Plenty of Java here

Unfortunately two of my favorite conferences, OOPSLA and Mac OS X Con, are scheduled for the same week. I am spending a couple of quick days up in Vancouver at OOPSLA before heading down to Santa Clara for O'Reilly's Mac conference. I was thumbing through the proceedings this morning and was struck by how many of the papers and talks are either about doing something with Java or that use Java as the example language. There has been plenty of discussion here and elsewhere about whether Java is cool or relevant anymore, but I was about 120 pages into the proceedings before I found the first non-Java paper (it extended Squeak).

This may say more about this year's program committee than it does about the state of Java, but four or five years ago there were only a sprinkling of talks about Java - not that I don't enjoy a good Smalltalk presentation as much as the next guy.

Yesterday Jim Caristi and I led Design Fest session using Extreme Programming as the methodology. It was a pleasure being surrounded by smart people engaged in a project. Jim brought a variety of hats to separate the roles he was playing: professor, coach, and the customer (Julia's Child). The customer wanted a slide show creation and presentation tool that would fit on a Java Stick.

Huge thanks to Apple Computer here in Canada for providing six laptops and an airport base station. Despite what you may have read elsewhere, the Mac is a great platform for developing Java applications. Having a Terminal window you can pop open makes a big difference. CVS is part of the standard developer tools installation so we set up a CVS repository on my laptop along with a Fitnesse wiki. Rendezvous made it trivial for the other machines to connect to mine and (after some IDE issues) each pair had a working copy of the project stub on their own machine with the existing 14 tests passing.

In today's Weblogs, Jonathan Bruce describes the JDBC 4.0 Expert Meeting which begins today. this is a "two day expert meeting to drive our specification efforts towards an early draft review publication of JDBC 4.0.

We have a full agenda and will be discussing the details of various components that make up the JDBC 4.0 specification including Ease-of-Development, XML and advanced Connection management."

Pat Niemeyer shares Stupid Scanner tricks.... The java.util.Scanner class allows him to use a single line to read all of the text from a stream. It makes simple things simple.

In Also in Java Today , Russ Miles continues his series on AOP and Spring, which started off with what he calls "the 'hello world's of aspect-orientation: tracing and logging." In An Introduction to Aspect-Oriented Programming with the Spring Framework, Part 2, Russ shows "how 'around' advice can be used to intercept and change the way that features within your applications are interacted with, in order to implement the Cuckoo's Egg aspect-oriented design pattern."

You can use the Xkins framework to manage skins for you Java application. In Skin Web applications using Xkins Guillermo Meyer introduces skins and Xkins and provides an example where the same registration page is used for two online bookstores that each need a look and feel specific to those stores. He shows you how to Obtain HTML pages with each skin, Determine skins' templates, Create the skins, Use the skins, [and] Deploy the Web application."

In Projects and Communities , the JDDAC community features a link to an article on programming Embedded Java Controllers which focuses on JStik and JStamp.

The Netbeans community announces the early access of Netbeans 4.1 with " new development capabilities for [J2EE 1.4], including Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) components and Web Services support."

Denismo addresses a readers question about AWT and SWT. In today's Forums, he writes "In Tiger, the "bridge" has been developed, allowing SWT to embed Swing. So you can use either SWT or Swing, or you can mix them when you need that. However, as you pointed out, Swing and SWT won't look and won't behave the same, so the possibilities to mix them efficiently are quite limited."

VHI responds to the question Re: what have they done with Java? saying "The enum in Java IS the implementation of Bloch's Enum Pattern. Annotations were included to make the Java programmer's life *easier*. Look at EJB 3.0 specs and probably you will appreciate the amount of simplicity it brings."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Final Release: JSR 73 - Data Mining API
• JSR 256 - Mobile Sensor API Submission to JCP
• Tapestry 3.0.1
• Glazed Lists 0.9.3
• EADP Express
• JFindReplace Initial Release

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Current and upcoming Java Events :

• October 24-28, 2004 OOPSLA 2004
• October 25, 2004 Java By the Bay JUG
• October 26, 2004 Project Looking Glass online chat
• October 27, 2004 Jini Community Webinar
• October 30, 2004 JaMU - JUG Indonesia:Compiere and Jasper
• October 30, 2004 JUG Sardegna meeting

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