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No class at all

Posted by daniel on January 28, 2005 at 9:23 AM PST

Helping Newbies

If you've worked with newbies, you know the common problems they
have when first programming with Java. A compiler tells them that the
name of the file containing a public class has to be named a certain
way. They are told that Java has no pointers and then they encounter a
NullPointerException. But long before any of this, writes Rick
Burridge in
Also in Java Today , many encounter the following href="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/richb/20050127#java_pet_peeve">
Java newbie problem:

"Hand's up all the people who, when they were first starting with Java,
accidentally typed something like:
% java SomeApp.class
when they really should have been trying to run:
% java SomeApp

You got back an error message like:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: SomeApp/class
"

Rick and those commenting had some suggested solutions - we should
look to eliminate more of the minor obstacles. Dana Nourie's href="https://new2java.dev.java.net/">new2java project is in the
spotlight this week. This " project helps new and experienced
developers get up and running on the Java platform by directing them
to useful training resources. The project collects links to code
samples, tutorials and quizzes, and provides a place to chat with
other developers about problems, solutions, coding techniques and
more."

Cocoa applications for Mac OS X are typically written in
Objective-C, but they can also be written in Java. A "Cocoa-Java"
bridge allows you to call into the Cocoa classes from Java, while
still allowing you to use the rest of the J2SE API. In href="http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/01/07/ipod_reader.html">Build
an eDoc Reader for Your iPod, Part 3, Matthew Russell uses this
combination to use an open-source PDF reader written in Java and tie
it in to his otherwise-native Mac application. His article shows both
how to use key classes in the bridge and how to use the XCode IDE to
set up a Cocoa-Java project.

Two Notes: (1) You have until Monday
night to submit your proposals for JavaOne. (2) The projects side of
java.net will be down for up to 18 hours on February 2, 2005 for a
tools update.

Ted Kosan blogs about a new community coming to java.net in href="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/tkosan/archive/2005/01/on_the_edge.html">
On the edge. In today's
Weblogs , he writes "On Monday January 31st a new Embedded
Java community will make its appearance on java.net and the community
will be co-lead by Dan Johnson and myself. Due to the java.net
scheduled maintenance on Feb. 2nd, however, we decided to delay
officially announcing the community until after the site was back up."

Chris Adamson considers some href="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/invalidname/archive/2005/01/hasty_conclusio.html">
Hasty conclusions from a recent Open Office announcement.
"OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X will keep its X11 dependency and
apparently will never get a native Aqua look. The Java-assisted
NeoOffice/J is already part-way there. What's the big picture?"

In Projects and
Communities, the jini.org
front page is linking to the href="http://community.jini.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=discuss&msgNo=1398">
results of a recent poll seeking input as to preferences for which
licenses that respondents preferred Sun and others use. Respondents
also had an opportunity to indicate which licenses, if any, were
unacceptable, and the responses note important concerns about the
various licenses.

Heads up to members of the java.net href="http://community.java.net/linux"> Linux Community: href="http://linuxworld.com/">LinuxWorld is reporting on
discussions on the jpackage.org
list suggesting that a href="http://linuxworld.com/story/47882.htm">redistributable JVM
packaged as a Linux RPM might be made available soon, perhaps in
the next week. Note that this story is extremely speculative in
nature!

What about not adding any new components to Swing? In today's href="http://forums.java.net/jive/index.jspa"> Forums the
suggestion is "Don't add any new components, [..] instead focus on
fixing the thousand and one open Swing bugs. There are just
waaaaaaaaaaay too many open Swing bugs that need to be fixed and
many of them are pretty important. I'd rather feature-freeze until
we get the majority of them cleaned up."

Markf writes about Lightweight Objects, Tuples" saying
" href="http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/vanreeuwijk02adding.html">http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/vanreeuwijk02adding.html
Reading through this, it looks ideal. It's not overly ambitious like
Kava, and would fit in well with the existing language."

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Helping Newbies

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