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Where are you working?

Posted by daniel on September 20, 2004 at 11:00 AM EDT

Our java.net poll asks the continent on which you code

We run a new poll each Friday. The latest asks On which continent do you mainly write code. Even a simple question like that is difficult to phrase correctly. We wanted to know a bit about where coders are. But we couldn't ask where are you from as people are often not coding in the country that they consider to be their nationality. Then we got an objection from some folks who travel all the time (so we put in the word mainly). Then, of course, we got feedback on our choices. We did not mean to be insensitive in not including island nations but I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that they were naturally associated with a continent. We were also taken to task for leaving out Antarctica - but I'm ok with that one. If you care to try your hand, you can always suggest a future poll and the associated responses.

There are a ton of Web Services specs out there an more seem to be coming all the time. In today's Weblogs, Michael Champion blogs about More WS-* specs, more questions about architectural viability. He thinks he finally understands "why half the smart people I know are involved with specifying and implementing the WS-* specs, and the other half think it is a waste of time."

John Mitchell starts a conversation on Security: Open source vs. Commercial. Reponders counter that the opposite of open is not commercial it is proprietary and that there can be open source commercial software.

Steve Mallett publishes "a follow up on my previous essay that argued we must wrestle away the power of a few sites to own all our data by publishing our contributions to the web in distributed XML files like we do with RSS. The tools to do this exist now, and that all factors point toward a future of owning and publishing all our contributions. The future of the Semantic Web is Here and is evenly distributed today."

In Also in Java Today , Ward Cunningham has been thinking about the Wiki of the Future. Eugene Wallingford reports that "Ward's latest thoughts on wiki focus on two questions, one technical and one social, but both aimed at a common end. First, how can we link wikis together in a way benefits them all? [..] How could we manage automatic links across multiple wikis, multiple servers? Second, how can wiki help information to grow around the world? [..] Can my wiki gain information while forgetting or ignoring the stuff that isn't so good?"

Static initializers are used by many Java programmers, but not everyone understands their side-effects and other oddities. In a section of Understanding the Interplay Between Utility Classes and Static Initialization, Satya Komatineni shows how you can write static initializers that are not run when you access variables in their superclasses. Taken a little further, it's easy to mistakenly assume that shared fields accessed as statics are initialized when they may not be. His solution is that "the unwanted dependency demonstrated so far can be broken by using a holder class that can hold the single resource," which leads to a new pattern, the Static Resource Holder, which can manage the static resource and ensure it is initialized correctly.

In Projects and Communities , follow the latest status of your favorite JSRs. The JSR community homepage includes the latest news from the specifications in the right hand column.

The Java Games Community's Performance tuning forum points to this summary of JVM Options.

Forking is the big issue in today's Forums. MThornton responds to the assertion that the Java Team won't provide some often requested features saying "It isn't just the Java team, but a significant proportion of the user community also want nothing to do with certain proposed extensions. To be sure there are extensions I would like, but in my opinion forking the language is too high a price.

Terkans adds "If you truly wish for a language with those features, write your own compiler to build that language for the JRE platform. Many languages are already doing that, and making sure they interoperate well with the existing Java libraries. Take a look at the languages discussed in the alt.lang.jre columns at ibm/developerworks/java for examples. Most of those languages are open-source, so grab a copy of their compiler, and start coding your own dream language."

Cowwoc, however, "would like Sun to fork Java once every 10 years. Specifically, release J2SE 2.0 (or by now, 6.0 I guess) in a manner that is not constraint by backwards compatibility issues. Specifically, work on improving API cohesiveness, remove multiple ways of getting the same thing done (i.e. the old way and the new way). etc... The underlying language can remain 100% the same (maybe minor performance tweaks for Generics?) but the focus would be on API refactoring."

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