This week, I posted an interview with Bruce Eckel on InfoQ.com.  Bruce is a legend in the Java community, who has moved on to working with Python and Flex.  When I first learned Java his book Thinking In Java was a huge help.  In the interview, he shares on a broad number of topics, including discussing his latest book, First Steps in Flex.

Check out the interview here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/05/bruce-eckel

In our latest episode of drunk’n madness, we interview Adam Flater.  He is the founder of the Merapi project, which provides a bridge between AIR and Java on the client.  Check it out at: http://www.drunkonsoftware.com/2009/05/01/episode-12-adam-flater/.

This week Dzone posted a Refcard James Ward and I wrote on the new Spring BlazeDS Integration project (Download the Refcard here).  To go along with publishing the Refcard, Dzone’s James Sugrue interviewed James and I for our thoughts on Spring and Flex.  If you are interested in integrating Flex and Spring, the new Spring project makes life pretty easy, and our Refcard will help guide you through getting everything setup with a fairly straightforward example.  Let me know if you have any feedback on the Refcard or the interview.

Our podcast of Booze and Bits continues in episode 11, where we do our usual thing – geek out on software over a few beers.  In this episode, we chat with Matt Raible about GWT, open source, RIA, etc.

Check out the episode here: http://www.drunkonsoftware.com/2009/04/05/episode-11-matt-raible/

I spent most of the day working on setting up a new project with the latest Spring (3.0.0M1) and Hibernate (3.3.1.GA) releases.  I have more recent experience with Hibernate and was able to get everything working pretty quickly with Postgres on VMWare share.  It has been a few years since I last setup a Spring project and really got down in the guts with it.  I remember it being a mostly low cost framework that provided quite a bit of handy plumbing.  I have never been wowed by dependency injection for dependency injections sake, but I have always liked the things Spring pairs with their container (AOP, ORM support, etc).

Anyhow, as I dug in today I was pretty shocked to see how bloated Spring (and Hibernate) have become.  I have been guilty of throwing JAR after JAR at problems, but it was almost unbelievable to see how many dependencies each framework now has, which of course caused me significant versioning hell in attempting to get the right mix of JARs.  With each change, a tweak to libraries seems to come.

The other surprising part to me was the number of different options there are now for configuring Spring, and how difficult it is to find a clear path to follow.  I am huge fan of annotations, and I am glad that they added significant support in that area.  However, even though I now have a working setup, I have little confidence that I am completely inline with the best practices.

Our company’s founders, Stu and Ed, love to make the statement, “Freedom from choice.” It seems like a “lightweight container,” like Spring would follow this simple axiom.

Anyhow, I am posting my current project for feedback.  Let me know if you see any silliness or have feedback on how I can improve my setup.  It pretty basic so far … Hibernate with Annotations, Spring (Annotations, ORM support), and SpringSecurity.  Here is the project.

In the latest installment of Drunk On Software, we dicuss Anvil with project founder Ryan Knight.  Ryan is a colleague of mine at Gorilla Logic. Enjoy the video and let us know if you need any more information on Anvil.

This week we posted a video with Stephan Janssen.  Stephan is a great guy and an important voice in the Java and Flex communities. Check out the video here.

Chet Haase, an engineer on the Adobe Flex Platform Team, shared a few thoughts this week on how JavaFX and Adobe Flex compare.  Chet brings a unique perspective, as he was a member of Sun’s JavaFX team before joining Abobe.  You can read his comments in my InfoQ post.

Well, I have been pushing him to get in the Blogging game for a while, as he brings a unique take to all things software.  He is our CEO that codes.  I don’t know what that says for his CEO skills, but for us developers it makes for a great boss.  Anyhow, here is the official introduction to Mr. Stu Stern’s blog, Big Gorilla.

Well, this seems like a stupid statement, but for me, “Flex is Java!”  We have heard a lot the last year about Java the platform versus Java the programming language, with the push to add scripting languages to the JVM and add extensions beyond the core programming language.

When you look at Flex you find that Data Services is built to run in a Servlet container.  The IDE is an Eclipse plug-in.  The only thing that really breaks from Java is that the client runtime is not a JVM, but Java has basically failed to ever deliver a viable client side runtime for browser-based applications.  So, why not consider Flex / Flash for this option?

That is actually where my statement comes from, as I think Sun should have started claiming, “Flex is Java” in 2007 as a marketing campaign, rather than starting their client side initiative, JavaFX.  Even if JavaFX ends up becoming a viable technical option, how will Sun ever profit from it?  I know-I know, I read Jonathan Schwartz’s blog and hear they are making money on Java, but in all seriousness… why doesn’t Sun promote things like Flex as successes of the Java platform? Is it just another case of “not built here syndrome?”