"Avoid Crappy Abstracts"

Casey Cameron has blogged with advice on How NOT to Have Your Talk Accepted for the JavaOne Conference . Judging by the email we got after last year's selections, many of you think the answer is: submit one.

Casey feels your pain and is trying to help you craft your submission. She has asked the program committee for their advice and it came down to the following common pitfalls:

• Crappy Abstracts
• Scattershot Submissions
• Product Talks Positioned as "Learning"
• Niche topics, not of general interest to most Java technology developers
• Old and beaten-to-death topics with no new approaches

Also featured in Projects and Communities, TheServerSide is running a discussion based on Allen Holub's piece Do we really need the JCP. Many of the responses in the forum effectively address point Holub raises in his intentionally provocative piece.

In Also in Java Today Windows NT, 2000, 2003, and XP contain a utility called the Performance Monitor that provides a rich array of performance data on your hosts as well as the applications they support. However, accessing this data from Java is challenging. The JavaWorld article Access Windows Performance Monitor counters from Java, Part 1 summarizes a method to reliably access this data in real time using a small but elegant Java API. A follow up to this article will describe how you can integrate these statistics into a Java Management Extensions (JMX) infrastructure and present the benefits that JMX provides.

Rick Proctor writes that "One of the most basic network programming tasks you'll likely face as a Java programmer is performing socket functions [..] to create a network client that talks to a server via a socket connection [ or ] to create a server that listens for socket connections." In Sockets: Basic Client-Server Programming in Java he introduces you to setting up a simple client and a simple server. Before you reach for that high level abstraction, consider whether you might be better served with a simple socket.

Mike Loukides has stirred up a discussion about the place for Java and scripting languages in today's Weblogs. In The Problem with Scripting he writes about a programming incident in which he was tempted to reach for a scripting language but instead found he could easily knock it out using Java.

In Happy New Year, Rory Winston makes some safe predictions for 2005. ", I'm looking forward to more developments on the rich client side (a lot of competing technologies sprung up in 2004), the release of Geronimo, more exposure for JDK 5.0, and finally taking a look at EJB 3."

Should you use tools when learning a language? In today's Forums, JWenting says "In my experience people using an IDE to learn a programming language tend to end up learning mainly to use the tool, not the language. When later tasked to use another tool (or no tool) they don't know what to do."

Pitosalas writes that WebStart needs to be addressed and improved. "If we want to do well on the desktop, then there is no other way but than to provide a reliable and usable means for installing software. It is so elementary, that it boggles the mind why this is not being addressed."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Berkeley DB XML 2.0.9
• RSSOwl 1.0 - RSS Feed Reader
• Pebble 1.6.1 - Java Blogware
• MagicDraw UML 9.0
• JResourceBrowser 1.1
• OpenCCM 0.8.2 - CORBA Component Model Platform

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