Entries tagged with java - Channel 9

Windows Azure extended Interoperability presented at PDC09

Jean-Christophe Cimetiere — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:48:11 GMT

During day one PDC09 keynote, Ray Ozzie highlighted Microsoft’s commitment to interoperability announcing additional technologies you can now use on Window Azure Tomcat (Java), memcached and MySQL.

We sat down with Steve Marx (Technical Strategist in the Window Azure team) and Vijay Rajagopalan (Principal Architect in the Interoperability team) to discuss these new possibilities.

If you want more detail and demos, refer to Steve Marx’s talk Building Java Applications with Windows Azure and Mohit Srivastava-Tushar Shanbhag's talk Developing PHP and MySQL Applications with Windows Azure.

Additional links:

Interoperability Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/
Windows Azure interoperability: www.windowsazure.com/interoperability

Apache Stonehenge demoed at PDC09

Jean-Christophe Cimetiere — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:47:00 GMT

A couple weeks ago, Microsoft was at ApacheCon. We reported the progress made on the Stonehenge project and presented the roadmap.

The goal of Stonehenge is to provide a public forum to test the interoperability of WS-* protocols on different vendor stacks and to build sample applications that could provide best practices and coding guidelines for better interoperability. The main sample application, StockTrader has been implemented on .NET (by Microsoft), PHP (by WSO2), WSAS JAVA stack (by WSO2), Metro (by SUN Microsystems), Spring (by SpringSource). The latest version of StockTrader uses the WS-Security and WS-Trust protocols for claims-based authentication scenarios. This allows the end-users to be authenticated through an independent Security Token Service (STS) that is trusted by the bank and to pass that token to the broker to process the transaction.

This week at PDC09, we were demoing the project. I went to see Kent Brown, product manager for WCF and asked him to give us an update and show a demo of the different StockTrader applications working together.

Watch the video till the end, Kent unveils the mystery on why the project was called Stonehenge!

Additional links:

Project page: Apache Stonehenge
Interoperability Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/

Developing Windows Azure applications for PHP, Ruby, and Java, using Eclipse

Robert Hess — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:57:00 GMT

In our previous episode, Vijay Rajagopalan shared with us some of the details about a session he did at MIX09 which showed how Microsoft was providing support for building Silverlight applications using Eclipse on either Windows or even on other platforms as well.

In today’s episode Vijay shares with us the details regarding some new interoperability support which will similarly allow PHP developers to use the Eclipse IDE to develop for and deploy to Windows Azure, and provide Java developers with a new Windows Azure SDK, making their life much easier when they use Windows Azure storage services in particular. He’ll also describe how Microsoft is working to make sure that Eclipse itself is a great Windows 7 application and how it will enable developers to write applications which can take full advantage of special Windows 7 features.

And you can find more information about these interoperability tools here:

Using Eclipse to build Silverlight applications in Java, PHP and Ruby [Using Eclipse to build Silverlight applications in Java, PHP and Ruby]

Robert Hess — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:31:00 GMT

As hard as it might be to believe, not everybody is using Visual Studio as their development platform. Then what if they want to develop a Silverlight application? Is notepad their only option?

Fortunately not. Vijay Rajagopalan did a session at MIX09 earlier this year which shows how we've been working hard to provide interoperability support for Eclipse users that not only allows them to use Eclipse as their development environment, but also allows them to integrate their Silverlight applications into PHP, Ruby, or Java.

And if you want more details, you can watch Vijay's MIX09 session here:

Build Applications on the Microsoft Platform Using Exlipse, Java, Ruby, and PHP!

And for additional information and downloads, you might be interested in the following:

Interoperability @ Microsoft

in reply to Using Eclipse to build Silverlight applications in Java, PHP and Ruby

Web Services Interoperability using WCF and Project Metro

Matthijs Hoekstra — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:20:00 GMT

In deze sessie zullen we behandelen hoe je in een multi-platform omgeving interoperability kunt bereiken tussen services gebouwd op het Microsoft platform en services die leven in de Java Enterprise wereld. We gebruiken Metro, het Sun Web Service Interoperability initiatief en Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). We demonstreren hoe je met behulp van Metro en WCF een Java web applicatie kunt laten praten met .Net services en vice versa. Verder zullen we ingaan op een aantal problemen waar je in de pratijk tegenaan zult lopen als je dit soort dingen gaat maken en hoe je deze oplost. We kijken tevens naar de mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden van de huidige stand van de techniek.

Opmerking: De kwaliteit van de powerpoint/demo stream is helaas niet super goed, zodra we een betere kwaliteit hebben zetten we deze online. Excuus voor het ongemak.

Deze video is opgenomen tijdens de DevDays in Den Haag in juni 2009. DevDays is het grootste evenement op het vlak van softwareontwikkeling en -architectuur in Nederland. Duizenden development professionals bezoeken dit jaarlijkse evenement om in twee dagen weer volledig op de hoogte te zijn van alle ontwikkelingen op hun vakgebied.

