java.net moves to Movable Type

John Reynold's leads off today's Weblogs with a post about the open letter from Sun regarding Java persistence. In Someone's listening, he links to Sun's letter supporting the creation of a "common persistence API underlying JDO and EJB." Meanwhile, Joshua Marinacci continues his exploration of the concept of mini-apps with his latest "software doodle" called WeatherWatcher.

It's life as usual here at java.net, and yet these posts look a little different. Yesterday, we moved our blogging infrastructure over to Movable Type in response to requests for features for the bloggers (such as XML-RPC so that bloggers can author their blogs when not connected) that MT supports. Thanks to the O'Reilly team that included Tony Stubblebine, Sarah Breen, David Lents, and Terrie Miller. We anticipate that there will be tweaks and a need for changes, but the initial release went very smoothly and the nearly two thousand entries were ported over to MT yesterday afternoon.

From your standpoint, there shouldn't be much different about the new UI. Take a look at Joshua's post. At the top right corner of the page you will see a navigation to previous and to next posts if there are any. You will also see a link to "Main". Clicking on Main or on the link to "Joshua Marinacci's Blog" takes you to the same place. Go ahead, go to Joshua's main page. Most of the new features are there in the right column. There is a calendar with the current month with links on any date on which an entry was posted. You will also see a list of recent entries and a listing of months in which previous entries were posted. One area which is not improved is the comments area. You can not alter the view or see threaded comments any more.

In Also in Java Today , Eric Giguere explains that much of your navigation in a UI is within a component. Once you've selected a component within a larger container, "you need the ability to navigate within the component. Selecting an individual cell within a table is an obvious example." In Custom Item Traversal in MIDP 2.0 he writes "Users must also be able to navigate between components, to move the input focus from one component to another. In version 2.0 of the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP), this inter-component and intra-component navigation is called traversal. Understanding how traversal works and how it's exposed to the user is vital to writing usable custom components."

It seems as if Jini still needs to introduce itself to people. Part one of Jennifer Kotzen's Java Dynamic Networking with Jini Technology "explains how Jini technology tracks services, identifies their capabilities, and assembles them into systems." At its core, "Jini Lookup Services (LUSs) and the Discovery, Join, and Leasing protocols collectively allow a Jini system to accurately, efficiently, and automatically track the set of services currently available in dynamic environments."

In Projects and Communities ,Apple has updated their mailing lists including java-dev, coreaudio-api and quicktime-java so years of developer tips and tricks are finding their way into Google.

Sun's John Bobowicz and Chris Cheline will take your questions about java.net in the next edition of Java Live September 28. 11:00 A.M. PDT/6:00 P.M. UTC.

John M writes "the whole code formatting religious wars will never be settled", in today's Forums. He writes that this is "partly a manifestation of the mildly-autistic, obsessive-compulsive nature of most developers. A bigger part for most people is that people's brains process information differently -- especially visual information (which is pretty much all we software folks have). Look at all of the ways that people have come up with to try to add in other sense modalities into the software process (both consciously (code smells) and unconsciously (structured programming))."

Jonathan Simon reacts to the story where the customer service rep fixes a bug and tells the user to reload, "I was cringing when I read parts of this knowing that they were just pushing stuff into production like that. Assuming all your tests are automated, you can get pretty quick, but not that quick."

Mark Swanson is still worried about when there are no professional software developers. "You're not looking far enough into the future. At the rate of open source progress I do not believe there will be any reason to use any proprietary software in 20 years. At this time most software developers will be largely out of work and the revenue generation capabilities of the software IT sector will largely be removed from the global economy."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Open Letter Asks Support for New Persistance Spec.
• J2ME Polish 1.2.1
• QuickJNLP 0.5
• Enhydra 6.0
• IBM’s XML Security Suite
• Russia's Budget Windows

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Current and upcoming Java Events :

• September 27, 2004 java.net on Java Live
• September 29-October 1, 2004 OSCOM

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