Spring Roo 1.2.0.M1 released

Spring Roo 1.2.0.M1 was released. Significant changes:

• Ten times faster
• Now Apache licensed
• Moved to GitHub
• Adding service layer

Project page: http://www.springsource.org/roo

Some thoughts about plans

Recently I've heard a speech given by a successful business woman. What I've remembered was especially one point: The key to my success was not to have a plan, but to have a habit of planning. The world is changing so quickly that we have to change our plans very often!

Friends of Astah

Astah the producer of UML modeling program has started a new program: Friends of Astah. The Idea of their move is to make astah Professional available for free to individuals and organizations in the software community for one year, but not only.
You can profit from it in the following ways:

• 1-year license of Astah Professional
• The use of Friends of Astah logo
• Publishing your activity (links to blog/articles/books)
• Friend of Astah membership sticker

How to take part in the program look for: http://astah.net/friends-of-astah

Forcing a download dialog in the browser

If we have a link in our website to the resource, that can be opened in the browser itself, by default the resource will be open in the browser . But what can we do to have a link that will activate download instead? To force the resource to be downloaded by default, in the http response we should add header
Content-Disposition: attachment;filename="our_file_name"

To read more about http headers look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields

LOGBack

LOGBack is a new logging framework, that is intended to be a successor of log4j. It is designed by the founder of log4j Ceki Gülcü.

It allows us to have an abstraction level of logging, so we can use API for logging and change only configuration to use an other framework in runtime producing logging.
Some new features: parameterized logging statements, abstraction of configurable encoders, Mapped Diagnostic Context (adding useful context information to every log line e.g. user who started current operation), event filtering

If you want to learn how to migrate to LOGBack read: http://logback.qos.ch/manual/migrationFromLog4j.html

Javaagent

Since JDK 5 we have possibility to run Java application with parameter -javaagent, that allows to intercept compiled code with our own one. Our code is executed in the same JVM, loaded with system class loader with the same security policy.

To create your java agent you must implement method:
public static void premain(String agentArgs, Instrumentation inst);

and you have to archive this class into a jar file, that contains also file META-INF/MANIFEST.MF, with additional attribute Premain-Class with value of class that will be intercepted.
Then just run your application adding parameter -javaagent:your-jar-file.jar

Google App Engine changes!

Google corporation has announced that it changes Google App Engine terms of use. In the second half of September it will roll out further details. Some changes described in SLA draft (http://code.google.com/appengine/sla.html):

• reduction uptime to 99.95%
• have 3 year deprecation policy, to plan application changes more easily due to API changes.

Summing up, there will be still a free version of service but more limited. Someone who wants to pay for an extended version might consider doing it before October 31st and you will get 50$ bonus.

How to add Facebook button to your site?

How do you add Facebook's Like it button to your website or blog? It's really easy. You just have to add some javascript in the head of the page and a small piece of html code where you want to have it. A detailed description for Facebook's integration can be found at http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2010/04/facebook-like-button-for-blogger.html
Similar integration for Google Plus is available here http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2011/06/add-google-plus-one-button-on-blogger.html