disk space. Just create a free account, and you get 30Mb of space for creating docs, spreadsheets, convert them to pdf, etc. Try the demo and see for yourself! One of the things that amazed me: you can even do fullscreen slideshows of powerpoints :)
Apart the usefulness, it's really the best applet I've seen.

Suuurrrooouuunnnnd

Santa Claus brought me a brand new Creative Sound Blaster Audigy card along with 5.1 speakers. I wasn't looking for a new sound card, but now I really love the sound I can get here...
I first installed the windows drivers, which confirmed the nice surround sound quality :)
I was a bit curious how Linux would handle the card, and specifically the 5.1 speakers. I had a few problems (and still have) with the Alsa drivers, but curiously not at first. The problem only manifests when I boot my PC directly in Linux (which I do most of the time). Instead of crystalline sound I got some horrible noise. However, if I first boot Windows and then reboot to Linux, everything is fine. It appears to be some kind of initialization code that is missing from the Alsa drivers.

Besides that annoyance (which I hope it ends soon), the sound in Linux is now a lot better than before. One of the first things I tried was to listen to the surround sound in a DVD. I had a few problems configuring Xine, but it worked nice on Mplayer. And yes, the sound is great :)
However, I noticed something missing comparing to windows drivers. When listening to music, I realized the music was playing only on the 2 front speakers. And in windows, besides playing on all 6 speakers, I could also select from a set of special effects (like the sound was playing inside a church, auditorium, etc). Of course, I wasn't hoping to have those special effects in Linux...and I don't miss them too. It's fun to try the first time, but who uses them, really ? :)
What bothered me was that the music didn't play on all 6 speakers. Well, I never thought about how things were done in Windows, but I soon figured why Linux only plays on 2 speakers. A surround sound (one that plays on all 6 speakers) must have the information on what to play on each speaker. The sounds and music on DVD are recorded in 6 channels....one for each speaker. But normal music is record in Stereo, which means 2 channels. So, normal music should be played only on 2 speakers. Fortunately there's a trick: I could tell it to play the same channel on several speakers. That's very easy to do in Alsa. However, it doesn't sound the same as in Windows. What I think Windows drivers do is apply some kind of audio filter to the duplicated channels. That filter gives the sound a more 3Dish feel. Nevertheless, the result is reasonable. And hopefully someone with time and patience creates a similar set of functions to be added transparently to Alsa (instead of specific to each driver), which would make it very flexible.

It's amazing how much we can do in Linux, even when we lack the manufacturer's drivers ;)

Qemu: a valid emulation option

In my last post I introduced ReactOS, which is a small operating system resembling Windows. However, I didn't really install it. I could have tried the live cd, but I was too lazy to do a reboot. And it was a great chance to experiment Qemu, which I had discovered recently. Qemu is a process emulator that can boot an operating system inside a window. Much like VMWare.
In the past I found a few other projects doing similar stuff (Bochs and Plex86, for example) but for the first time it worked smoothly out-of-the-box. I tried it with ReactOS and a few linux-based livecds. All of them worked perfectly, even audio and network. Well, perfectly if you don't mind the speed....which is slow. But that is to be expected in this kind of emulators. Tip: be sure to use the Qemu Accelerator module, which makes Qemu a lot faster. Without it, it's too slow to be useful.
Qemu usage is pretty straightforward. It has several command line options, but normally you can go with the simple command (for a livecd): qemu -cdrom /dev/hdb (being hdb your cdrom device).
In conclusion, Qemu is a very good piece of software and probably the best option if you don't want to buy VMWare.

Open Source Windows

Ever wanted M$ Windows to be free ? or even better, Open Source ?
You have two choices: you can wait that M$ does it, or you can try ReactOS. ReactOS is an open source initiative to create a free operating system, fully compatible with M$ Windows. Seems a very strange concept, but why not ? Linux is a free implementation of Unix...
And no, it's not just a concept...it works ! At least, what I've tried, which wasn't much...just the basic apps that came with it (notepad, explorer....). First impression: it looks like the real thing, except the four buttons on the taskbar representing four virtual desktops, which is something I never understood why M$ never implemented. I didn't try to install other applications, but trusting on their website, ReactOS can run, for example, the games Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex. I don't know if everything works smoothly, but if you don't have a M$ license and want to use a few Windows applications, you don't loose anything by trying it. The download is small and if you don't want to install it right away, they also have a livecd. And if it works you just saved some money ;)
I don't know if ReactOS developers will have any legal issues with it in the future. And I'm not saying that I feel it it's not legal. I don't. The code is not derived from Windows. It's all GPL code (they work closely with the Wine project). However, if M$ feels threatened in any way, I'm sure they can find a legal issue somewhere.

