The SUN has finally set at Redwood Shores

We’ve been debating the merits of a possible IBM-Sun deal for a while now, and even Sun itself seemed to be in the dark as to if it would be a good idea to be bought by IBM. These debates are now all moot: in a surprise move (at least, I didn’t see any speculation about it) Oracle has bought Sun Microsystems, at USD 9.50 a share, which equates to a total of 7.4 billion USD. The news got out through a press release.

“Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. “We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.”

“This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, also in the press release, “From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.”

“Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “This transaction will preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.”

The deal has received unanimous approval of Sun’s board, and is likely to go down this summer, after shareholder approval.

About Oracle

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit thes Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

About Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision — “The Network is the Computer” — Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://www.sun.com.

ten commandments for Java programmers

There are many standards and best practices for Java Developers out there. The article 10 Commandments for Java Developers outlines ten most basic rules that every developer must adhere to and the disastrous outcomes that can follow if these rules are not followed. Briefly summarizing the 10 commandments:

1. 1. Add comments to your code. – It is true comments do not literally contribute to the functionality of a program. But time and time again you return to the code that you wrote two weeks ago and, for the life of you, you cannot remember what it does!
   2. Do not complicate things. – Developers tend to come up with complicated solutions for the simplest problems. We introduce EJBs into applications that have five users. We implement frameworks that an application just does not need. We add property files, object-oriented solutions, and threads to the application that do not require such things. For those who do not know any better, I recommend reaching out to the more experienced programmers for advice.
   3. Keep in Mind – “Less is more” is not always better. – Code efficiency is a great thing, but in many situations writing fewer lines of code does not improve the efficiency of that code.
   4. No hard coding, please. – Developers often forget or omit this rule on purpose because we are, as usual, crunched for time. But maybe if we had followed this rule, we would not have ended up in the situation that we are in. How long does it take to write one extra line of code that defines a static final variable?
   5. Do not invent your own frameworks. – There are literally thousands of frameworks out there and most of them are open-source. Many of these frameworks are superb solutions that have been used in thousands of applications. We need to keep up to date with the new frameworks, at least superficially. One of the best and most obvious examples of a superb widely used framework is Struts. This open source web framework is a perfect candidate to be used in web-based applications.
   6. Say no to Print lines and String Concatenations. – I know that for debugging purposes, developers like to add System.out.println everywhere we see fit. And we say to ourselves that we will delete these later. But we often forget to delete these lines of code or we do not want to delete them.
   7. Pay attention to the GUI. – No matter how absurd it sounds; I repeatedly observe that GUI is as important to the business clients as functionality and performance. The GUI is an essential part of a successful application. Very often IT management tends to overlook the importance of GUI. Many organizations save money by not hiring web designers who have experience in design of “user-friendly” applications. Java developers have to rely on their own HTML skills and their limited knowledge in this area.
   8. Always Prepare Document Requirements. – Every business requirement must be documented. This could be true in some fairy tale, but it is far from that in the real world. No matter how time-pressed your development is, no matter how tight the deadlines, you must always make sure that every business requirement is documented.
   9. Unit-test. Unit-test. Unit-test. – I am not going to go into any details as to what is the best way to unit-test your code. I am just going to say that that it must be done. This is the most basic rule of programming. This is one rule that, above all, cannot be omitted. It would be great if your fellow developer could create and execute a test plan for your code, but if that is not possible, you must do it yourself. When creating a unit test plan, follow these basic rules:
      1. Write the unit test before writing code for the class it tests.
      2. Capture code comments in unit tests.
      3. Test all the public methods that perform an “interesting” function (that is, not getters and setters, unless they do their getting and setting in some unique way).
   10. Remember – quality, not quantity. – Do not stay late (when you do not have to). I understand that sometimes production problems, urgent deadlines, and unexpected events might prevent us from leaving work on time. But, managers do not appreciate and reward their employees because they stay late on regular basis, they appreciate them because they do quality work. If you follow the rules that I outline above, you will find yourself producing less buggy and more maintainable code. That is the most important part of your job.

 

TIOBE Programming Community Index

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

The index can be used to check whether your programming skills are still up to date or to make a strategic decision about what programming language should be adopted when starting to build a new software system.

Since there are many questions about the way the TIOBE index is assembled, a special page is devoted to its definition.

The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query is executed for the regular Google, Google Blogs, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube web search for the last 12 months. The web site Alexa.com has been used to determine the most popular search engines.

The number of hits determine the ratings of a language. The counted hits are normalized for each search engine for the first 50 languages.

Besides the rating of programming languages, there is also a status indicated in the TIOBE chart. Programming languages that have status “A” are considered to be mainstream languages. Status “A-” and “A–” indicate that a programming language is between status “A” and “B”. If a programming language has a rating that is higher than 0.7% (yes, this number is arguable but we had to fix it somewhere) for at least 3 months it is rewarded status “A”. The first two months the programming language will receive status “A–” and “A-” respectively. The opposite holds for languages that go from status “A” to status “B”. So if a language had status “A” 2 months ago, a rating of “0.607%” last month and a rating of “0.687%” now, it will have status “A–“.

Programming languages that are very similar are grouped together. Currently the maximum of the hits of the individual languages is taken into account when calculating the ratings of groupings. In the future we will do a better job and take the union (from mathematical set theory) of all the hits.

The long term trends for the top 10 programming languages can be found in the line diagram below.

