Engineers, Architects, Technologists...

Some titles are easier to see through than others. When Bozo T. Clown gives you a card that lists him as President and CEO of Bozo T. Clown consulting you probably have a good idea that this is most likely a small operation and Mr. Clown may be the only employee (maybe not). But what happens when someone is introduced to you as a software engineer or architect? What training and experience should we assume of a senior engineer or a chief technologist?

Malcolm Davis asks How do you classify yourself? in today's Weblogs. He points out that " The title 'engineer' is restricted to different degrees by different states. Texas is about the strictest in the US. Furthermore Texas is the only state that offers a license in software engineering." Malcolm writes that " until we come together as a software society with strict rules of competence, when asked what I do, I will reply, 'I just program'." It reminded me of the bests chefs I know who describe themselves as cooks.

If you "just program" you will enjoy Joshua Marinacci's observations on his first anniversary at Java.net: the social side of software. Among his observations, he writes " I always had this great vision of the internet bringing tons of brilliant people together to produce brilliant software. The more people, the better the software. I have found the most successful software to be developed by a small number of people, or at least with a very strong leader."

Text book example? In today's Forums, on Optimizing Judiciously, TFagan writes "You coded the cleanest way first; you observed the performance (a limit of 5 simultaneous users); you refactored for performance; and then you re-measured to verify the benefit (a limit of 80 simultaneous users)."

JWenting talks about the Help wanted ads "It gets worse. I've seen jobs advertised requiring 10 years of Windows NT4 administration experience and 10 years of Java AND C++ experience for a Java programming position. This was back in 1996, when NT4 and Java both had been on the market less than 2 years. Never mind what a Java programmer was supposed to know NT4 system administration."

As for Excessive Synchronization, javakoe writes "Try to avoid blocking (like IO) code while holding a lock. I have had problems with servlets holding locks while writing output. When one browser stalled everything kept waiting for the lock."

In Also in Java Today, all of the items for the Effective Java Bookclub have been posted and many have generated interesting discussions. The bookclub will accept further comments through Friday. Feel free to weigh in on one of the threads.

The new IKVM technology allows a Java virtual machine to run inside .NET's Common Language Runtime (CLR), allowing for in-process communication between the two. As Avik Sengupta writes in An Introduction to IKVM, "if you are creating a .NET application, but want to use that cool new Java library that doesn't yet have a .NET counterpart, here's a solution for you. Conversely, if you are a Java developer who wants to call a .NET library from Java, IKVM is what you need."

In Projects and Communities, when it comes to back up solutions, Daniel Brookshier explains why P2P is better than client server in An Application for P2P Backups. He points to JXTA's ability "to find a specific computer anywhere on the internet."

Linked project JRefactory is a tool that provides pretty printing and refactoring capabilities for your projects. Latest releases also include a Java Web Start version for easy deployment, and it uses JavaCC, PMD and Findbugs.

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• NetBeans IDE 4.0 Beta 1
• Submitted: JSR 250 - Common Annotations for the Java Platform
• Commons Launcher 1.1
• Submitted: JSR 251 - Pricing API
• PostgreSQL 8.0 Will Run on Windows

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

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• August 25 UML Modeling with Java Studio Enterprise Webinar
• August 27-29 Central Ohio Softare Symposium
• September 8, 2004 Tools Support for JavaServer Faces

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.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.