Who needs another language ?

No, I'm not going to talk about Ruby and the huge amount of news about it's possibility to take over the world :) I'm going to introduce you to a lesser known language: D. Yes, I presume it's name has something to do with the evolution from the C language... Anyway, I wasn't really thrilled when someone told me about this new language. I immediately thought "ok, a new language...yawn". However, I was surprised when I looked at this comparison. It just seems too good to be true. My first reaction was "where's the catch ? does it really work?". I never heard of it before, but apparently it has already been on Slashdot and Dr.Dobb's. At first sight, the language specification seems very similar to C or Java, but with the best of both worlds, and more. Why (almost) nobody knows about it ? maybe it's a hidden gem that will appear on the spotlight sooner or later...or maybe it will never catch on, despite its (apparent) quality (It wouldn't be the first). Worth a try...

Can you guess it ?

If you remember my last post, I used an UML diagram to explain the overall architecture of Acegi Security. Can you guess in which tool I made it ?
UML is one of the most well-known standards in the IT world, and many tools have been created to help us design those nifty diagrams. The first tools I met were the full-blown commercial products like Rational Rose or Together. And although they really are good products, with lots of features, it always seemed to me that they were a little fatter and heavier than they should. Is it really that difficult to create a small tool that models UML diagrams ?
Then I discovered Dia, which does a reasonably good job, and is completely free. But it's not an UML tool, it's a general-purpose diagram creator (much like M$ Visio). That can be an advantage, but it also means that certain features, typical in UML only tools, are not present: code generation and reverse-engineering. Although I rarely use those features, sometimes they can be very helpful. Overall, I think it's a good piece of software. However, I never enjoyed how the end result looked like.
So, after Dia, I tried ArgoUML. I was impressed by the different kind of UML diagrams it allowed, including the sequence diagram which is normally the first to be absent. I was just starting to explore ArgoUML when, by chance, I discovered Umbrello. Umbrello also has all the UML diagrams (at least all I can think of), does code generation and some reverse engineering (not tried it though). Normally this kind of tools have only one programming language in mind (when generating code or reverse engineering). Umbrello allows code generation for: Java, C++, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP5, SQL and a few others (reverse engineering allows only for C++). So what is the difference to ArgoUML ? ArgoUML also allows code generation to more than one language (although not as many as Umbrello), but I didn't find an option for reverse-engineering. Diagrams aside, ArgoUML has a few additional features relating to project handling and overall it seems a more complete and also a more complex product. In terms of usability I think Umbrello takes the lead: the interface is less cluttered and the overall program is lighter, faster and easier to use. And even comparing to Together, from what I can remember when I used it a few years ago, I prefer Umbrello for it's usability.
So, in conclusion I think both ArgoUML and Umbrello are excellent UML tools, that should be considered before blindly buying the full-blown commercial products.
And the answer to my initial question is: Umbrello...never leave home without it ;)

Acegi Security Introduction

Lately I've been busy learning and trying out the Acegi Security System, which is a security framework for the Spring Framework. It's not the easiest framework to grasp, but if you have the time and will, it will pay off. During the process of learning it, I created a diagram to help me understand, and now I decided to create a small introduction around it.
Remember, this is just an example of a possible Acegi configuration. Acegi Security is very flexible and has a lot more features (like single-sign-on and remember-me services).

Introduction

Acegi is based on servlet filters. This has one big advantage: it decouples your application from Acegi. And this makes it easier to add Acegi to an already working application, for example.
For simplicity sake, there's no need to declare all filters on the web.xml. You can use FilterChainProxy which encapsulates a group of filters and executes them in order. As you can see in the picture, we can have 3 filters lined up. Ignoring the HttpSessionIntegrationFilter for now, the other two, AuthenticationProcessingFilter and SecurityEnforcementFilter, implement Authentication and Authorization, respectively.


Authentication

Authentication is the process of confirming that a user is who he claims to be. Typically, this is done by supplying an username and a password (in Acegi concepts those are called Principal and Credentials, respectively). In a web environment, normally, the username and password are provided as a result of an HTML form submit. This submission is captured by the AuthenticationProcessingFilter (it analyzes the URLs passing by, looking for the configured string, that is passed by the form's "action" property) AuthenticationProcessingFilter then calls AuthenticationManager, which starts the process of authenticating. First step is to find the user in some repository, based on the given username. Next, the credentials are compared, and if they are equal, authentication is successful.

The base class in this process is the Authentication class. It's a simple bean composed of a Principal, Credentials and a few Authorities (this normally means user "roles"). AuthenticationProcessingFilter creates a new Authentication Object with the specified username and password, and if authentication succeeds, at the end of the process the Authentication Object will be filled with some Authorities.
But first, we need to find the claimed user in the system. There can be a variety of user repositories in the system (database, ldap, etc). Each of these repositories can be accessed through an AuthenticationProvider. The role of the AuthenticationManager is to maintain a collection of these providers.

Acegi has a few different types of AuthenticationProviders, but probably the most used is the DaoAuthenticationProvider. This AuthenticationProvider uses a DAO (Data Access Object) to retrieve the user from a repository (typically a database). You can use the provided JdbcDaoImpl to connect to a database through JDBC and retrieve the user information, without writing any code. However, is quite simple to implement your own Dao (I did it because I was using Hibernate): just one method that retrieves a User based on a username.

Authorization

Authorization is the process of protecting resources by only allowing those resources to be used by users that have been granted authority to use them. SecurityEnforcementFilter is the filter responsible for the authorization process. It uses a FilterSecurityInterceptor to identify the resources that need to be secured. It holds a collection of patterns (regular expressions) and authorities (an Authority is normally just a string representing an user role). When an URL is identified by one of the patterns, the related authorities must be present in the Authentication object (the one that was created by the authentication process). If there is no Authentication object (the user has not logged in yet) or if the given Authentication does not have the authorities the resource requires, then the application is redirected to a configured AuthenticationProcessingFilterEntryPoint. This normally just represents an URL to a login form.


Now for the first filter, HttpSessionIntegrationFilter...this is responsible for integrating the Authentication object with the HTTP Session. The authentication and authorization processes talked before don't really interact with the HTTP Session. They aren't even aware there is such a thing. They use a SecurityContextHolder to retrieve a SecurityContext, which contains the Authentication object. When a request is made, HttpSessionIntegrationFilter loads the SecurityContext from the Session and stores it in the SecurityContextHolder, where all subsequent filters can access it. At the end of the request, the SecurityContext (that may have been altered during the request) is stored again in the Session. This kind of design is very flexible... all the authentication and authorization processes are independent of HTTP session handling. Thus, we could provide a SecurityContext in any other way. HttpSessionIntegrationFilter it's just a thin layer on top of the rest of the Acegi Security System.

Video editing in Linux

As usual, when on holidays, one must fill endless video tapes of friends and relatives doing funny stuffs (and boring stuff also). Next we have the task of putting them to DVD. It's not hard, but it took me more time than I expected.
First, we have to capture the raw movie from the camera. I already have a DV camera, so that part is plain easy. I could use command-line dvgrab, but I preferred Kino.
Kino allows for capture (with full control of your camera....you can pause, play, etc from the program) and saving to a variety of formats. For me, I was interested in the DVD format. Kino does this job pretty well, and it also has a few additional tools for some editing, like moving and deleting scenes. I haven't tried those though. Kino can, thus, do the entire job. Unless you really want to express your creativity and apply some fancy effects...or a more professional-like editing.
You guessed it, I wanted to express a little of creativity...and for that I used Cinelerra. Cinelerra has lots of advanced editing options (more than I will ever need) and some cool effects...like chroma key...you know...when those pretty girls tell the weather on TV ;)
Anyway, I didn't want to go that far....just add a few titles and images along with the movie. Cinelerra's manual is big, but it explains well all that you need to know. However, you can try this tutorial first, for a quick start.
So, in conclusion...I captured my DV movie with Kino, saved the movie as QuickTime (this is needed for Cinelerra) and made some editing in Cinelerra. After Cinelerra rendered the movie, I imported it again in Kino and converted to DVD format.
A few tips I learned the hard way:

