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Room for Big Ideas?

Posted by daniel on January 12, 2005 at 10:45 AM EST

Re-examining keynotes

In the December 2004 Communications of the ACM the association's president, David A Patterson wrote that statistics for ACM conferences show they are healthy. "I am concerned, however, about the overall impact of increasing workloads on program committees and conferences and the decreasing acceptance rates on authors, especially authors of papers focusing on big ideas or new directions."

His suggestion is that we set aside a set of talks devoted to big ideas (this could also be sessions within other tracks). Further, he suggests that there be "a separate program committee to select them. This committee could consist of a few former program committee chairs and authors with a record of producing such papers.

He further suggests that a keynote address could be replaced by a session with these big ideas talks and it reminded me that JavaOne used to do this. There used to be a keynote at JavaOne devoted to big ideas. Danny Hillis spoke about the Long Now. Douglas Adams spoke about computing from a users standpoint. There were panels that considered the future and were given enough time to do so. Last year, this may have taken the form of "The Big Question" debate.

In any case, as the track chairs look at the submitted papers, perhaps they can earmark the ones that don't seem to fit because they are "big ideas" and pass them on to a committee considering putting together an interesting higher level keynote address.

In today's Weblogs , Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart follows Peter Delisle's lead in asking for ideas for WS and XML Sessions at JavaOne '05. Peter also provided a list of sessions from last year but you can look in the JavaOne archives for those.

Max Goff points to recent articles that may signal the return of technology has begun. In Fire and Ice he asks "Will 2005 mark the beginning of a raging bull market for technology? Or will a 21st century IT stagnation continue?"

RegExGuy asks about jar within jar in today's Forums. "When building apps designed to run as java -jar foo.jar it has always been a big nuissance that one can't readily incoporate some third party jar inside foo.jar. So what everybody does is unjar the third party jar and the re-jar it into foo.jar. It would be nice if one do something this:jar -cvf foo.jar -R bar.jar com.x.Y.class where -R stands for "Re-Jar". This command would extract the contents of bar.jar and place them in foo.jar"

Pete Kirkham writes, "Often you want immutablity at the interface level, but the implementation caches state for performance reasons. Having the compiler enforce that all fields of an immutable class are final prevents this (maybe mark them with transient in lieu of a mutable keyword)."

In Also in Java Today , ONJava's second reader survey of 2004 recently concluded, and the article Results from the Second 2004 ONJava Reader Survey compiles the responses. Did dominant tools tighten their grip on developers' loyalty, or are there new tools that demand your attention? Where do developers expect the Next Big Thing to come from? What kinds of articles do you want to see on ONJava in 2005? The answers to these questions and more are in the survey summary, so please have a look and contribute any ideas and opinions in the talkback section.

The article Securing ebXML: Message Exchange is the first in a two part series examining security in ebXML. This first article looks at message-level security and security policy mechanisms for ebXML messaging. The second installment will cover ebXML content attacks.

In Projects and Communities, the JavaPedia page on JavaDoc has been updated. Add to the links provided or initiate discussion about new JavaDoc features.

Greg Anderson's JavaWorld article Dynamic Behavior in Java illustrates "a design pattern similar to the Chain of Responsibility pattern that allows applications to change object behavior at runtime by attaching special class instances to the objects being modified."

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Re-examining keynotes
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