Mrinal Wadhwa » Java

Easy deploy Flex/BlazeDS apps to Amazon EC2 with Stax

Mrinal Wadhwa — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:10:13 +0000

Dick Hirsch introduced me to Stax in relation to an open source project that I’m involved with, Apache ESME (more on that later)

What is Stax ?

According to the Stax website … Stax is “The fastest way for developers to build, manage and scale Java applications on EC2″ .. here are the notable features ….

Application Templates

Once you’ve installed the Stax command line tools its a breeze to get started with building your application. Stax comes with various pre-configured application templates to get you started .. the most notable for me among the templates was the Flex/BlazeDS template that can be created as follows ..

$ stax create -t flex myflexapp

The -t in the command line tells stax to
generate using the flex template

Check out the 2 minute guide to create and deploy a Flex/BlazeDS Hello World app that uses remoting .. it really did take 2 minutes.

Stax also has application templates for Struts, Wicket, JSP, Jython, JRuby (on Rails) and ColdFusion

No proprietary APIs

Stax does not make you use any proprietary API, so your application code is totally independent of the environment and you can choose to move to a different deployment environment whenever you like.

Simulated local development environment

The Stax command line tool has a run command that lets you run/test you application locally during development using a local pre-configured instance of tomcat.

$ stax run

And when you’re done developing just say ..

$ stax deploy -u staxusername -p staxpassword

Snapshots and Roll-Back

Stax lets you create snapshots of applications or databases so you can revert to previous snapshots at any time. Every time you hit the deploy command a snapshot is created and you can revert to it anytime.

Reporting and Monitoring

Stax also has real time reporting to monitor your application’s health, resource utilization and performance

All the Elastic Cloud goodness

And last but certainly not the least Stax lets you leverage all the Elastic Cloud goodness offered by Amazon EC2 .. scale on demand, clustered servers for load balancing, pay for only what you use etc.

Stax is currently in closed beta and they’ve not announced their pricing, but its definitely worth a look the next time you’re starting a new project.

JavaFx preview released, here’s my HelloWorld app and some initial thoughts

Mrinal Wadhwa — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 01:47:58 +0000

Sun Microsystems today announced a preview release of the JavaFX SDK.

I’ve been observing this new entrant into the RIA space from the outside but today I thought it was time to dig in a little bit. So I got my hands on the latest Netbeans wit JavaFx support and cooked up this little Hello World application….

Initial thoughts

Here are my initial thoughts of the technology .. I will try and share more detailed opinion, once I know the technology a little better ..

I don’t particularly like the YAML like declarative syntax for describing UI .. I think XML as used by Flex and Silverlight is more readable .. but I guess this is more of a personal preference
The Netbeans IDE for JavaFx is fairly basic and somewhat buggy right now, I hope this will improve over time
Did they really achieve their goal of making Java UI development simpler than Swing? .. I’m not so sure … I guess I’m still getting used to the JavaFx style of UI development
JavaFx needs a good way to share source, Flex’s really easy way of sharing code has helped adoption, since it makes is very easy for the people in the community to share and learn from each other

Launch Application using Java Web Start
(Note, Java 1.6 is required)

Source:

/* * Main.fx * * Created on Aug 1, 2008, 6:00:51 AM */


package helloworld;
import javafx.application.Frame;

import javafx.application.Stage;

import javafx.scene.CustomNode;

import javafx.scene.Group;

import javafx.scene.Node;

import javafx.scene.text.Text;

import javafx.scene.Font;

import javafx.scene.FontStyle;

import javafx.scene.paint.Color;
/**

 * @author Mrinal Wadhwa

 */

public class HelloNode extends CustomNode {
    public function create(): Node {

        return Group {

            content: [

                Text {

                    font: Font {

                        name: "Verdana"

                        size: 30

                        style: FontStyle.PLAIN

                    }

                    x: 60, y: 110

                    fill: Color.WHITE

                    stroke: Color.WHITE

                    content: "Hello World from JavaFx"

                }]

        };

    }

}
Frame {

    title: "Hello World !"

    width: 500

    height: 250

    closeAction: function() {

        java.lang.System.exit( 0 );

    }

    visible: true
    stage: Stage {

        fill: Color.DARKGRAY

        content: HelloNode{}

    }

}

I will share more detailed code whenever I get some more time to play with JavaFx. Meanwhile here are a few resources that will help you learn ..