• Select the option in Kino for splitting the captured movie in multiple files. This makes it easier for editing afterwards, because of Kino's smart auto-split: it detects when a scene ends and another starts. It's also lighter on the machine. I tried working with a 13Gb file in Cinelerra and it kept crashing.
• Don't forget to set your movie properties (video size, pal/ntsc, etc) in Cinelerra. It doesn't ask, and if you set it wrong, you won't get good results.
• When rendering the movie in Cinelerra you have a few choices for the output format. The only one I could make it work back in Kino again was Raw DV.
• And finally, remember that this takes a lot of disk space. 1 hour movie equals more or less 13GB...multiplied by two because of the cinelerra's rendered Raw DV format...and the DVD itself..:)

Have fun!

Flash user interface

We usually identify Flash as a language for making web animations, with or without interaction. Even games...And although Flash has given us, also, extraordinary examples of user interface creativity, its applicability for creating user interfaces is far from being the mainstream. Flash is not very easy. I'm no expert, but normally, we have to create the entire look from scratch...and although that brings flexibility it also takes time and is more suited for artistic designers (or at least someone with that capability). I, for example, couldn't create a better interface than the one HTML gives me. So I stick with HTML.
However, if we could specify a Flash interface in XML things would become a lot easier. That's what Lazlo creators thought. I already tried it and I think they made a very good product. With Lazlo you get a consistent look of windows, dialogs, buttons, sliders, etc. It clearly resembles a desktop application. You do not have to worry too much about the look (it's already great) and just create XML for the interface and a few JavaScript for animations and other dynamic content.
Another feature I think it's great is that Lazlo works with data in XML format. This means that if you want to populate a table, you can easily map the XML with table columns. Also, you can get this XML from a web service very easily. Try the demos and have a look at the interactive tutorial...you'll probably be amazed.
One last thing, it's free and has better documentation than many commercial stuff that I've seen.

Use the patterns, Luke

Patterns are good. Everyone agrees with that...which doesn't mean that everyone uses patterns. But even worse than not using patterns is using them wrong. Let's imagine you want to create a Singleton, but you implement it wrong. Because it's stated that it is a pattern we assume it is right...we know what it does. This makes it hard to find the problem...the same way we don't test if Sun's API is right, we assume the pattern is correct. And probably it will take some time till someone finally finds it.

An innovative approach to help in this problem is PEC (Pattern Enforcing Compiler). What it does is check if your implementation of the Design Pattern (Singleton, for example) is correct, at compile time. It's very easy to use. You only need to add the following to your code (copied from website):

1. Add "import pec...*;", e.g. "import pec.compile.Singleton.*;"
2. Add "implements ", e.g. "implements Singleton"
3. Compile with PEC

If your code doesn't implement a correct Singleton (for example) a compile error is shown (the error messages are normally very good explaining what is missing in the pattern). I think this is a good idea and may prevent a few headaches. But there is a catch...there is no magic here...not only you need to implement the Singleton right, you have to implement Singleton the way PEC thinks it should be implemented. I'm not saying that PEC doesn't "enforce" a good Singleton pattern, but there are always different ways of implementing a pattern. For example, in PEC a Singleton must have a static method called "instance" to retrieve the Object instance (no other name). However, if you adhere to PEC guidelines, you gain a powerful tool against those nasty-hard-to-find-bugs. The good news is that PEC is extensible. You can add your patterns, either new ones, or different implementations of those supplied by PEC.
So, in conclusion this can be a handy tool if you adhere to PEC's implementation of patterns or you have the time to extend PEC and create your patterns.

Direct Web Remoting

Have you seen Google suggest already ? It's a new service from google (still in beta) that suggests words as you type (similar to auto-completion in popular programming editors). I don't know the details of how it is done, but I presume it uses something similar to DWR.
DWR allows client-side JavaScript to call server-side java, without a page refresh. Although I don't like JavaScript that much, I have to admit that with DWR we could create extremely flexible user interfaces. It's still in alpha stage, but at least for me it worked pretty well (Firefox, of course). The way DWR works is quite ingenious. It creates an IFRAME which calls a servlet that does our work. On reply, the IFRAME has an "onload" script that returns the result to the JavaScript. Thus, the IFRAME is used just for the request and response process and is immediately deleted.
Don't know if it will catch on, but with all the different rich client frameworks emerging, it will be a difficult fight for all.

