The JavaLobby team releases a JavaDoc search engine that allows annotations

Ben Galbraith leads off today's Weblogs with a look at where jdocs.com is and what he hopes to see from it in the future in his post Finally...Interactive JavaDocs.

Craig Castelaz is looking at improving field validation in The best laid plans. He is wrestling with the problems of doing this too late because "his product relies heavily upon the lost focus event to trigger field validation. In other words, we verify the value of a component, such as a JTextField, inside its lost focus event. The problem, as you might guess, is that the verfication occurs too late. We've already lost focus. While it is easy enough to request that focus return to the offending component if it contains invalid data, the new focus owner may be unable to relinquish it for some reason."

James Gosling has posted some comments from "Siggraph, which is always fun. This is the one conference a year that I can attend and just sit in paper sessions and listen and learn." His post includes a bonus link to pdf on designing a window system.

In Also in Java Today, Robert Cringely asks if anyone has a right to make money from open source software in Open and Shut. He analyzes the recent Sveasoft dispute and says "Most of the people involved in this dispute have never read the Free Software Foundation's General Public License, which isn't about making software free as much as it is about making source code freely available. The GPL doesn't say that you can't charge for Open Source software. If it did say that, Red Hat wouldn't have a market capitalization in the billions of dollars. IT IS OKAY TO CHARGE FOR OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE."

Brett McLaughlin and David Flanagan have used the new "all lab, no lecture" format for their early look at the new features in Java 1.5 ("Tiger"). In an excerpt from Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook , they show how to use Tiger's new varargs syntax, allowing methods to take a variable-length list of arguments.

In today's Forums, Jimothy provides an example of Refering to objects by their interfaces. "A classic example of this is to say List things = new ArrayList() instead of ArrayList things = new ArrayList(). More important, methods are more flexible if they accept List , instead of ArrayList, as parameters. Better yet, accept Collection."

Of course you should Avoid float and double if exact answers are required. D Bleyl writes that he has "seen many Money classes on the net, but I'd really like to know why there isn't one in the jsdk yet. What rounding strategies do you use with your BigDecimal?"

Morton offers Constructive Criticism for the Geronimo Developer's Notebook chapters. Among other things, Morton says "Hi. I'm sure the entire community appreciates this effort (as do I). But have you (or your editor) asked yourselves who your target audience is?[..]. It's a technical text - make it brief and to the point, if there's nothing to write - don't."

In Projects and Communities, do you have multiple classloaders? Find out where your class was loaded from using the Java Tools community project Which4J.

There are a dozen links in the JavaPedia entry on the Petstore but no comments yet. Visit the page and add your thoughts below the line.

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• Java 1.4.2 Update 1 for OS X
• jzForum 1.1
• EJB 3 Callback Feedback Requested
• JasperReports0.6.0
• WebSphere Business Integration Modeler 5
• PostgreSQL 8.0.0

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