I look forward to the final release of Java SE Update 10 and the final release of JavaFx SDK .. these are exciting times in RIA land.

Finally ! a cool JavaFx example

Mrinal Wadhwa — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:36:19 +0000

Sun Microsystems announced JavaFX (their RIA platform) a year ago but till now all we had seen were some lame examples mostly because (I guess) the deployment platform for JavaFX wasn’t ready yet.

Sun’s yearly developer conference JavaOne is currently going on and it looks as though some cool stuff is being shown there. I saw a twitter from Dion Almaer (of Ajaxian fame) where he shared a video of a really cool demo .. even though the demo crashed a couple of times … it does tell you a lot about the platform…

Things I liked …

Convert a web app to a desktop app, just by dragging it to the desktop (super cool !!)
Same code running on browser, desktop and mobile (if you believe the demo )
Hardware accelerated 3D

One big question I have to ask … is the web part an applet? does Sun really think people are going to get comfortable with applets again (even if the file size is now a lot smaller)?

Anyway its great to see how things are shaping up in the RIA world, if you want to learn more about JavaFX head to http://javafx.com or http://openjfx.dev.java.net/. here’s an image that presents a broad picture …

Do let me know what you think of JavaFX and how the RIA space is shaping up.

Apollo + Artemis: these Greek twins have got to irk Microsoft

Mrinal Wadhwa — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 12:50:30 +0000

In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo … In todays world Artemis is a community project to extend and enhance Adobeâ€™s Apollo by connecting it with Java … the idea is to build very rich and interactive User Experiences for desktop Java applications in traditionally Internet based user interface technologies Flex/Flash/AJAX instead of using traditionally desktop UI technologies like Java Swing.

All of us who have built front-ends for desktop software in Swing/.Net etc. earlier and later moved to developing RIA user interfaces in Flex understand how much simpler things are with Flex. I have done a lot of Swing development in the past and it is truly a very powerful framework that can be used to create anything that you can create in Flex … but, it can get quite hard and cumbersome as the complexity of the interface increases. Enter Artemis …. with Artemis you can develop your desktop based application in Java and create a User Interface for it in Flex/Flash or even AJAX. Isn’t that awesome!!

Apollo has out of the box support for reading/writing Files and windowing but with Artemis it brakes all boundaries, any kind of desktop software could now have a Flex interface. You could now have an Apollo/Flex application start/stop processes, talk to hardware devices on your system, make RPC calls to other process, make system calls … pretty much anything Java can do on the desktop, you can do it with this new combo of technologies but now not only is your user interface easier and faster to build and maintain, it can look a lot better than what desktop software ever have. With this, Apollo is in true competition with Microsoft’s WPF, I wonder what Microsoft feels about that

The Artemis project was started by Adam Flater, Sean Christmann and Tony Hillerson from effectiveUI but their intention is to run it as community project where developers can write and publish the Java and Flex components that make up an Artemis library at the Artemis Website. Any Java library that you have can be converted to an Apollo accessible form using the Artemis bridge. Artemis just like Apollo is still in alpha and currently there are three java libraries present in the project:

Screenshot Library
Generic JDBC Connection Library
XSLT Library

There is a very nice example Apollo application Artemis Screenshot available for download on the Artemis download page …. an awesome demo of the Wii light saber application that was showcased in Apollo Camp can be seen here at Adam’s blog.

I was my self thinking of possible applications that i could build using Java+Artemis+Apollo+Flex and the first thing that came to mind was the very first enterprise application that I ever worked on at EMC during my first job … EMC AutoStart which is a high availability clustering solution that allows you create and mange clusters of as much as a hundred systems in order to ensure high availability of enterprise applications like databases, email servers, banking software etc. The core of AutoStart is very complex and has evolved a lot in over 10 years so maintaining this core left us developers very little time for the Swing based UI. My first thought was that with Artemis AutoStart team could now very easily replace their existing UI with a nice Flex interface and the effort involved would also not be much .. i hope someone from my old team is listening.

So you see … this new project has a lot of scope and I am very excited about it.

To get more information about Artemis .. head over to the project homepage. Many other people have talked about Artemis on their blogs and I am leaving links to some of these posts for your reference:

I noticed something funny on the Artemis home page .. the author of the different news items is called Zues … this is funny because according to Greek mythology Zeus was the father of Apollo and Artemis