In this article I will show how to build basic RESTful Web Services in JAVA for Web Application using JAX-RS: The Java API for RESTful Web Services and its open source implementation: Jersey together with XStream. I will also show how easy is to extend Jersey to work with your favorite XStream library and that testing Web Services can be a fun with the outstanding soapUI application.

Recently, when I had to test some free message queue systems which works with Microsoft .NET I found the list of some interesting systems.  When I found out that Apache ActiveMQ can be also used from .NET, I deiced to test it first. You can see my results below.

yWorks products

If you are not an artist and you want to quickly draw nice diagrams I’ve found a very useful and light tool. Earlier I tried to use Visio or other heavy duty tools for my diagrams but their user interface is so complex that I really started to hate using them. Recently, I had to draw some graphs and then I found yEd – a JAVA graph editor application. I needed to give it a try.

In our last article about Grails we promised some tutorial showing how easy and simple it is to create web application in this framework. So – let’s do it!

From this place you can download project files ready-to-use.

In this little ‘How-To’ I’m going to use NetBeans, since it has an excellent support for Grails applications. First of all – let’s create new Grails project: ‘File’ -> ‘New Project’ -> ‘Groovy’ -> ‘Grails Application’. NetBeans will ask for a folder placement of our newly created project and will automaticly build whole project folder structure for us. Actually, we can even run our project right now – and we can see in the browser that it works.

After a short look the answer is yes. But after a little deeper digging into Groovy and Grails, I must admit that I’m simply surprised! Not only by its simplicity but also because of its decent features and the fact that Grails combines all the best from both Ruby on Rails and Java. If you worked with this couple, you should be curious by now.

Yep, it’s another scripting language for Rich Interface Application development. The first releases of JavaFX  aroused mixed feelings, in fact, these were just enhanced Swing components. But latest 1.2 release is showing some fine effects and possibilities. And as soon as I watched some presentations and examples of applications, I thought: “let’s give it a try”.

One thing that was always missing in Eclipse was a GUI designer: a graphical tool for building Graphical User Interfaces. Fortunately, there is an Eclipse project called Visual Editor and the new version was released after two years of silence (1.4.0 – latest version, nightly builds).

From yesterday we can enjoy the newest version of a great Java Enterprise development tool. And as Rod Johnson promised in April – it’s fully free. In this release – actually first one with decent enhancements since STS was made free – we can find really nice stuff. It supports Spring 3.0, offers inbuilt wizards for Spring projects, beans and XML files, graphical configuration editor, Spring Roo project wizard and dev shell for Rapid Application Development, Spring Web Flow and Spring Batch visual development tools.

A major new version of the Eclipse software development platform was released on 24th of June. It was the ninth annual release of the Eclipse project – Galileo with the Eclipse Platform 3.5. The Eclipse Galileo release includes 33 projects which translates into a large number of new features. In this article I will present the 6 features that I have enjoyed so far.

Java based IDEs (Integrated Development Environment), like Eclipse, Netbeans or JDeveloper are becoming more and more the main tool in software engineers’ everyday work. We are able to take advantage of today’s IDEs comprehensive functionality thanks to its open structure that allows universal plugins building. In my everyday work I am using SQL Developer. I was missing some simple but very useful feature – DB Jobs management – so I decided to prepare such a plugin on my own. In this post I will give you some background information about this plugin. Feel free to use it and please provide your feedback! Thanks in advance.