David Chappell - The Microsoft Application Platform: A perspective

Matthijs Hoekstra — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:46:00 GMT

What is an application platform? Why is it important? And how should we think about application platforms in a world of cloud computing? In this session, David Chappell looks at all of these topics, providing a general model for both on-premises and cloud platforms. He then uses this model to examine several important issues in this area, including the competition between .NET and Java, why SOA is failing, and how the Microsoft platform compares with its on-premises and cloud competitors.

This video is recorded at the Dutch DevDays in Den Haag The Netherlands in June 2009. DevDays is the largest industry event for developers in the Netherlands. Thousands of professional developers visit DevDays yearly to keep in touch with the latest developments in their field.

Open XML made easier for Java developers with Apache POI

Jean-Christophe Cimetiere — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:17:00 GMT

When developers are tasked to deal with document file formats it might be challenging to do the right thing if you don’t have a good experience with a particular format, and need to crack it open and understand all the details.

For Java developers and Microsoft Office file formats there’s a very interesting solution with the Apache POI project, which provides a Java API to access Microsoft Office formats. Last year Microsoft and Sourcesence announced that they would collaborate to add support of the Open XML file format to the Apache POI project, and the resulting Open XML support has been integrated as part of POI 3.5 beta 5.

The end result: Good news for Java developers who need to manipulate the Office Open XML files (.XLSX, .DOCX, .PPTX), because it really makes it easier for them to do the job!

To illustrate the point, let me walk you through a demo scenario that uses Apache POI Java Libraries and actually combines it with the PHPExcel project (for PHP developers) and the Open XML Format SDK 2.0 (for .NET developers). My goal is just to give you a sense of the type of scenarios you can easily develop using multiple languages and multiple platforms.

We will make that demo available with more explanation in an article on http://openxmldeveloper.org/. Before we get into the demo itself I want to thank Julien Chable and Maarten Balliauw for their help in building this demo.

For now, let me walk you through the scenario. For the sake of our demonstration we are going to show how raw data can be consumed by a Java web application using the Apache POI, to create an .XLSX file from scratch. How that file can then be accessed and modified by a PHP application (with PHPExcel). And finally how the resulting file can be digitally signed and finalized via the .NET framework using the Open XML Format SDK.

Here’s the data flow:

Step 1 of the scenario starts in the Java Web applications:

Once the “Create Spreadsheet” button is pressed, it creates the files:

And does some processing to inject the initial XML data and formatting. The result looks like this:

Most of the Java code required to do this fits in this code snippet:

Step 2, moving to the PHP application, the UI is similar:

This step adds cell protection, renames the .XLSX file, changes cell formatting, and inserts additional content formatting. The result looks like this:

And the code to accomplish it looks like this:

Step 3, finally, from the ASP.NET web applications using the Open XML Format SDK:

Where the code for adding the digital signature looks like this:

Easy, don’t you think?
Stay tuned, as I said earlier, we will follow up on http://openxmldeveloper.org/ with a more detailed article.

Additional background on PHPExcel and the Open XML SDK:

The PHPExcel project is an open source project available on Codeplex. It consists of a set of classes for PHP that enables PHP applications to read and write to various file formats. These formats include HTML, PDF, and the relevant one for our demonstration…Excel 2007’s .XLSX format. This class set supports features such as setting spreadsheet meta data (author, title, description ...), multiple worksheets, different fonts and font styles, cell borders, fills, gradients, and adding images to spreadsheets. In parallel to this project, there is also the sister project PHPPowerPoint, which is intended to operate along similar lines as the PHPExcel application but with a focus on the .PPTX file formats. Both of these projects are built around the OpenXML standard, and the PHP framework. Read this nice article: Use PHP to create Open XML Spreadsheet reports

The Open XML Format SDK provides methods for .NET developers to access and manipulate XML content, including XML data contained in OXML document formatted files. It provides strongly typed part classes to manipulate Open XML documents. The SDK also uses the .NET Framework Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) technology to provide strongly typed object access to the XML content inside the parts of Open XML documents. The April 2009 CTP release also adds support for the validation of Open XML documents.
Read Brian Jones' blog to go deep on Open XML SDK.

Jean-Christophe Cimetiere - Sr. Technical Evangelist

John Rose: Static Runtimes and Dynamic Byte Codes

Charles — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:17:00 GMT

John Rose is a virtual machine expert who's been working on the Java Virtual Machine for several years. He's part of the team that is adding multi-language support to the JVM, specifically, dynamic language support. How does the multi-dynamic-language support mechanism work, exactly, inside the statically typed JVM? What are some of the basic problems faced by VMs that must support both static and dynamic languages? The JVM, like the CLR, has a baked in static type system. What hurdles did this create for John and team and have they jumped them?

Tune in.

ARCast.TV - Eric Newcomer of IONA on the state of Interoperability

Bob Familiar — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:36:00 GMT

Eric Newcomer, Chief Technology Officer of IONA, discusses the challenges of interoperability in a heterogeneous world, the state of middleware and interoperability standards with Bob Familiar.

