The team that founded Apache’s Maven project has joined Eclipse to marry their popular framework and repository with the Eclipse platform and projects.

Engineers from Sonatype, the corporate backers of Maven, have also joined the Eclipse board, where they’ll play a part in the open-source group’s architectural direction. Sonatype has become a strategic member.

Jason van Zyl, Apache Maven founder and also founder and chief technology officer of Sonatype, told The Reg he’d lobby for his Java build-and-release framework and repository to be integrated with the next version of Eclipse, due in just under a year. The idea is for Sonatype’s Maven plug in for Eclipse, M2Eclipse, to ship with Eclipse 3.5 - a first version of M2Eclipse is due by the end of September.

Sun on Tuesday announced availability of Java VisualVM, an open-source GUI tool for troubleshooting and profiling Java applications.

Users can view detailed information about Java applications while they are running on a JVM (Java Virtual Machine). Billed as an all-in-one troubleshooting tool, VisualVM integrates several command line JDK (Java Development Kit) tools and profiling capabilities. It enhances monitoring and performance analysis, according to Sun.

“After eight months of frantic development since VisualVM Preview 1 was released, I’m happy to announce the general availability of JDK 6 Update 7 Java VisualVM and VisualVM 1.0,” said Luis-Miguel Alventosa, a Sun senior software engineer, in a blog.

Offered as part of Java Platform, Standard Edition (SE) Update 7, Java VisualVM provides a visual diagnostic tool for development and production environments. It includes such technologies as jvmstat, which provides lightweight performance and configuration instrumentation to the HotSpot JVM, as well as Java Management Extensions and the NetBeans profiler.

Following the announcement of Sun’s plans to make Java free and open under the General Public License (GPL) at JavaOne 2006, there have been a few struggles on the path to open source. At the time of the OpenJDK release in May last year, around five percent of the code–the portion not owned by Sun–was still closed.

Simon Phipps, the chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems, said: “We released under the GPL everything we had the rights to release under the GPL and that was last summer. There were a couple of holdouts there. One was the area to do with raster graphics and 2D graphics. That turned out to be owned by a company that didn’t want us to release that code as open source. We negotiated with them and because they’ve said ‘yes, you can open source the code’, I can tell you they’re Codec […].”

The only element that’s left now is actually a sound-related component within Java. We finally decided that the vendor that’s involved there just isn’t going to play ball and we’re rewriting the code from scratch. That’s going to be done within the next couple of months.”

Phipps says Java is expected to be completely free within the coming few months.

Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence.

Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C are definitely losing ground.

‘Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,’ says Jansen. ‘The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.’

Sometimes your Java application will need to execute an external process which you do not have any control over. Executing external applications from Java is problematic since you do not know when they end, you need to capture their output and parse it and also make sure that they will not hang and causes your program to wait for them forever.

There are several ways you can execute external applications while protecting your program. The following example will show you how to execute a process, get the response as a string and specify a timeout period in which the external application has to finish. In case the process did not finish after the timeout period we’ll abort the process and throw TimeoutException

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Sun Microsystems is refashioning customer support options for Java Platform, Standard Edition (SE), extending support to 15 years under one paid plan and reducing it from six years to three years under an alternative free plan.

Featured is a new paid subscription program called Java SE for Business, which provides fixes for the 1.4, 5, and 6 versions of Java SE.

Under the previous plan, Sun provided quarterly fixes for release families of Java SE for six years, said Bill Curci, Sun product marketing manager for Java SE. “Now with Java SE for Business, customers can more than double that timeline to a total of 15 years where they can receive fixes per release family,” Curci said. Java SE is the basic runtime environment for desktops and servers.

ISVs, integrators, and service providers can offer Java SE for Business to their customers.

But quarterly updates for Java SE will be offered for just three years to those not opting for the Java SE for Business program; it had been six years but remains free. Also, support for the open source Java platform will continue via the OpenJDK (Java Development Kit) community.

A planned upgrade to the Eclipse software development platform, called Eclipse 4.0, is expected to feature Web enablement and less complexity.

