What is the TCO difference between IBM WebSphere and Open Source JBoss? – Just my two cents…

I have spotted a really great article about comparing prices of open source and proprietary products: “What is the TCO difference between WebSphere and JBoss?”. The interesting aspect is, that this article is written by an IBM-biased company (Prolifics). Usually, only open source vendors write such comparisons. I really like this article, seriously! It is good to see comparisons not only by open source vendors, but also by vendors such as IBM (in this case, Prolifics cannot be considered unbiased, it is an IBM consulting company – but that is fine). I just want to give my two cents to this article in the following…
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Enterprise-ready Tool Support for Apache Camel

Apache Camel is my favorite integration framework on the Java platform due to great DSLs, a huge community, and so many different components. Camel is used by many developers from different companies all over the world. However, most guys are not aware that some really cool tooling is available for Camel, too. Many people ask me about Camel tooling when I do talks at conferences. This is the reason for this short blog post about Camel tooling.
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Avatar as Alternative for Java Server Faces (JSF) and JavaFX? – JavaOne 2012

Project Avatar was announced at JavaOne 2011. After no further information until JavaOne 2012, some new information was announced at this year’s conference. Even a little demo was shown in the keynote. Contrary to JavaFX, Avatar offers the realization of modern web applications without requiring a browser plugin. Web applications are realized with HTML5 and JavaScript (Nashorn implementation) on client-side, and Java EE backend on server-side. Avatar is also suitable for creating mobile applications (smartphone, tablet), because it does not depend on a browser plugin.
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Progress Report from CamelOne 2012 in Boston (Apache Camel, ActiveMQ, ServiceMix, CXF)

This week, I was at CamelOne 2012 in Boston, organized by FuseSource. Sessions covered several open source projects such as Apache Camel, Apache ServiceMix, Apache ActiveMQ, and Apache CXF. Attendees learned directly from their peers and other industry experts how open source can deliver measurable technical and business benefits to their organizations.
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Progress Report from the Java EE Conference “Confess 2012” in Leogang, Salzburg (Austria)

This week, I was at Confess 2012 (http://2012.con-fess.com) in Leogang, Salzburg (Austria). Confess is an international conference for Java professionals in its fifth year, organized by IRIAN and the EJUG Austria. It is reasonably priced with 275 € for the two-day conference, and 500 € for the workshop day. The speaker lineup is very good with many well-known international speakers, such as JSF spec lead Edwuard Burns from Oracle America, Hazem Saleh from IBM Egypt, or Jürgen Höller from SpringSource.
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Apache Camel Tutorial – Introduction to EIP, Routes, Components, Testing, and other Concepts

Data exchanges between companies increase a lot. The number of applications, which must be integrated increases, too. The interfaces use different technologies, protocols and data formats. Nevertheless, the integration of these applications shall be modeled in a standardized way, realized efficiently and supported by automatic tests. Such a standard exists with the Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) [1], which have become the industry standard for describing, documenting and implementing integration problems. Apache Camel [2] implements the EIPs and offers a standardized, internal domain-specific language (DSL) [3] to integrate applications. This article gives an introduction to Apache Camel including several code examples.
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When to use JavaFX 2 instead of HTML5 for a Rich Internet Application (RIA)?

These days, we are starting a new project for realizing a Rich Internet Application (RIA). One of the first questions is: Which technologies and frameworks shall we use? The backend will be Java or another modern JVM language, as we are mainly experienced Java developer. In most use cases, we also prefer web frameworks, which allow to code mostly in Java, as many of us just have basic knowledge regarding HTML and JavaScript. A decision has to be made for the upcoming project: Shall we use HTML5 or JavaFX 2 for realizing the web client? We took a look at pros and cons, which are listed below in this blog post.
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