It's time for the next Java Meetup again. I decided to postpone the 7th installment of this quarterly event in Amsterdam until right after summer, because most people here in The Netherlands take a couple of weeks off in August or so.

I've looked at our internal schedules and it seems September 21st is the only day left in September, so I hope it fits with other people's schedules as well.

We'll be doing it at the same location as last April's meetup, as this is pretty convenient for us and everybody seems to be fine with it. The first Java Meetup ever was held in my favorite Amsterdam hangout…

In a recent blog entry Marc Logemann touches on the subject of proxy performance. In his entry he asks for a white paper by 'the Spring guys'. I don't want to spend (p)ages and (p)ages on discussing the differences up to the nanosecond between proxies and byte code weaving mechanisms, but I do think it's valuable to re-iterate once again what the differences are and whether or not this discussion matters at all.

What are proxies and why do we use them?

In other words, proxies can be used as stand-ins for real objects to apply extra behavior to those objects--be it security-related behavior, caching or maybe performance measurements…

Introduction

Grails seems to be going from strength to strength, and it looks like it definitely "has legs", as they say. I am quite interested in stretching those legs a little outside the web application arena. If you are aware of my work on Spring Batch, you will probably be able to guess where that might take me. But for this article I wanted to just share some experiences I've had with the basic, low-level deployment and build of a Grails application.

I have a love/hate relationship with Maven 2, and I am learning to love Grails, but sadly the two do not play particularly well together. It would…

A couple of month ago, we start publishing polls on www.springframework.org asking people to provide their feedback about Spring, some of its features and how they are using those features. The first question I posted was whether or not people were checking required dependencies and if so, what mechanisms they used. I quickly followed up on this question asking the community what transaction management strategy it used.

To my delight when I first checked the results, back in March, a lot of people told us by voting in the first poll that they were using the @Required annotation. The second…

The Java EE 6 proposal (JSR 316) was published today. I believe that this will be the most important revision of the platform since it was released nearly 10 years ago, and that it should be welcomed by users of the technology. Interface21 is happy to be a supporter of this JSR, and I am looking forward to contributing to it.

Java EE (known as J2EE for most of its history) has played a valuable role in creating a market for Java middleware. However, over those 10 years, important issues have emerged with the platform, such as:

• The need for a Java EE compliant server to be bloated with a range of functionality that is of little interest to the vast majority of users
• The fact that enterprise requirements have changed since J2EE was envisaged and that a "one size fits all model" is less and less appropriate
• The fact that enterprise Java has been greatly strengthened by the emergence of frameworks (especially in open source) that make developers more productive and their production applications more efficient and maintainable
• New challenges such as Ruby on Rails, and even .NET, showing that, in a time of rapid change and innovation, a cosy 2-3 year release cycle imperils the entire platform

Java EE 6 is an important revision of the platform that has the…

Michael Hickins recently published a piece on eWeek entitled Is Open Source Dying? The title drew me in, and no doubt plenty of other folk too. But the article doesn't prove the case, although it contains some interesting points that merit discussion.

Most of the article concerns speculation about the experience of government with open source, and the motives of vendors such as IBM. I prefer to judge companies and individuals by their actions, rather than speculation about their motives, and there is plenty of evidence that IBM, for example, takes open source very seriously. There's plenty of…

As promised to everyone in my sessions, here are all the code samples that I presented during the conference.

Concurrency and Spring JMX Dynamic Languages

Slides will be available from the SpringOne web site.

I was reading an article by Vigil Bose on TSS the other day and saw the usage of the HibernateDaoSupport class. Since this is no longer a recommended way of using Hibernate from Spring, I thought I might as well just blog about it another time.

With the advent of Spring 2.0, it has become possible to start using the Hibernate Session API directly again. The question is whether or not it is wise to abandon the use of the HibernateTemplate when working with Hibernate, or any other template-based approaches Spring features.

Using Spring XxxTemplates

Acquisition of connection: If transaction synchronization is active…

Last week at SpringOne, Alef and I gave a talk on dealing with complex applications using Spring. Complexity in this case was considered both at the structural and dynamic level. As for the structural part of the talk, I covered that one in my previous blog posting. The dynamic part explained some possible solutions to deal with differences between your deployment environments. (testing, acceptance, production, etc.) A lot of people asked me if I could provide them with the source of the demonstrations I gave during the talk. I've attached the sources to this blog entry and will explain…