Tiger is coming to a desktop near you.

Developers have seen lists of changes to the language for the Tiger release for months. Generics, varargs, static imports, enums, ... lots of new toys for us to play with. In today's Weblogs, Chet Haase writes about the features that the end users will notice in Tiger on the Desktop. It is one impressive list - don't miss the item that shows you how to enable the OpenGL implementation that has been added to Java2D. Maybe tomorrow's Tiger release party will have enough of that "teeming throng of Tiger admirers" that Chet is looking for.

Daniel Brookshier blogs about the Education and Learning Community's first advisory board meeting in No child held back! He reports, "The current problem with education is that it is a machine that forces a certain pace of learning. If a student is allowed to create their own pace, learning is unbounded and moves as fast as the student's capabilities and interest. Learning is also bound by the teachers skills. By exposing a student to a wider field of study that is unbounded, the student is not forced to live within the bounds of a teacher's limited circulum. Not to say teachers are inadequate, the system should just allow a student access to any teacher or expert as the student's need for specific mentoring progresses.

In Also in Java Today , Struts provides a nice separation of view and controller from the typical web application arrangement, but this turns out to make a Struts application more difficult to test completely with a tool like Cactus. Lu Jian believes he has found a solution, which he calls "StrutsUT". In Unit Test Your Struts Application, he says "the idea is to extend the Cactus framework's 'in-container' part to interact with the test case two times in the web container", with the test called from both Cactus and Struts.

The weak generational hypothesis says that "Most allocated objects will die young [and] Few references from older to younger objects exist." In Garbage Collection in the Java HotSpot Virtual Machine, Tony Printezis explains approaches to ensure that "the GC must be able to identify live objects in the young generation without having to scan the entire (and potentially larger) old generation."

In Projects and Communities , Welcome to the CNJUG (China Java Users Group) to their java.net site that will be used to "collaborate with our members, share ideas, discuss existing or future CNJUG events maybe even start new Java related projects."

The Jini Community webinar series begins Wednesday, September 29, 2004 12-1pm EDT with Bill Rawlings of Lockheed Martin describing a system based on Jini and JavaSpaces technology which significantly reduces the time and resources required to reformat an image.

Bondolo argues why the code formatting problems should just go away, in today's Forums. He writes "It's unfortunate that the Code Formatting problem still exists. There are no good technical reasons why everyone's editor shouldn't just display all source in their preferred style. Compilers and version control systems can happily eat some normalized format that may be nobody's preference."

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."

Dog asks, "Why do some people seem so keen and so happy to get rid of software companies?? I like working at a software company! Would I prefer to work at a Bank, an Aerospace company, a car factory, a food producer?? Hell no!! Software companies are cool, they have casual wear, they have flextime, I don't have to deal too much with customers, I get free drinks, etc."

In the Good Bad Attitude chapter, Jonathan Simon writes, "Graham gets at the idea that good results are often the effect of breaking rules. Again, I think this comes back to the idea that new thought is controversial. One of the things that the US does well is the liberal arts education -- learning a broad range of subjects outside your main discipline and their integration. And part of that education is learning to break rules to get your task accomplished."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Apache HTTP Server 2.0.52
• Ex BEA Execs Popup at Open Source Support Startup
• SuperWaba 4.5
• Netty 1.7.3
• RIFE 0.8.0
• Method Scheduler for J2EE, Servlets and JSP

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 :

• September 29, 2004 Jini Webinar
• September 29-October 1, 2004 OSCOM

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.