XML-based GUI

I recently had to develop a Swing application. I touched Swing only a few times before. And because of that lack of experience I didn't want to do it manually. It would take much too long (and is quite boring too). XML based GUIs seemed a valid alternative. A little research and I ended up choosing SwixML.
With SwixML you can define all the user interface in a single XML file. This has several advantages: you clearly decouple presentation from business logic, it's easier to code and the resulting XML file has a lot less lines than the corresponding Swing code. Also, for those who know the Swing API well, transition to SwixML should be smooth. All Swing components have a corresponding XML element with the exact same name. Properties also have the same name. You can think of the XML structure as a complete representation of the Swing GUI components. This is also a clear advantage for SwixML developers: there's no need to explain what the elements and attributes are. A link to the Swing API suffices (after code-reuse, we now have documentation-reuse).
Be sure to check the samples page to see the simplicity of the XML structure.

AOP Jargon

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) introduced a lot of new jargon (as if there wasn't enough already). And the problem with AOP jargon is that it's not very intuitive, and I think this scares away some people. Because, in fact, AOP is not that complicated. I've been exploring Spring AOP, and I'll try to explain some of the AOP jargon used in Spring (most of the concepts are the same in others AOP implementations).
The most common example associated with AOP is logging. Logging is something that we have to do across a lot of classes (if not all). And most of the times the code is the same, across all those classes. Wouldn't be nice if we could just say: "let there be logging in all these classes". Well, we can. That's AOP.

Let's assume we want to log everytime the foo() method is called.

public class AOPTest {

 public void foo(){

   ...interesting stuff...
 }
}

The normal solution would be to add something like System.out.println("Entering method foo"); at the start of the foo method (or something a little better than System.out.println). With AOP we can tell that a given piece of code is executed before any call to foo(). That piece of code is called an Advice. There are different kinds of advices for several situations:

• before advice - executed before the method

• after advice - executed after the method

• throws advice - executed if a specific exception is thrown

• around advice - intercepts the method, and can be used to change arguments or even preventing the method from being called
  

• introduction - adds methods to the class, allowing it to implement another java interface

The type of advice already specifies when it should occur, at least in part. We still need to tell what classes and/or methods are intercepted by the Advice. This is done with a Pointcut. A Pointcut simple defines when an Advice (generically speaking, not a specific advice) should occur. For example: you can specify regular expressions to match class and/or method names (you can match only the class name to apply an Advice to all the methods in the class). So, now that you have an Advice and a Pointcut you may join the two in an encapsulating class called Advisor (basically, simplifies configuration).
This should be enough, but Spring implements AOP trough proxies. Every method call is intercepted by a proxy class, before getting to the real method. This is how Advices are executed transparently before or after some method. Fortunately, you don't' have to create proxies manually for every target class (although you can, if additional flexibility is required).

I think this is all the jargon one needs to know to get started on Spring AOP...or any other AOP implementation. I used Spring AOP mainly because I was already exploring Spring Framework, but there are others more powerful that Spring AOP, like AspectJ or AspectWerkz.

3D collaborative environment

For a long time many projects have tried to create a functional 3D desktop. Every project that I've seen fails at one point: performance. However, some interesting ideas appear now and then. Recently I've discovered OpenCroquet. It's not a simple 3D desktop. It's more like a 3D world. Croquet is a collaborative 3D environment that allows applications to be shared between several users. And almost any application can run inside Croquet (no need to program it specifically to work in Croquet). Croquet's architecture allows those applications to be shared in a multi-user environment. You can see the application another user is using, and you can even work with him in the same application (see the screenshots). That allows teams far apart to work together in a project.
OpenCroquet is still in early development, although there's already a version for download.

