Project committer Stuart Halloway just announced the launch of the first release candidate for Clojure 1.2.  Although there have been few changes between this release and the last, the news is significant because the first beta of Clojure 1.2 went live only two weeks ago.  They only had one beta release and they may only have one release candidate as well.  Expect the GA very soon.JBoss...

The new hosted Drupal service called Drupal Gardens, was recently given beta status.  This announcement means that anyone can now go to the site and start using the beta for free.  The leaders of the Drupal community have also announced that the next version of Drupal should have its beta release sometime in August.  However, they're going to need plenty of help from the community to fix the...

The fourth JBoss Application Server 6.0 milestone was released this week.  It is the first to include support for EJB 3.1 Timer Service and EJB 3.1 Asynchronous invocations. M4 also comes with a different default JBossWS stack that uses Apache CXF.  With this support, users will immediately get better performance for WS-*.Objectivity Ships its New GraphDB

It's easy for a programmer to get excited about the plethora of languages that developers have now to build all sorts of applications, but Andrew Theken says the best advice he can give to most programmers is to focus on one language platform and learn it really well.  Then if you're ready to move on after awhile, you can shift your focus completely to a new platform.  Theken also thinks its...

The Two Step View pattern, as its own name suggests, proposes a mechanism composed of two steps for generating an HTML page:first, a logical representation of the page is produced, as a map (key => value) of the different elements of the page.then, the physical representation is rendered, by juggling around the single elements to compose the final HTML.The first step is usually related to...

By introducing a central licensing server on the Android Marketplace, Google hopes to provide an effective method for protecting Android apps that can currently be copied pretty easily.  The licensing service works with almost every version of Android, all the way back to 1.5.  You can read their documentation to learn how to license your applications.A Brand New "Day" for Adobe

I recently stumbled across an amazing article. I've been using continuous integration for years, and I've used continuous deployment for a long time, but I've never tried this trick. The clever developers working on the very popular Digg.com site are using a continuous deployment system to push out new code to one of their sites. Article Type:  ...

ZeroMQ (or ØMQ) is an open source messaging library supported by the iMatix Corporation.  It has been described as messaging middleware, TCP on steroids, and now is just "a new layer on the networking stack."  Basically it allows you to design a complex communication system simply and programmatically by giving you a special socket interface.  Nicholas Piël recently introduced this...

Since the last beta, Ruby on Rails 3.0 has had over 842 commits by 125 developers.  That's the level of polish you can expect when you download the first release candidate for RoR 3, which is now available.  The fixes have focused on bringing Rails 3 performance up to the levels of version 2.3.  Other changes in the first RC include support for shallow routes (for shorter URLs), support for...

The Transform View pattern involves a view mechanism that processes data structures one element at the time, and transforms them into an end-user representation like HTML.The Transform View usually takes the shape of a view class (or function) with these characterizing traits:

Yet another great developer has left Oracle this week.  Bryan Cantrill, the co-inventor of DTrace, gave a heartfelt farewell to the company he joined in 1996.  In his praise of the pre-Oracle Sun Microsystems, Cantrill also has a few well-veiled criticisms likely aimed at the new culture under Oracle.  Statements like: "[Sun] fostered an environment where the OS [Open Source] was viewed...

Firebug is one of the most famous extensions for the Firefox web browser. In the past years, the functionalities offered by this plugin alone sold Firefox as the platform for web development over Internet Explorer (besides the respect of W3C standards that characterized Firefox). At that time, Chrome had not been invented yet and when it was released, it incorporated some of the innovations of...

Source hosting site, GitHub, reached more than one million projects over the weekend, according to their VP of R&D.  Around 60% of projects are full repositories while 40% are "gists" - short code snippets.  GitHub launched in February of 2008.SEC Says Dell Stayed Profitable Through Intel Kickbacks

The next version of PHP 5 has been released with over 100 bugfixes, some of which are security related.  PHP 5.3.3 may owe some of these bugfixes to the PHP Month of Security in May, which has been run by Stefan Esser for three years.  In PHP 5.3.3, methods with the same name as the last element of a namespaced class name will no longer be treated as constructor. This change doesn't affect...

JBoss delivered the final version of its Hibernate 3.5.4 maintenance release this week along with the first beta of 3.6, which adds some new features.  First of all, 3.6 will drop support for JDK 1.4.  It will also merge some modules into the core (specifically hibernate-jmx and hibernate-annotations).  Several limitations will also be fixed in Hibernate 3.6.KDevelop Releases 1st Patch for 4.0

JetBrains pulled out a hat-trick this week with a triple release of its flagship IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, its CI server, TeamCity, and its lightweight Python IDE, PyCharm.  TeamCity and IntelliJ got small version updates, while PyCharm had a bigger milestone with its first 1.0 Beta release.  Lets look at the highlights for each release:IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.3

The newly released Lightspark 0.4.2 is another alternative implementation of the Flash Player (others include Smokescreen and Gordon) that is designed to be efficient on current hardware.  Changes in this release include plugin support for Chrome, and support for Firefox's OOPP mode.  Just remember that the proliferation of these SWF players wouldn't be possible if Adobe hadn't made the...

There's reason to celebrate today as SQLite 3.7 is released in GA.  The lightweight, ubiquitous database includes some game-changing new features, which have arrived about two years after the 3.6 beta came out.  Today's release will feature nested transactions, constrained foreign keys, write-ahead logs, and more.

In the last week I've seen two surveys of the IT industry posted that indicate two things:  1. Java ain't dead.  2.  Developers continue to be the most sought-after IT staff - Java/J2EE developers in particular.

In this series we have seen two Web presentation patterns so far: