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Bolstering the JavaPedia

Posted by daniel on October 19, 2004 at 1:25 PM EDT

What needs to be done to help improve the JavaPedia.

The thing about bloggers is you never know what they're going to say. Jon Mountjoy has posted his thoughts of what he terms Javapedia impediments in today's Weblogs. He wants a nice domain name, easier search for the majority of users who read the wiki and don't contribute, and make it nicer to look at.

Joshua Marinacci is also thinking about usability in his post Please: think of the users! He provides half a dozen tips that boil down to thinking of your users first since "Your UI will be subconciously molded to fit your own algorithm if you don't think of your users first. We Java developers should be familiar with concept since we often separate interface from implementation. When you design that new widget, first think of what the user wants to do with it, not how you want to implement it. Implementation is secondary. (at best!)"

In Also in Java Today , In his ACM Queue article A Time and Place for Standards , Gordon Bell writes "the time has come to declare a moratorium on creating even more consortia and SSOs [standards-setting organizations] than we already have." On the positive side, he writes "standards can do much to reduce wasteful, redundant product development—thus freeing up resources that can instead be dedicated to fresh, inventive work." He warns that there are "several areas of burgeoning technological innovation that appear to be ripe for new and evolving standards. But, as I hope I’ve managed to illustrate, those areas need to be approached with some restraint since too many standards are at least as bad as none at all."

In his latest JavaWorld magazine article, Richard Lawson shows you how to use XML-RPC to call Perl routines from your Java code. He argues that instead of using SOAP, "sometimes your problem is simple, and a light API like XML-RPC can allow you to quickly and easily connect formerly independent programs that were separated by language, platform, and location." The article starts "with the Perl module and routines we want to call, wrap a facade around them, then connect the XML-RPC server to the facade. Next, we call the routine through the Java XML-RPC implementation."

In Projects and Communities , the Java Users Group Community page reminds you that JavaPolis, Europe's largest Java conference, is two months away. BeJUG members can register free for the conference, and registering for JavaPolis gets you a one-year BeJUG membership.

Query streams of XML with the help of Typex. This Java Web Services & XML Community project provides a data bindng system, with Java classes specifying data to be extracted from the stream. A demo application pulls items of interest from RSS feeds.

When should you change Java? In today's Forums,TSinger asks and answers this question saying "IMHO, there are only two reasons for changing Java:- catch often occuring errors at compile time (e.g. const or notnull references) and - make your intention more clear (e.g. enhanced for-loop in Java 5)".

How do you enhance documentation to knit together docs for different APIs? Pdoubleya writes "As a developer, the main problem is really with multiple APIs, as others said. As a developer, I now use a couple of dozen FOSS APIs on a regular basis, for different projects. Their JavaDocs are not linked to each other, there is no real search capability, and installing new docs means I have to update my references to the API docs."

RegExGuy has a proposal on Default values + Generics = Better together. He writes "The idea is that the X => Y construct identifies which argument you want to set. So if you use it, you don't have to specify the arguments in order. It would be optional, of course, but once the construct => was used in an argument list, all remaining arguments would have to use it. This would be really simplify writing constructors for complex objects with lots of default parameters. Also, having the compiler fill in the class argument would get around some of the problems people have with generics. "

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What needs to be done to help improve the JavaPedia.
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