Developing for mobile devices.

When prospective authors ask in what areas we are looking for content, mobile is always on the list we send them (although we usually ask back "what do you want to write about"). Thomas Kuenneth has started a three part series on Going mobile with Duke. He introduces the J2ME Wireless Toolkit, and shows how to develop and deploy a small sample application. First he provides a brief intro of J2ME.

In today's Weblogs, N. Alex Rupp reports that Mark Proctor added Drools DRL schema to CVS today! He reports "Mark Proctor, the Drools project's most energetic developer, has uploaded the long-awaited XSD files for the many flavors of DRL syntax. This will allow new developers to validate their DRL files and further reduce the overall headache of learning DRL. A hundred thousand thanks to Mark Proctor!"

Bob Lee asks Where's AOP? His view is that "Many developers have an itch they aren't entirely aware of. Repeated boilerplate code causes it. AOP can scratch it. I survived without OOP for a long time, but now that I'm aware of it, and I understand it, I have no desire to go back. The same happened with AOP to a lesser degree. Whether others choose AOP or some other road, I'm confident the itch will get scratched. It's just a matter of time. Developers who understand AOP will open others' eyes to how they can improve their code, and they will in turn open even more developers' eyes. Pay it forward. I've witnessed this effect in my own company as interest in AOP slowly but surely snowballs."

In Also in Java Today , in part two of Annotations in Tiger, Brett McLaughlin explains Custom annotations. Brett warns that the same overuse that occurred initially with Javadocs where people would document simplet getters and setters could happen with custom annotations. He recommends that you "use the standard annotation types often, and even heavily. Every Java 5 compiler will support them, and their behavior is well-understood. However, as you get into custom annotations and meta-annotations, it becomes harder to ensure that the types you work so hard to create have any meaning outside of your own development context. So be measured. Use annotations when it makes sense to, but don't get ridiculous. However you use it, an annotation facility is nice to have and can really help out in your development process."

Fermin Castro is interested in what his cluster is up to, specifically, what kind of resource and performance hit is entailed as sessions are replicated across a J2EE cluster? He notes, "once a cluster is up and running, it is usually difficult to analyze its behavior. The reason for this is that application servers use low-level APIs to implement their clusters and do not expose any metrics about what's going on underneath the application's code." In Monitoring Session Replication in J2EE Clusters, he introduces a replication latency testing tool to measure this overhead, and provides strategies for analyzing the results and solving problems.

In Projects and Communities , the home page of the JDDAC community points to an article on Embedded Java Controllers featuring JStamp and JStik.

The JavaDesktop community project Flying Saucer is faster and now includes a web start browser and increased compliance with CSS 2.1.

Matt_Meyer posts on the Dream Language in today's Forums. He writes "That is the coolest thing about Java as a platform vs Java as a language. Java as a language(please don't hurt me) is a little clunky and redundant [..] Now it's time for Java as a platform. [..] If you can live with the abstraction of the VM the Java platform is pretty awesome. It's hackable, layered, relatively portable, and it has a very large community of COOL opensource hackers providing limitless innovative solutions."

Jonathan Simon writes "On this front, I just wanted to point out a9.com - a very cool middle ground. You have a locally running application with data stored remotely. You have all of the thick client benefits without any of the nteraction issues. If we can only get around installation!"

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Initial Release of Cargo
• JSR 250 - Common Annotations Review Ballot
• Aurora 0.3, Initial Release
• JOSSO Single Sign-On 1.0.0-rc1
• JGraph 5.0.1
• Open Source Solaris 10 by End of Year

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• September 15, 2004 JavaZone 2004
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• September 16, 2004 Fort Worth JUG: P2P and JXTA
• September 17-19, 2004 Lone Star Software Symposium
• September 18, 2004 Hong Kong JUG: Everything Eclipse
• September 20, 2004 Triangle Java User's Group

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