JavaOne: Sun rolls out JavaFX

OutsidetheLineshe Lines - CNET News.com: "As part of Sun's effort to enable consumers to innovate, Green introduced JavaFX, a rich Internet application environment set to compete with Adobe Systems' AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight. He showed a JavaFX application with Flickr and Twitter feeds running in Facebook within the browser, and then he dragged it out of the browser--to the desktop. The same application also was shown running on a Java-enabled phone via JavaFX Mobile.

Cloud Tools for EC2

"WS Short Takes for Friday, April 18, 2008
from Amazon Web Services Blog by AWS Editor

I met developer Chris Richardson in Philadelphia last month. Chris is a seasoned Java developer and the author of POJOs in Action.

He told me that he had just released CloudTools. This is a set of tools for deploying and testing Java EE applications on Amazon EC2. It consists of AMIs that are configured to work with Apache Tomcat and to work with EC2Deploy, the EC2Deploy core framework (described here), and a Maven plugin which uses EC2Deploy. Once the plugin has been configured, one command will launch the appropriate number of EC2 instances, configure a master MySQL database, populate it with data, configure zero or more MySQL slaves, configure one or more Tomcat servers, deploy the actual web application, and then configure an Apache instance which will load balance across all of the Tomcat instances (whew!).

Simply Singleton - Singleton patterns in Java

Simply Singleton

Sometimes it's appropriate to have exactly one instance of a class: window managers, print spoolers, and filesystems are prototypical examples. Typically, those types of objects—known as singletons—are accessed by disparate objects throughout a software system, and therefore require a global point of access.