Ted Neward: On Java and .NET, Software Academics versus Practioners, General Purpose Programming Languages

Charles — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:31:00 GMT

Ted Neward (the Dude) sits down with me to discuss programming languages and related topics. Ted is a software architect and consultant that spends a great deal of his time working in the area of Java-.NET interop (multi-platform communication). He's got a great perspective on theory versus practice and the importance of languages and software platforms that meet the needs of both academics and professional developers.

Ted also shares his insights on the history of languages and platforms.

Very interesting conversation for sure! Ted's a great guy with lots of experience in the industry as a practioner.

Enjoy!

Low res file here.

Code To Live: Dave Donaldson on CodeKeep

joshholmes — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:47:18 GMT

Josh Holmes caught up with Dave Donaldson to talk about the cool project that he started back in 2005 called CodeKeep. This is a fantastic example of a passionate guy putting up a project that everyone can benefit from with no financial motivation.

This is one of the longer episodes so far (close to 30 minutes) but there's a lot of great content here.

Charles Nutter and Wayne Kelly: Making Ruby Run on Static Virtual Machines - JRuby(JVM) and Ruby.NET

Charles — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:28:13 GMT

At Lang.NET 2008, I caught up with two dynamic languages afficianados who have been working on a similar (and really hard)problem over the years: getting Ruby (a dynamic language) to run on a static virtual machine (JVM and CLR, respectived).

Charles Nutter is a lead developer on the JRuby project which aims to run Ruby "natively' on the JVM. Wayne Kelly is the lead developer on the now defunct Ruby.NET project (it's been merged into the IronRuby project so Wayne and team's great work has not gone with the wind...) which aimed to get Ruby to run on the CLR.

Both Charles and Wayne are challanged by the same technical hurdles: Running dynamic code in a statically-typed environment with no support for continuations. This is really challenging and is the primary reason that Microsoft created the DLR...

Here, we chat about that they're working on and what problems they face.

Another interesting discussion with brilliant people at Lang.NET 2008.

Enjoy.

Low res download file.

JAOO 2007: Erik Meijer and Dave Thomas - Objects, Functions, Virtual Machines, IDEs and Other Fun St

Charles — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:05:00 GMT

JAOO 2007: Gilad Bracha - Computational Theology, Functional versus Imperative, Language History and

Charles — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:17:00 GMT

Dr. Bracha is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System.

Enjoy!

JAOO 2007: Kresten Krab Thorup - JAOO What. How. Why.

Charles — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:02:25 GMT

I recently got the chance to attend JAOO in Aarhus, Denmark. Besids learning a great amount about various approaches to solving hard problems that we all face as programmers (regardless of the stack we spend most of our time developing on), I got to meet so many interesting people from all walks of programmer life. What a great conference! For one thing, JAOO not about specifc products. It's not about one company's view of the world. It's not about one class of technologies or developer. It's not just about Java and LAMP or .NET and Windows.

JAOO is a unique conference and I love the way sessions are reviewed by attendees: after the session ends attendees can simply choose red, yellow or green pieces of paper and place them in a bucket. Red means the session was poor. Yellow means it was OK. Green means it was good. Attendees are also encouraged to write feedback on the piece of colored paper they choose. Simple, yet incredibly effective. Hey, PDC people. Pay attention.

JAOO is a truly interdisciplinary conference that attracts some of the smartest folks in the industry. Luckily, I got a chance to spend some time with a few of these programming pioneers and innovators and you will get to meet them over the coming days.

First up is Kresten Krab Thorup. For those of you who program in Java, you've undoubtedly heard of Kresten. Dr. Kresten Krab Thorup is Chief Architext and Co-founder and one of the Software Pilots of Trifork. Kresten in largely known for his work on integrating generics into Java. He is also one of the creators JAOO and each year, besides being the MC of the event, he can be spotted wandering around the conference in a bright green jacket engaging attendees and speakers.

I had a great time and JAOO 2007. My perspective has changed in terms of Us vs Them mentality as well gaining a new respect for both dynamic languages and functional programming. (You will be seeing some very interesting interviews with some of the pioneers of these two "hot" programming techniques).

Enjoy and a very big thank you to the wonderful JAOO team for inviting me to JAOO 2007 and providing unrestricted access to the event and speakers. I hope to be back next year!

Delivering Parameterized Silverlight Content with Java

Adam Kinney — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:27:47 GMT

This video demonstrates how J2EE can be used to generate XAML which is then delivered to a JSP Silverlight front end. A XAML Generator was written in Java, and this fronts the Northwind database. Queries to the database can be triggered from the Silverlight front end, and these result in XAML being constructed from a template on the server. It demonstrates how dynamic front ends can be assembled server side due to the fact that XAML is XML, and how Silverlight can be used with disparate back-ends, including Java-based ones.

license.