Running IntelliJ 9 Public Preview Community Edition on Mac OSX

JetBrains just announced they are open sourcing IntelliJ in a community edition with a subset of features from their commercial product. Having used Eclipse almost exclusively in my Java work, I was interested in trying it out and went to download the .dmg file. I unpacked everything and tried to run the poorly named Maia-IC-90.94.app Nothing came up. Lame. I dug into the package and executed idea.sh which prompted me that I need to set the environment variable IDEA_SDK or JDK_HOME. Ah ha! In my .bash_profile, I set 
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home
export IDEA_JDK=$JAVA_HOME
And ran idea.sh again and IntelliJ came up.

Running Maia-IC.90.94.app still doesn't run the app but at least now I can play around with IntelliJ.

Linode API for Java

I've been really happy with my recent move over to http://www.linode.com.  I was checking out their API and noticed there wasn't any Java client.  I wanted a do a small pet project so I took a couple hours this weekend and wrote a Java client for the API. The API leverages Apache HTTP Client and JSON.org Java libraries and is built using Maven. The project source code can be found here. If anyone runs into any problems with using it, please feel free to ping me! Update: Linode was nice enough to update their API page with a reference to my project.

Terracotta acquires Ehcache

Pretty big news in the Java world today. Open-source with a business model company, Terracotta, acquired Ehcache, the very popular caching library. The creator and maintainer of Ehcache, Greg Luck, had these things to say about the acquisition:
What this means for Ehcache Users
  • Ehcache remains under the Apache 2 license
  • New feature development is accelerated with the addition of a team of engineers working full-time on Ehcache
  • I am full-time on Ehcache. I have not had the time I would have liked to devote to Ehcache (I have been doing a miserly 10-15 hours per week for the past 6 years) but now I do. Look out!
  • Ehcache extends its standards support. There are multiple emerging standards in this area and I plan to work with the community to lead further standardisation efforts. A lack of time has been my biggest obstacle in doing more on this to date.
  • Ehcache gets new hosting at ehcache.org with state-of-the-art forums, source control and bug reporting. The changes will happen slowly and carefully.
  • File release at sourceforge.net is retained
  • Maven deployment to oss.sonatype.org and Maven Central is retained.
  • Distributed caching via Terracotta is seamless. Ehcache users can have full confidence that they can start single node and scale as high as they need to with Enterprise features.
  • Enterprise support, training and professional services for Ehcache. I have provided these for a few years now, but now we will have the full Terracotta organisation behind them with the usual SLAs.
What this means for Terracotta Users
  • Ehcache APIs will replace Terracotta distributed cache APIs as a single caching interface / standard for Terracotta distributed caching
  • a single-node version of Terracotta ala Ehcache will be available for the first time
  • Full freedom to run on the latest version of Ehcache at all times, knowing it will work with Terracotta
  • Single vendor support structure for caching interfaces / libraries as well as their scalability / reliability runtime.
  • the investment protection of standards
It's pretty cool to see open source companies like SpringSource (recently acquired by VMWare) and Terracotta making big moves. I look forward to seeing what's next for these guys.

The JSON Saga

Working with JSON all day and implementing my own URL shortening app, diminutiveurl.com using Base32 encoding, I really admire Douglas Crockford's smart and simple approach to these topics. I stumbled upon Crockford's talk on the JSON Saga, where he tells the story of how JSON came about. He is a really smart guy and a talented speaker. Check out the video: