If anybody wants a copy of Eclipse that doesn’t explode in Leopard and is having trouble finding a link to version 3.2, here it is. But how will we ever live without 3.3’s spell check?

J. Locke is so fed up with Apple’s stagnant Java rutime he’s hoping to tempt Sun back to shipping Mac virtual machines, with surveys about paying cold hard cash. There’s a lot of Mac switchers that want a reliable version 6 at any cost, and who don’t particularly care how clumsily Swing imitates whatever “aqua” is called in Leopard (“the dark is rising”?). Thanks to Core Animation the prospect of pleasing end users with anything less than full Cocoa access is a pipe dream, anyway.

It should be a lot easier to purchase JavaRebel now that their ordering system directly supports credit cards. And, they say that the current price of $99 has a thirty-three percent discount applied that ends December 1, meaning the regular price is, um, 99 ÷ (1 - .33) => $150. Adopt early! { previously }

Code Commit on embedded Jetty: “This means that running the web application is as simple as ‘Run As…’ -> ‘Java Application’. It starts fast, is more responsive than a straight-up Tomcat instance, and best of all, hot code replace works properly in debug mode.” Sweet, one less thing for Coderspiel to write about! Embedded Jetty absolutely rules. The code replace business in Eclipse is the reason that Databinder has always recommended Jetty Launcher, but after using embedded the launcher seems like fluff (and doesn’t work with Java 6, not that that is a problem for us on Mac OS). Its next version will be pushing embedded all the way.

Nobody likes Java ME: Google announces open-source mobile phone OS, Android.

Remember RedHat? And Sun? Those two powerhouses of the late ’90s are joining forces so Java can “benefit from extreme pervasiveness,” which sounds kind of dirty but is likely to be quite boring. Elsewhere, with less synergy, and no press release, some guy with a spare weekend just mostly compiled the FreeBSD port of JDK 1.6 on Leopard.

JavaRebel 1.0 M3 is out, with lots better Scala compatibility than the previous milestone. You get fourteen days to evaluate, at the end of which you can still buy before the price goes up.

All hail MacPorts! Setting up a new work iMac here, and using MacPorts (instead of the hodgepodge of custom package installers) for everything unixy. Slow but smart.

Waffle on Java: “What really ticks me off with Java … is that it’s got absolutely no aspirations to be anything other than a slowly-growing (community process! community process! squawk!) C++ implementation with a better syntax, a no-magic-allowed attitude (if it’s implemented like a method in the bytecode, by gum, it should be written like a method in the code!) …” That’s true of Java, and totally lame, but now you can route around the squawking.

OMG MacPorts has Scala! Ha! port install scala … :)

The clumsy clash of mutually ignorant programming worlds continues, as “Uncle Bob” describes Hibernate as having “adopted” the active record pattern, bringing unto himself the tiresome wrath of Gavin King. It was just a whisical post about how the evolved tradition of “data objects” mapped to relational databases is not exactly object oriented bliss, and maybe we should think about other ways of doing things. Ungrateful cretin! Just like last time, the real offense is not worshiping Gavin’s gift to mankind enough to know exactly how it works (does anyone, really?) before daring to mention its name in a post about something else. May we suggest, “Hibermort”?

Buildr is under Apache incubation now, along with everything including the instructions I’m going to give my hairdresser this weekend, but the good news is that the event has forced Assaf to write about his project for the first time in ages: “some people think it’s a daft idea (my words) to write a build system in Ruby for building Java (and Scala) code. And some are still holding on to the ideal of programming in XML.” Heh. Yeah unfortunately we’re stuck with that for a while longer.

Waffle with more coffee: ”Java doesn’t seem to have a great community as much as a large community.” Ouch! “Certainly, there’s no end to the Java ecosystem. Endless libraries (many named J-something),” or worse, EJ-something, “different languages (even though, I’m sorry Nathan, it looks too much like Python for me to be comfortable with it).” What because it doesn’t have the semicolons? Well at least we got Waffle to look at Scala, so mission accomplished there! One big thing that distinguishes Scala from Python is running tons faster, leveraging static typing as the only way to get decent performance on the two virtual machines Scala supports. (Its CLR support is lagging, but it will be back.) The thing is, Scala is not a product of the stagnant Java ecosystem. It’s an invasive species, one that’s going to kick Java’s butt on its own VM and allow the rest of us to escape its dull decline.

Wicket 1.3.0-rc1 has landed on the central Maven repo. Everybody dance, now.

New beta of Databinder, too. Can you believe this release cycle is coming to an end, soon? It seems like only 1985 when we released Databinder 1.0.

ASP.net goes retro: “Microsoft is working on a MVC Framework … the idea is to separate business logic from the View” Really? “The MVC Framework doesn’t support postbacks and the use of ViewState.” And so abandons any semblance of object orientation—This is all Rails’ fault. Despite its anti-Sun, anti-establishment bluster, Rails is the only reason the Model 2 travesty of MVC is still taken seriously. Thanks, guys!

The beta version of WebLogic has a curious new feature: “you can now redefine a class file and redeploy it without needing to complete a full application redeployment.” Now, where have we heard that before? Oh, right. The big difference being it’s tied to their app server, in a time when people are starting to question the need for those webapp battleships in the first place. Why build every possible service into a container, configure it externally and point it inwards, when you can easily link from the inside to whatever service you require? (And if you dare to write code outside of WARtime, JavaRebel works for that too.)

Lift’s David Pollak: It’s been a year and I still totally love Scala

It’s on the JVM, but: “The difference between J2ME and Android is thus… J2ME was a bolt on which was specifically designed to be kept as far away from the handset’s core functionality as possible. Therefore it sucked big time and was only useful for … well not much actually.” Android is on the JVM because “it provides the phone with much needed protection against sloppy programming.” So Android is good news for the JVM and bad news for Sun’s platform schemes. What else is new?

The after-work project to port Java 1.6 to Mac without Apple’s “help” is going like gangbusters: “As evidenced by the above ‘Hello, World’, X11 Swing is working on the 32-bit JVM.” { previously }

Cute reddit headline: First CouchDB-based app is in the wild. DEATH TO SQL!

Uh, ohh! Time for a little comp in the non-sucky, non-slow JVM language category: Introducing boojay.

Running Java commands by sudo in Leopard has a new twist, “apparently caused by a more restrictive default sudoers file.”

ActiveObjects forgoes joined inheritance: “Keep the schema simple, make it easy to do stuff outside … The ORM should be a liberating tool, not a constraining one.” Wise move! Joined table inheritance is the end of the ORM rainbow. You get there, throw yourself a party, and then realize that important things are broken and it’s been a complete sham. Better to quit while you’re ahead and avoid the hangover.

Open Source Java 6 on Leopard

Locke explains it all: ”Wicket is a very different world from most other web frameworks. It is unmanaged and object-oriented—something that is (unfortunately) pretty foreign to the web tier.” And it’s hard not to read this as damningly faint praise: “IOC is truly great for certain problems, especially certain enterprise-sized problems, but it is no magic bullet and I do not feel it has a place in the web tier.” The thing about those other tiers is, they peaked when they were written in FORTRAN.