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Holiday pictures

Posted by daniel on December 10, 2004 at 12:55 PM EST

Back from London with a snapshot to share - send in yours.

Kimmy-the-wonderwife and I and most of our luggage returned from London last night. We spent most of this week with the Jini team and Jini and JavaSpaces developers at the eighth Jini Community Meeting. First of all, there is something about Jini technology that seems to attract a diverse group of exceptionally bright people who are fairly open about what they are working on (to the extent they are allowed to be) and interested in sharing ideas with others. I feel energized and once the ideas bubbling up every where settle down a bit, I will share some of the highlights from the conference with you.

We have a week left for you to submit your pictures of Duke on vacation for this year's Holiday Pictures feature. I'm sure I saw Duke and family crossing Abbey Road.

Actually, our graphic designer Miky Vacik produced that for us last year. Send in your creative and tasteful Duke on holiday shot between now and next Friday.

You can actually tell that the Abbey Road shot is dated as there are no Starbucks in the background. This is not a shot at Starbucks, but it was a bit sad to travel to London and see so many American icons. In the US you used to be able to travel to a different area of the country and see regional or local stores that were special to that destination. Now it seems as if you see the same stores everywhere in the US. It was disappointing to see this beginning to happen internationally as well. As the holiday season approaches, try to shop local and "buy where you browse" (as Tim O'Reilly says), and preserve the local stores that make your neighborhood special.

Finally, thanks again to Chris Adamson for producing the daily blog and editing the site while I was gone.

In today's Weblogs, Calvin Austin's Mastering Mustang blog entry invites you to "Find your way around the mustang snapshots with this first part of an ongoing series."

Kathy Sierra has been thinking about Brett McLaughlin's posts on the coolness of Java. In Does it really matter if your tool is cool? She asks " Is 'picking the right tool for the job' truly the responsible approach? Is wanting your tools to be cool really a sign of immaturity? Can we and *should* we still be passionate about Java?"

Navaneeth Krishnan has been thinking about your online identity and single sign on. He has put his thoughts into his entry Network Identity, Liberty Alliance and Identity Enabled Portals

In Also in Java Today , Michael Pilone writes that " a Java application that utilizes a combination of the JVM design and the Win32 operating system does not allow temp files to be deleted if they are open at exit. As a result, the application dumps temporary files on the user's system and never cleans them up." In Managing Temp Files in Java Apps he shows you how and why he "created a class, TempFileManager, to handle the creation of temporary files as well as the cleanup of existing files"

ONJava is featuring a book excerpt from SWT: A Developer's Notebook, in which Tim Hatton presents the Standard Widget Toolkit, the GUI framework that is the basis of Eclipse and, increasingly, other Java desktop applications. In Creating Toolbars Using SWT, he says "the SWT provides you with everything you need to create sophisticated toolbars, something your users will expect in almost every application you deliver." The chapter develops a fully-responsive toolbar, with separators, tooltips, and radio- and check-style buttons.

In Projects and Communities, learn more about the Java Desktop Community's Project Looking Glass in an article about Its Architecture and a Sneak Preview of the API.

The JXTA community has updated their JXTA Demos page. Open source offerings include Shell, myJXTA, and JXTA Net Map. Commercial demos are LeanOnMe and ZIM pro.

Follow the thread on Makes switch() and case: work with any object or primitive in today's Forums. Bruce Chapman begins with an example that shows "This is getting close to the situation where I would appreciate an enhanced switch. In particular I would like a construct that branches on instance type and refines the type inside the construct."

JZacker does not want to see an additional check keyword saying "In my humble opinion, you should be using exceptions instead of doing all these checks. If you try to perform some operation on an object, and that object cannot support the operation because it is in some 'invalid' state, then the object should throw a declared exception."

With respect to Support distributing shared libraries as resources Coxcu writes "Aside from the complexity of writing the code, JNI also doesn't have any good deployment options. Sounds, images, etc.. can be resources, but there is no easy way to distribute native libraries as resources. Not only should the code be easier to write, but it should be easier to deploy."

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Back from London with a snapshot to share - send in yours.
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