When you take the time to write a desktop application in Java, you should also polish it and deliver the double-clickable applications that your end users expect.

Joshua Marinacci continues his series on this topic with Make your Swing App Go Native, part 2. In this installment he adds task to an Ant build file to distribute his "Mad Chatter" application as an exe or app file. This creates double-clickable applications for both Windows and Mac OS X end users. Joshua also adds file associations so that you can click on the created file and your helper application will launch (just as you might double-click on an HTML file and your favorite browser will launch). The code will be available after the third part is published. You'll find the source in the java.net project Mad Chatter.

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In Also in Java Today, "Uncle Bob" Martin takes a contrary approach in his blog Web Services? What has the industry been smoking?. He reminds us that "if you want to provide a service on the internet, there is already a facility for that. Write a little process that sits on the back side of a socket. If the industry really needs some kind of platform independent remote method invocation (something that I seriously doubt) I think we could do better than to hijack HTTP and XML."

John Zukowski has written the latest Java Core Tech Tips Programmer's Challenge . He notes that "this year's tips covered topics in many areas across the Java platform spectrum (from working with the Java 3D and JMX APIs-to-dynamic class unloading), the challenge focuses on those necessary to create a simple drawing program similar to PhotoShop, though certainly not as complete."

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In today's Weblogs , Chris Adamson confesses to some of his gaming habits in The Rise of the Media Game. "Games aren't just about polygons and collision detection - media is becoming increasingly important." In addition to providing our feature article, Joshua Marinacci has also blogged about   2004: the year of the Net-App Joshua discusses why the networked applications are coming and what UI technology we will need to build them. 

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In Projects and Communities the Education and Research community hosts the Jade Library for scientific & real-time applications has added "pointer and enum support to the Struct and Union classes [and has ] Made Enum somewhat equivalent to the upcoming enum base type (JDK1.5)". The JXTA community is announcing the " new JXTA J2SE stablerelease, 2.2 'Timpani'. The 2.2 release is a significant release thatcontains a number of new features and some important bug fixes."

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In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Java Tools Community Ready to Launch
• HTML Parser 1.4 Alpha
• Cocoon Support for JSR 168 is Days Away.
• Jodd v0.20
• Caio - A Java.net Success Story
• GanttProject 1.9.10

Registered users can submit news items for the java.net News Page using our news submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review by news director Steve Mallet before being posted to the site. You can also subscribe to the java.net News RSS feed.

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Current and upcoming Java Events:

• January 8 Dallas J2ME User Group
• January 8 Jini Boston Meetup
• January 8 Project JXTA Tutorial
• January 13 SDForum Emerging Technology SIG
• January 17 JUG Indonesia's JaMU (Java Meet Up) #6
• January 20-23 LinuxWorld

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

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