Deadline for JavaOne proposals is here

Harry Anderson used to end his act by reminding his audience "Never eat at a place called Mom's, and never play cards with a guy called Pop." I had simpler rules that included not taking two women out on the same date and not waiting until the last day to submit session proposals for conferences. This weekend I broke both of them.

Believe it or not, the second one is more of a problem at home. Kimmy-the-wonderwife spent much of last week explaining to our eight year old why she shouldn't wait until the day before her project was due to do all the work. I listened to the lectures all week, blissfully ignoring the parallels to my own situation and here I am the morning of the last day on which proposals will be accepted for this year's JavaOne conference without having submitted any of them.

The Call for papers closes January 31, 2005. I'm not seeing it now on the site, but I thought the cut off was midnight PST. All weekend friends have pinged me on IM asking me to read their proposals and offering to read mine. I would love to see a bar chart showing the number of submissions each day since the call for papers went live. I'm guessing there is a big spike today.

As for the date with two women... this weekend was the father-daughter dance for the Girl Scouts in our home town. I had the pleasure of escorting my two daughters to an evening of dancing and snacks. Being a dad is just the best. Now back to proposing a BOF with a guy named Pop at a breakfast meeting at a diner named Mom's.

In Also in Java Today , Richard Mansfield's DevX article OOP is Much Better in Theory Than in Practice contained provocative statements such as "For many programmers, OOP is almost always far more trouble than it's worth." DevX readers were provoked and respond in support and in opposition to the points raised in the article in the follow up piece Riled Readers Respond to Restive OOP Rejection.

Debu Panda's An Introduction to Service-Oriented Architecture from a Java Developer Perspective looks at the growing concept of service-oriented architectures, which borrows Jini's dynamic traits (runtime discovery and use of services with published interfaces), but exchanges Jini's Java-based service description for XML and SOAP, which brings non-Java participants to the table. The idea is catching on because, according to the author, " service-oriented architecture (SOA) is popular because it lets you reuse applications and it promises interoperability between heterogeneous applications and technologies."

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.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi shares tips on Controlling iTunes from Java: a better Java/COM integration with Tiger in today's Weblogs . "Annotation in J2SE 5.0 gives library developers a new degree of freedom in designing. I used it to make Java/COM bridging easier."

In Projects and Communities, with today (1/31/05) the deadline for submitting session proposals for JavaOne 2005, the leaders of the Java Tools Community are asking those who are making proposals related to Tools community projects send them an e-mail with the project name and what the proposal is about.

According to the Mac Java Community, "Apple Developer Connection is sponsoring a free two-day Java on Mac OS X training session in Singapore on March 1-2. The syllabus includes Java on the command-line, integrating Java and Cocoa, and developing web applications with XCode, JBoss, and Tomcat."

Tackline writes about Generic "this" ("self") method return type in today's Forums. "You can do some similar with only 1.5 facilities. Give the base class a generic parameter that represents a type "like this". Either cast this, or return the return value of an abstract "get this"/self method. [..code in full post ] Personally, I'd prefer a notation that allows a chain of method invocations on a single expression."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Hibernate 3.0 beta 3 & 2.1.8
• Jakarta Cactus 1.7 - Testing Framework
• 6th International Middleware Conference Call for Papers
• XINS 1.1.0 Final & 1.2.0-alpha1 - Web Services APIs
• AgentFX 2.1.1 - 3D Engine

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Current and upcoming Java Events :

• February 14-17, 2005 LinuxWorld Boston 2005
• February 28- March 3, 2005 EclipseCon
• March 3-6, 2005 TheServerSide Java Symposium
• March 14-17, 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

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