Due in two years, Eclipse 4.0, or e4, was the subject of a presentation at the EclipseCon 2008 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Wednesday. It also was discussed by Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse, in an interview on Tuesday. He said e4 is not even started as a project yet. “It is theoretical at this point,” said Milinkovich.

Sun Microsystems is developing a Java Virtual Machine for Apple’s iPhone and plans to release the JVM some time after June, enabling Java applications to run on the popular mobile device.

The JVM is to be based on the Java Micro Edition (ME) version of Java, said Eric Klein, vice president of Java marketing at Sun, on Friday afternoon. Apple had not shown interest in enabling Java to run on the iPhone, but Sun plans to step in and do the job itself after having pondered Thursday’s release of an SDK for the iPhone by Apple.

“Now, the iPhone is open” as a target platform, Klein said. The free JVM would be made available via Apple’s AppStore marketplace for third-party applications.

“We’re going to make sure that the JVM offers the Java applications as much access to the native functionality of the iPhone as possible,” he said.

Besides Java games, developers could bring over enterprise applications such as ERP or CRM to the iPhone, said Klein. Apple’s iTouch, which features iPhone capabilities minus telephony, also will be supported by the JVM.

Spring technology is an alternative to EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) for Java development, but an upcoming Java version will enable combinations of established Java platform technologies with Spring, the founder of the Spring Framework said on Tuesday.

Interviewed at the WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo, Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring Framework and CEO of SpringSource, anticipates accommodations with the enterprise Java platform once Java Platform, EE (Enterprise Edition) 6 is released. This is expected to happen sometime in 2008, according to a Java Community Process Java Specification Request focused on Java EE 6.

“I think it’s pretty clear that Spring provides an alternative to EJB — I recently blogged about how requirements for Spring skills have overtaken requirements for EJB in North America — I don’t think that necessarily means Spring is in opposition to Java EE as a whole, given that Java EE 6 is introducing the notion of profiles,” Johnson said.??

Java EE 6 could allow for standardized combinations of technologies without the legacy of the traditional, full Java EE platform, Johnson said. “We could combine our technology with the various standard technologies we support,” he said.

Focusing on the enterprise, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) tools vendor Zend Technologies is shipping Tuesday version 3.6 of its Zend Platform application server for PHP as well as Zend Studio for Eclipse, an IDE for PHP based on Eclipse open source technology.

The two products “take [Zend products] to another step toward enterprise-readiness,” said Andi Gutmans, Zend co-CTO. PHP, meanwhile, runs around 40 percent of the Web, he said.

Featured in Zend Platform 3.6 are capabilities to monitor HTTP, Apache, and Java events; expanded performance alerts; and better diagnostics through the debugging of production problems on development servers. These improvements are part of Zend Platform’s “PHP intelligence” functions for monitoring PHP application performance.

Zend Platform monitors PHP applications in real time, reporting on script errors, database and performance issues, and other matters. Downtime is reduced by recording the full context for reported problems to enable root cause diagnostics and short time to resolution, Zend said.

Also highlighted in version 3.6 are automatic output compression to save bandwidth and enhanced job queues for deferred and offline processing. An improved download server optimizes delivery of large content and media files. Version 3.6 also features expanded options for caching content, with support for file or URL-based caching, client-side caching, and in-memory or disk-based caching, Zend said.

In this day of age where many applications need to communicate with web servers you need to make a simple HTTP call to the server. Usually There are two types of calls you’ll need to make an HTTP GET or HTTP POST. So instead of blabbing words, here is a code sample of how you do it.

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Looking to make Web development easier for Java developers, the Apache Software Foundation began offering this week Apache Wicket 1.3, an open source component-based Web framework.

Formerly housed at SourceForge, the Wicket project moved over to Apache last year; version 1.3 is the first release bearing the Apache nameplate, said Martijn Dashorst, chairman of the project and a senior software developer at Web application development firm Topicus. Enhancements have been made in areas such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and portal support.

“The purpose [of Apache Wicket] is to make development for Java developers simple as a possible,” Dashorst said. “We use a component model for that.”

Developers can create components with plain old Java and HTML, Dashorst said. Apache Wicket 1.3 is downloadable here.