Mutual Admiration Society

Enjoy the occasional ego-stoke

My wife once told me that it really blew her mind that my ability to program allowed me to create whole new applications. The funny thing about this is that I sort of discount my skill on the basis that the world of computers is totally contrived and fake - one layer of abstraction atop another atop another, with practically its only connection to the physical world being the flipping of tiny electronic gates in chips. Over the years, I've become far more impressed with professions like medicine, which are intrinsically about real life, as it truly is. Put another way, there's no API to fix a birth defect or cure a disease.

But it's not like I'll turn down occasional shout-out. :-)

Roger Brinkley was surprised to get this kind of adulation, from a family relation, no less. In The Way Cool Relative, he writes "Then out the blue the 17 year old son of one of my cousins looks at me says,'Do you work on Java?'. His dad quickly piped in, 'Can't you tell from his shirt?'. I was wearing one of the Java.Net T-shirts." After discussing Java and touring java.net's Java Games Community and Java3D project, the young man turned to his dad and said "Dad, you never told me we had any way cool relatives!"

Also in today's Weblogs, Joshua Marinacci discusses XML to Swing and the Gradual API, in which he laments the many attempts to create products that allow you to build GUI's with XML markup, noting that many have been over-complicated, required massive rewriting of existing code, and didn't play nicely with others. "I think the problem is that when we come up with new technology we create it to work in an ideal world, always forgetting that most developers have to deal with legacy code, old data, and ancient requirements. Its very difficult to adopt a new solution if the solution requires you to change everything you do all at once."

James Todd has an announcement of today's JXTA team chat. In JXTA 2.3.2b , he provides details and links to the myJXTA2 application used for the chat, available as source, binary, and Java WebStart (.jnlp).

Note: today's daily blog was written by Chris Adamson (invalidname), Associate Online Editor for java.net

In Also in Java Today , Bill Burke has written the first part of his EJB 3.0 Preview saying that the focus for the new release is ease of use and simplification. Burke shows how deployment descriptors are simplified by taking advantage of the J2SE 5.0 annotations. Also, "Home interfaces have been completely removed for all EJB types. They never made much sense for stateless beans, and had only limited use for stateful sessions." Burke also calls out many of the changes to Entity Beans in the 3.0 spec.

"At one time or another, however, most web developers have complained about the limited capabilities when using a browser as a client." So begins Mark Eagle, noting browsers' mutual incompatibilities, limited GUI options, limited support for storing state, etc. The alternative, is the Rich Internet Application (RIA), which puts more presentation and logic on the client side than is typically found in web applications. In Integrating Macromedia Flex with Java, he shows how to use the Flash-based Flex as the client-side of a Java based systems, and notes which habits and perceptions developers need to leave behind as they move to an RIA mindset.

In Projects and Communities, the Global Education and Learning Community recently featured docclerk, a document editing and publishing system with automatic version control. The goal of the project is to show how to use various open-source frameworks in a project, such as Tapestry, Spring, and Hibernate.

The Java Communications Community project jgossip describes itself as "simple and powerful Java forum software" implemented with J2EE and Struts. The recently-released version 1.0 runs on multiple application servers, offers unlimited forums and categories, and has powerful management features.

In today's Forums, user kcpeppe takes a step back from the Make switch() and case: work with any object or primitive discussion to look at the big picture of what's being discussed: "The most important feature about any language, natural or otherwise is simplicity. In natural languages, isolated language groups tend to be very complex and difficult for outsiders to learn. It is only when you have preasure to interact that the complexities of language are shed. I see this in english all the time. Airlines now incorrectly use regular rules of grammar to smooth out irregularities. They do this on purpose because it simplifies the language and in doing so, ensures that non-native english speakers understand what they are saying."

peterkessler responds to anecdotal comments about startup times in Re: Under the Hood: "What you should do is take your application(s) and try them with both JDK-1.4.2 and JDK-1.5.0. Those are the only numbers that matter. I'd be curious what you find. It's sometimes tricky, though, to figure out when an application is finished starting (are the bits in the graphics pipeline, or are they on the screen yet?). We have some hooks for that, if you are interested."

Responding in the thread Re: It's more important that Java programs be easy to read than to write, yishai writes: "First, any superiority of a language has to be defined in the context of what you are trying to accomplish. If you are trying to write the equivalent of a 10 line bash script, Java won't do it for you, won't do it well, and won't be worth your while. Neither will C#. So lets define some context for which you think C# is more appropriate."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• JDeveloper 10g Release 2
• Apache Maven 1.0.2
• Netbeans 4.0 RC2
• FireFox Users Downloading Vulnerable JVM
• SLAMD 1.8.1
• 64-bit Test Windows Close at Hand
• Cayenne ORM 1.1 Final

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Current and upcoming Java Events :

• December 6-9, 2004 TheServerSide Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop
• December 7-8, 2004 Eighth Jini Community Meeting
• December 13-17, 2004 JavaPolis, 2004

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.