Nexablog

While working on an application for a client, I encountered some issues with Java’s MessageFormat. In particular, I needed to pass MessageFormat a string that contained single-quotes and curly braces that would be treated literally. This is an issue, because single-quotes and curly braces are special characters in MessageFormat land.

MessageFormat is designed to allow you to dynamically create a string based on a static pattern and a set of inputs. For example, this is from the MessageFormat JavaDoc:

 Object[] testArgs = {new Long(3), "MyDisk"};

 MessageFormat form = new MessageFormat(
     "The disk \"{1}\" contains {0} file(s).");

 System.out.println(form.format(testArgs));

 // output, with different testArgs
 output: The disk "MyDisk" contains 0 file(s).
 output: The disk "MyDisk" contains 1 file(s).
 output: The disk "MyDisk" contains 1,273 file(s).

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I just presented a tutorial on Friday on using Direct Web Remoting, Hibernate and dojo.E.  It’s a very simple demo, but demonstrates the power of these three technologies combined to create simple, dynamic Java applications very quickly. The tutorial is available on SlideShare.

Note that there is a bug that obscures the URL for the SVN project.  The URL is http://source.nexaweb.com/svn/repos/trunk/tutorials/ajax/DWRExample/.

You can check out the project via SVN using this URL.

Also, to copy and paste the code snippets, download the document and open directly in PowerPoint. When copying and pasting, watch out for “smart quotes”. Some of the quotation characters in the PPT have been replaced with “smart quotes”, which are not recognized by XML parsers.

This will get even more exciting with the new features of DWR 3.0, which will add a RESTful layer to DWR’s remoting.  To learn more about DWR 3.0, I recommend Joe Walker’s presentation from The Ajax Experience last week.  He’s the lead developer for DWR.

Joel Barciauskas

Just finished checking in the last of the updates (minus bug fixes) for the new Ajax IMB Client, after a week of straight coding and little else. The new version has been completely rewritten from the ground up. This coincides with Nexaweb’s upcoming release (in a month or so) of an updated version of the Ajax Client. The Ajax Client codebase will be completely updated and run over dojo 1.2. All the coding for these updates follow six principles:

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One of the goals of the dojo.E project has been to bring some of the standards created by the W3C and others to developers for building their Ajax applications. A couple of weeks ago, I saw on Ajaxian.com that Firefox and Webkit are going to support XBL. Simply defined, the XML Binding Language or XBL is a way to create reusable components.

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The New Release: dojo.E 0.2.4

Last week the dojo.E team updated the code base of the dojo.E project. Many things in the code changed from the first release. The focus of the 0.2.x release was to create a well defined architecture around the core concept of adding XML to dojo. In this light, we created a flexible and well thought out XML processing engine that can take XML embedded in a script tag or external to the page and process the markup based on configured tag and namespace handlers.

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One thing we preach at Nexaweb more than any other is that no one technology / language / runtime… can solve all your needs. As I like to say, “It takes a village” of software technologies to raise your application from an idea to a production application.

Last week one of our Services people came to me and asked, “How would you upload a file using the Nexaweb Java Client?” At first I thought just use the Java Client and open up a file dialog. Then I remembered that under normal circumstances Java creates a very secure environment to run your applications. This “Sandbox” makes it impossible for applications that are not signed to access local resources.

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I attended this same conference exactly one year ago and the difference was pretty obvious: the way people are thinking about Ajax has changed dramatically. It’s something that I’ve been noticing for a while now, since I’m an avid reader of dozens of Ajax and RIA blogs and social news sites. But after talking to hundreds of developers literally 1 year apart, it was even clearer. Ajax is no longer being viewed as the “silver bullet” for the mess of problems that developing a web application creates. The hype and buzz is still there, but the expectations are a lot more realistic.

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Just my thoughts from talking to people……

Widget Wars - Every time I talk with enterprise scale customers, they always seem to be mostly interested in the latest “sexy” or “fancy” widgets to address a specific item or customer request. They want to use open source libraries and find a clever way to make 46 different tool kits and frameworks all work together seamlessly to deliver a “unique rich user experience”.

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We’ve been working hard on a new version of our development environment and we’re releasing a beta into the world.

Some highlights:

1. Data, data, data - all work flows that interact with data integration have been overhauled
2. Supporting users that have their own Eclipse environment and don’t want ours
3. Editing our “macros” - declarative modification blocks that can be executed on the client
4. Supporting JSON visualization for data sources
5. Results from usability testing has been added in
6. and more…

If you would like to take the beta for a spin, email our support department.

Rob Gagne

Over in the articles sections of the Nexaweb devcenter section I just finished creating a new entry describing how to Create a plugin for our Ajax client. One of the things that people can take advantage of in Nexaweb’s client architecture is the ability to integrate any third party component of any type (Flash, Ajax, HTML, Java, SilverLight) into their application. Flexibility is a fundamental design philosophy of Nexaweb or what we call a “Pillar of Development”.

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