wamblee.org

Introduction

The utilities library consists of software to support development of Java and in particular Java EE applications. I started this in 2005 when I realized that it would be very nice to have a support library readily available instead of having to cut and paste from old code.

There are many purposes for this documentation:

  • To allow others to use this library.
  • To allow myself to use the library(!). This is because I have written a lot of stuff in the past and need to make sure I have good enough documentation describing what I have made and how to use it.
  • To document the current state of development. In particular, some parts may be deprecated because of other developments).
  • To allow extension of the library.

See the links on the left side for information about various components of the utilities library.

Philosopy

Some parts in the utilities library may seem familiar to users of other popular frameworks such as Spring and Guice. This is not always a coincidence. It is my view that there many good IOC frameworks but that it is not a good idea to tie into any one of them specifically. Also, the support that one actually needs to develop applications and in particular enterprise applications efficiently only requires a few basic support utilities and typically not a big framework. Therefore, you will find a couple of small utilities that may be familiar in the functionality they offer to what is found in other frameworks.

Apart from this, there are many other interesting developments going on:

  • Java EE 6 dependency injection: Java EE 6 provides a powerful dependency injection framework called Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI), that contains a lot of experience from proven frameworks such as Spring and Guice. In particular, I think CDI can be viewed as a standardization of Guice (although some people might disagree). This, in effect, should make anyone think twice before depending heavily on a 3rd party IOC framework instead of using CDI.
  • Lightweight component technologies: Integration of lightweight component technologies such as OSGI and Java EE is under way which will also shift the balance. In effect, the enterprise spec for OSGI was released March 23rd 2010 and Glassfish V3 is already partly using it.

In particular, I believe that Java EE 6 with new powerful concepts such as singleton beans, lifecycle management, Contexts and Dependency Injection, used in combination with Enterprise OSGI will provide the most powerful way to develop applications in the future. In this. I am making only an exception for web frameworks to which I think JSF is not a good solution. I would use Wicket anyday if it were up to me.