XML shorthands

XML has become one of the most well established standards in computer technology. It's being used in almost all kinds of applications. I won't talk about its great features and advantages...much has been said about that.
However, not everyone is fully satisfied with XML, specially with its verbose syntax. This can make the document hard to read and create. I don't usually have to create large XML documents by hand, but if I'd have to, I probably would have the same feeling :)
Some people got tired of this and created alternatives to XML. The objective is not to substitute XML, but to provide a way to write XML documents more easily. So, all of them offer an easy way to convert the document to full XML. You can have a look a some of those XML shorthands in this comparison. As you can see, their syntax is similar and most of the times inspired by Python: nested elements are identified by identation (at least SLiP and SOX). I personally never liked this (seems a very dangerous world). But I have to admit that a few of them really are simpler than XML, and thus can make it less painful to create large documents by hand. Others (PYX and SXML), however, seem a lot harder and confusing than XML itself.
So, are these XML shorthands really helpful ? In my opinion, if you create/edit large XML documents by hand regularly and liked one of those alternative languages, it can be an good solution.

Congratulations Firefox

Firefox 1.0 will be officially launched on November 9. It's a nice milestone. And they plan to celebrate it. There is also a campaign to raise enough money for a full-page advertisement on New York Times (it appears they already have enough for two pages). For $30 you can have your name printed on the ad :)

Firefox is truly a great browser. I've been using since the days it was called Phoenix.
However, there is more to Firefox than meets the eye. Firefox is based on XUL. A definition of XUL is "a cross-platform language for describing user interfaces of applications". XUL is based on XML and has a rich set of UI components. This allows you to create complex interfaces in XML, with a clean separation between presentation and logic. The combination of XUL and Firefox means that you can make entire applications leveraged on Firefox. Thus, Firefox becomes a framework for complex distributed applications, that aren't suited for plain web pages. This is really a great thing and can boost creativity to create better distributed applications that go beyond HTML's limitations. And it appears some companies are already realizing this too.

Creating PDF documents in Java

Everyday I see more of those pdf-icons, on web-pages, that link to a pdf version of the document. It's a very nice feature. It's very useful if you want to save the document for later reference, or even for printing.

I just experimented with a tool to create PDF documents in Java: iText. It's very simple to use, although the documentation could be better (I have to remember this feeling the next time I don't feel like writing documentation). I just used a few simple options to generate a PDF from a text-only article. However, it also supports graphics, and for what I've seen from their website, I think it supports just about everything you'd need to create a PDF. For me, I just needed the following lines to show a title and a body text (yes, my requirements were simple) :

Font chapterFont = FontFactory.getFont(
    FontFactory.HELVETICA, 24, Font.NORMAL, new Color(0, 0, 0));
Paragraph title = new Paragraph(article.getTitle(), chapterFont);
Paragraph body = new Paragraph(article.getBody());
document.add(title);
document.add(body);

Well, in fact you'll need more code to initialize and to generate the actual PDF. Unless you're using Spring. Spring MVC has a very nice integration with iText. By using Spring MVC, a PDF document is just another way of showing the content. It's another kind of view, like a JSP or a XSLT. And it's resolved just like a JSP, by the View Resolver (you'll probably have to use ResourceBundleViewResolver, as, for example, InternalResourceViewResolver seems to be more suited to JSP pages). So I added the following to my "views.properties":

articlePDF.class=view.pdf.ArticlePdfPage

This specifies the class that generates the view to the client. Now, instead of forwarding to a JSP in the Controller, I forward to a PDF page, but for the controller it's completely transparent. I just need to tell it to forward to articlePDF view.

As for the class, it must extend AbstractPdfView. Below is the full class that I used :

public class ArticlePdfPage extends AbstractPdfView {

 protected void buildPdfDocument(Map model, Document document,
   PdfWriter writer, HttpServletRequest request,
   HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {

  ArticleBean article = (ArticleBean) model.get("article");

  Font chapterFont = FontFactory.getFont(
                    FontFactory.HELVETICA, 24, Font.NORMAL,
                    new Color(0, 0, 0));

  Paragraph title = new Paragraph(article.getTitle(),
                    chapterFont);
  Paragraph body = new Paragraph(article.getBody());
  document.add(title);
  document.add(body);
 }
}

iText seems good if you need to dynamically create PDF documents. However it may not be the best solution for every situation. It depends on what kind of content you have and how complex the final document should be. For example, if you already have a XML version of the document, there are simpler ways of generating a PDF from it (Apache FOP, for example).