Taking Duke with you

Thomas Kuenneth concludes his series on MIDlet programming with Low-Level Display Access in MIDlets . He introduces "the Canvas class with its related helper classes. It provides low-level display output and immediate access to the input facilities of a MIDP device. Canvas is particularly well suited for applications that require fast and unconstrained access to the screen, which is true for games and multimedia programs."

In Also in Java Today , in the developerWorks article Advanced Synth, Michael Abernethy writes about the Tiger feature designed to "let developers create a new look and feel without writing one line of Java code. This seems like a good solution. Programmers in general aren't known as the most artistic of people, and graphic artists aren't generally experts on Java coding. Synth provides a happy compromise by removing the entire description of the look from the code and placing it in an external XML file and image files. This type of look and feel, one that's described solely in external files, is called a skin."

Bill Venners has kicked off an interesting discussion with his post Can You Write Quality Software Fast? He questions when you should hack together code and when you should worry about long term design. Read the talkbacks. Eric Armstrong writes "When I was coding professionally, I invariably invested in long-term designing, bullet-proofing, and 'building for the future'. Invariably, it was a mistake to do so." Anthony Eden looks that the reason he has "had more success developing for now and fewer successes designing for later. The primary reason is because I've tried to design without really understanding what needed to be designed. In the end that almost always leads to failure."

Wayne Holder asks Session, Session, who's got my Session? in today's Weblogs . He billboards it " JSR-168 suggests that portlets can pass information to servlets by passing objects in the user's session. However, there appear to be some bumps on the road to making this work with Pluto and Tomcat."

John Reynolds wants to know why we don't make BPEL engines smarter in Objects, Components, Web Services and BPEL . "BPEL engines should optimize performance based on learning about the interfaces that are available for specific Services. To make this work, each Web Service would have to indicate alternate interfaces that it supports (Java RMI, C#, Jini, etc). In my example, the ACME Service provides both a Java and a Web Services interface, while the EMCA Service only provides a Web Services interface. When talking to the ACME Service, the smart BPEL engine can use Java protocols to speed things up."

In Projects and Communities, you can now read the chat transcript for last week's JavaLive conversation with five key members of the Java WSDP 1.5 engineering team about Java Web Services Developer Pack (Java WSDP) 1.5.

The JavaDesktop community notes that "Although it's always nice to add an item to the Swing Depot's Component Suites page, it's also nice to update one - it shows that the product is successful and under active development." Look at the updates to JIDE Software's component suites.

In today's Forums JCMeira asks Is there any project for increment render speed?.

Regarding building J2SE, sr29067 writes "I just started trying to build Mustang. I'm trying to build it on SuSE Linux 9.1, which I realise is not the supported platform for a Linux build. [..] The problem I'm working with at the moment is how to tell the build not to attempt to build the plugin so that I don't need the older version of GCC, plus convincing it that the platform I have does meet the needs of the build."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Mule 1.0-rc2 - Open source ESB
• PalmSource Expanding WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment
• JSR 269 - Pluggable Annotation Processing API Submitted to JCP
• JBossProfiler 1.0. RC
• JExplose 1.0 - Apple Expose-like Functionality for Java Apps.
• Document Enhancer for Java Updated

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• February 14-17, 2005 LinuxWorld Boston 2005
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