VMWare to acquire SpringSource

I found myself doing a double-take as I skimread the Twitter feeds this evening. VMWare to acquire SpringSource - hey, hey what the?

Rod Johnson has blogged about it, and this time it's not April fools day so there may be some truth behind it.

I wonder what this means for other virtualisation and cloud computing providers?

For instance, will this influence the direction of Grails support for Google App Engine? After all, it didn't take long for Grails to do an about turn and support Tomcat instead of Jetty as its default servlet engine after G2One was acquired by SpringSource.

Eclipse plugins playing catch-up

Since upgrading to Eclipse Galileo (a.k.a. 3.5) I've noticed that there has been a definite lag in plugin developers supporting the latest version.

A couple of examples that have resulted in me keeping a parallel Ganymede (3.4) version installed include:
- Google App Engine
- Spring Tool Suite (well, not really, as I uninstalled this once I saw the recommended configuration tweaks to get the plugins to play nicely with OSGi)

Today I noticed that SpringSource have blogged and tweeted about an impending milestone 1 release of Eclipse Groovy Tools, still tied to 3.4 but with the assurance that 3.5 support will be available soon.

Google App Engine play

I've gotten back around to trying out Google App Engine.

The main area that I have heard about it has been in my dealings with Grails, but I am sticking with the plain Java capabilities for my initial experimenting.

It seems fairly trivial to build and deploy some servlets using the Google plugin for Eclipse - even though that has meant switching back to a Ganymede version of Eclipse instead of the shiney new Galileo.

Being the curious sort, the first chunk of original-ish code that I deployed within my application was a servlet that iterates over the System properties of the server that is running the application and outputs them to the response.

After some sleep I think I will have a go at implementing a distributed game of noughts and crosses using AJAX and some servlets. This seems like it should be a simple enough game to implement, but will have the challenges of keeping track of players and game state.

Another limited use killer app

A week or so ago I signed up with a Google App Engine account. The next step was trying to think up an application to develop and deploy onto this new-ish cloud computing environment. I thought about an auction system, as I have some experience of that from a project that I lead back in New Zealand, but I got side-tracked into preparing for some interviews.

Yesterday I was looking for someplace on Google maps, which made me somehow think of providing an online lost and found service. Users can register to post their lost/found item details:

• using a Google Maps mashup (or whatever you like to call it) to specify the location
• upload image(s) of the item
• specify a means of being contacted

Sure enough when I did a quick search I found that someone else is already providing a similar service - but I'm still considering it as a toy application that could motivate me to try to produce a map-based system that can be configured to use different mapping services, as opposed to being tied to a particular provider. That was an issue that came up in one of those "what if" conversations at a pub after a technical user group.

Technologies I am currently looking into

Here's a list of tools / libraries / methodologies that I am hoping to reading about and have a play with while I some spare time on my hands.

TestNG - why use it instead of JUnit? How does its support for running tests in parallel work?

JSF 2 - what's changed since I last used RichFaces, Facelets etc.? Is it now possible to utilise the various open source widgets side-by-side?

Groovy - What cool features are there that I haven't already come across in using Grails?

easyb - will this give maximum value by allowing developers to write tests more rapidly (Groovy vs Java), and have the tests more human readable?

Spring

• STS (Spring Tool Suite)
• Spring 3.0
• Spring Security 3 - initial overview makes me want to have a play with the @PreAuthorize and @PostFilter annotations, the codebase tidy up should make it easier to get setup up too.
  
• Roo
• tc Server
• DM Server
• OSGi support

Google Wave

Google App Engine - just got an account set up, installing exclipse plugin ...

Google Web Driver - an alternative to Selenium