No wonder Java tops the ranking. And it will continue to hold that position for some time to come. What I am surprised to see there was Pascal is gaining popularity and people are using it nowadays. You can see the list of top 50 languages here.

Which is the Hottest Java Web Framework?

The “Break it Down” Blog has a lengthy post on Which is the Hottest Java Web Framework? Or Maybe Not Java? Comparing Java Web Frameworks is hard because so many people are passionate about the framework they know best. Add a couple more like Flex and Ruby on Rails and its downright difficult. Nevertheless, this post is good in that it contains a lot of pretty trend graphs and it looks like the author has done some good research. It’s likely the folks that will scream foul are the ones that did poor in the comparison (Tapestry and Stripes, I’m talking about you).

Surprising among the top Java Web Frameworks is the rise of Struts 2. Which is much more interesting I think is how Wicket adoption has stayed almost flat while Struts2 adoption has spiked. Spring MVC/WebFlow seems to be going no where fast and racing JBoss Seam there.The popularity of Struts 2 really caught me off guard with it being quite a bit different from Struts 1, I figured it got thrown into the “just another web framework” category, but I guess there is something in a name and it’s doing quite well.

Regardless of what one might think of the post and trends, one has appreciate the amount of time the author invests in the work.

Is Java Windows for Unix?

Is Java Windows for Unix? by ZDNet‘s Paul Murphy — The key conceptual difference between C and Java as used in business applications development and run-times is simply this: the C you learn in school is the C you find in things like Solaris, but the Java you learn in school has very little, if anything, to do with the Java you see in things like Sun’s identity management packages.

JDBC Prepared Statements

A Prepared Statement forces a SQL statement to be set to the database immediately where it will be precompiled. This means that for subsequent calls, the SQL statement can just run the Prepared Statements’ SQL statement without having to compile it with every call. A Prepared Statement is most useful when using a SQL statement that accepts parameters that may change with every call. I’ll demonstrate this technique using a MySQL database.

Below is a method that sends a Prepared Statement to the database with two parameters: “userId” and “password”. Notice that it calls the getConnection () method from a class instance called dataUtil. We’ll talk about this class in a second for completeness.

    public ResultSet viewItem (int journalId, int userId) throws SQLException {
        ResultSet rs = null;
        String sql = "SELECT journal_id, date_added, journal_text FROM journal" +
                                                                 "WHERE journal_id = ? AND user_id = ?";

        Connection conn = dataUtil.getConnection();

        PreparedStatement preparedStatement = conn.prepareStatement(sql);
        preparedStatement.setInt(1, journalId);
        preparedStatement.setInt(2, userId);

        rs = preparedStatement.executeQuery();

        return rs;
    }

As I mentioned above, I wanted to show you how to use the getConnection method, because after all, if you can’t connect to a database you can’t execute a Prepared Statement. It will return an open Connection object for our Prepared Statement to use. The SERVER and DATABASE constants you would replace with your server address and database name, and the USER and PASS constants would obviously be your database username and password. This method requires the MySQL Connector/J JDBC driver. You can grab this at http://www.mysql.com

    public Connection getConnection() {
        try {
            Class.forName("org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver");

            Properties connProp = new Properties();
            connProp.put ("user", USER);
            connProp.put ("password", PASS);
            connProp.put ("useUnicode", "false");

            Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://" + SERVER + "/" + DATABASE, connProp);
            return con;

        }catch (ClassNotFoundException cnf){
            return null;
        }catch (SQLException ex) {
            return null;
        }
    }

Notice that we first declare a variable to represent the SQL statement, and assign the SQL to it:

                    String sql = "SELECT journal_id, date_added, journal_text 

						FROM journal WHERE journal_id = ? AND user_id = ?";
The values that we will be sending to the database are represented by "?". Next we call our

getConnection () method to get our connection object and then define our Prepared Statement,

and then append our parameters to the Prepared Statement with these lines.
			preparedStatement.setInt(1, journalId);

 		preparedStatement.setInt(2, userId);
Notice that you should use the correct set method depending on the data type of the field you are

assigning the value to (see References below). All that's left to do is to execute the Prepared Statement

and to return the result set.

Reference: java.sun.com

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Java vs. C++: A Critical Comparison

In the article, a critical comparison, the author Robert C. Martin compares and contrasts Java and C++. This article is simply a discussion of the differences in the two languages, and not a diatribe against one language or another. It becomes really necessary for new Java programmers who are moving from C++ to understand these differences as it is going to help them see the problem with a new perspective.

 

A Critical Comparison

Introducing Apache Wicket

When you’re learning a new technology or framework, it’s helpful to gain an understanding of the terms and concepts, then move on to how the pieces come together. “Introducing Apache Wicket,” by Nick Heudecker, approaches Apache Wicket by presenting the core concepts behind the framework, and moves to reinforce those concepts with an example leveraging some of Wicket’s strengths.

JSTL Quick Reference

 

The JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) provides a full-featured set of tags for JSP development. There is a very handy JSTL Quick Reference in PDF format. This document is designed to be folded tri-fold style. You’ll find that it then conveniently fits in your back pocket.

Getting Further As a Programmer

Although, as with many java.net polls , it is difficult to conclude anything from the current one , it is interesting to speculate about anyway. Asked “what would most help your career” (one assumes, “as Java developers”), few point to new tools and languages as being most helpful:

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