J2SE 5.0 available.

Although there have been fairly stable beta versions available for months, it's nice to have the final version of the Java Tiger release downloaded and installed. If you are just getting acquainted with Tiger, take a look at our excerpt from the book "Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook". Brett McLaughlin and David Flanagan have written an "all lab, no lecture" overview of the new Tiger features. The featured chapter is varargs. Brett will also be leading us through the book when he moderates our next bookclub.

Graham Hamilton makes it official in his announcement that the The J2SE 5.0 final bits are out in today's Weblogs. He reports " The JCP Executive Committee approved the last 12 Tiger JSRs on September 14th. Less formally, but just as importantly, we then received our official blessing from the J2SE Quality Assurance team that we meet all the release criteria and are ready to go. Yesterday we did the final round of formal release approvals inside of Sun, including things like getting formal approval from the product support team that they believe the product is ready to ship and they are ready to support it."

Joshua Marinacci has tuned his latest mini-app in Weather Watcher: Release Deux. One of the issues he is addressing is "The JNLP spec (of which Web Start is an implementation) lets you select only one of two security levels: all and none. More importantly for most end users, if you download a signed app that requests all it will throw up a huge warning screen saying don't do it. Right there I've lost 50%+ of my audience."

Bob Lee points to an article from the latest edition of Oracle Magazine that uses the java.net application Dynaop in Taking Abstraction One Step Further.

In Also in Java Today , Mark Balbes reports that "J2ME is maturing at the same rate as the rest of Java. The JCP, which defines the new features that will become part of the Java platform, now features 62 specifications relating to features for J2ME." In The Mobile Media API, Balbes writes that "MMAPI allows us to develop software for mobile phones, pagers, and PDAs that can play and record both audio and video. In addition, cameras are supported so that a photograph can be captured and used within a custom application."

JSR-94 specification lead Daniel Selman has posted his thoughts on what should be next for the Java Rule Engine API in JSR-94, What Next? A good starting place is his diagram. Selman argues that the pasic problem is that "the specification is very loose. Defining a bunch of interfaces and exceptions to invoke a black-box 'rule engine' is not particularly helpful. [..] JSR-94 barely defines what a rule engine is (this is a contentious topic!) and can of course therefore not enter into the details of how rules are constructed or manipulated, the effects of invoking rules, binding of rules to the Java language or many other interesting topics."

In Projects and Communities , the latest projects to join the JELC include JRobotics, an admin tool called edumis, an open source IDE for learning POO, and a portable interface display environment.

This JXTA community post JXTA, WebStart, and You explains "a bit of detail describing JXTA's use of JNLP (Java Network Launch Protocol) and the process it enables."

Programmer's can't be replaced by magic, says Murphee in today's Forums."In the past decades, we've been getting more and more powerful libraries (or components), but that doesn't mean that they'll soon string themselves together by magic [...] there is still plenty of need for paid programmers in the future, no matter how good the components get."

Aaston thinks that the human jobs may change, saying "Anybody read the Asimov robot books? Assume that computers get smart, and that applications *do* string themselves together. Somebody is still going to need play the roll of psychologist."

Tools can help with the code formatting wars. Gary Kephart writes "One of the cool features of Eclipse 3.0, as I found out just a few days ago, is to be able to define a coding style and then export it to an XML file. Others on the project can then import the file and with a ctrl-shift-F, format the code."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• JSR 166 Backported to java 1.4
• Eclipse 3.1 M2
• Unofficial EJB 3.0 F.A.Q.
• JUDO 1.3
• Sphinx-4 1.0 beta
• Integrated Ontology Development Toolkit

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Current and upcoming Java Events :

• September 29-October 1, 2004 OSCOM
• October 1-3, 2004 Great Lakes Software Symposium
• October 8-10, 2004 Pacific Northwest Software Symposium
• October 15-17, 2004 Atlanta Java Software Symposium
• October 19-22, 2004 Educause 2004
• October 19, 2004 JXTA Developer Kitchen

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