Excited by the possibilities afforded by JRuby and the ability to plug it into various different Java environments, I decided to try implementing a JRuby interactive console in Eclipse.

CodeGear, Borland's developer-focused division, released JBuilder 2008. The latest version of the Eclipse-based IDE offers support for application factories, a concept CodeGear's Jeff Anders describes in an interview with Artima.

Sun's latest JRE update focuses on ease of desktop deployment, and includes the Java Kernel, hardware acceleration, the Java Deployment Toolkit, and Java Quick Start.

JetBrains, maker of the popular IntelliJ IDE, released a new dependency analysis tool that makes it easier to grasp the structure of complex enterprise applications.

Adobe released today early versions of its AIR rich-client runtime, the open-source Flex SDK, and the FlexBuilder IDE on Linux, enabling cross-platform Flex development and deployment. The company also joined the Linux Foundation with the aim to further the cause of rich UI experiences on Linux desktops.

I just came across Steve Yegge's "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns," which (might) provide much of the explanation for why Java programs always seem to end up being excessively verbose.

Developers who have relied heavily on refactoring support available for static languages are suspicious of the productivity gains promised by dynamic languages.

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has added two new features aimed at applications that need to be highly tolerant of both application and data center failure. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels introduces elastic IP addresses and availability zones in a recent blog post.

Azul Systems released a new tool that allows continuous performance profiling of a Java application, even in a production environment. In addition, the company announced a program that lets developers observe their applications on Azul's 96-core hardware-based JVM.

Domain-specific languages have been brought to Java under the name "fluent interface." To define a fluent interface, most DSLs utilize strings and a lot of untyped behavior. With Java 5, and a bag of tricks, the compiler can check for a lot more, however. Jevgeni Kabanov discusses a new open-source project that aims to make that easier.

Pattern matching, a feature of languages such as Haskell, ML, and Scala, offers a convenient way to define sophisticated control flow. While Java does not provide pattern matching capabilities, the open-source Tom library adds pattern matching for Java. Luis Diego Fallas provides a brief pattern-matching overview for Java with Tom.

JavaScript is an object-oriented language, but it does not have the concept of classes. Instead, JavaScript relies on an object's prototype to encapsulate information. In a recent blog post, JQuery author John Resig describes how JavaScript inheritance can be made easier.

Wired Magazine, April 2008, page 44. Expired: ASP.NET, Tired: PHP, Wired: Django.

Lex Spoon, co-author of Programming in Scala, gave a presentation at the 2007 JAOO conference on Scala and on bringing future languages to the JVM. InfoQ posted a video of Spoon's presentation.

Asynchronous HTTP calls are increasingly popular, especially in Ajax and other rich-client applications. In a recent JavaWorld article, Gregor Roth reviews the principles of asynchronous HTTP in the context of the Servlet 2.5 API and Comet.