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Java talks at this year's OSCon

Posted by daniel on February 7, 2005 at 11:46 AM EST

Call for papers deadline Feb 13 for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention

There are many open source Java projects. Submit a proposal for a talk or a tutorial about your favorite for this year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention. OSCon is held in Portland, OR August 1-5 but the call for papers closes February 13.

OSCon is a challenging forum for Java developers. Paul Graham belittled Java during his keynote and Tim O'Reilly received applause when he reported that the overall market for Java books has declined. Tim was just summarizing the numbers for various technologies and not making a political statement.

All that aside, there was a very healthy Java track last year. Couple that with the fact that there is a large intersection between Java developers and open source developers (although the definitions of open source may differ) and OSCon is a fun conference. There is a limited amount of space for Java presentations, but take some time this week to craft a compelling proposal.

Stuart Sim writes Quality Bugs Me in today's Weblogs . He muses that a bug is often a "mismatch between expectations and the delivered software because the requirements were so poorly documented or the functional domain was not clear to the team."

Thanks to some work from Tim Boudreau, JNN just got prettier (at least on the mac). " Having a couple evenings to kill in a hotel room, and needing to do a bit of coding to keep myself sane, I wrote some UI and keyboard usability improvements to JNN, James Gosling's RSS reader (screenshot in blog). I hope you'll agree the results are pretty slick. Especially if you're using a mac, please give it a try."

In Bad Design, Jonathan Simon provides A really good example of really bad design. The feedback poses thoughts on why it is so.

In Also in Java Today , Andy Hunt points to an article that, at first blush, may not seem to have anything to do with the programming life. He writes that The Christian Science Monitor article The cure for traffic chaos? Remove the signs, lines, lights."says local authorities in London are about to unveil a radical solution to traffic congestion and pedestrian safety. They're planning on removing all of the conventional road markers: traffic lights, white lines, guardrails, sidewalks, etc., and create a single shared space for everyone, motorized or not. In effect, by upsetting the status quo, research (and a few pilot projects) has shown that drivers suddenly become much more attentive and aware. They can't just roar through the light on mental autopilot when there is no light. They have to watch their entire surroundings, make eye contact with pedestrians, and so on. They have to become engaged to be effective."

Bitwise manipulation seems like the arcane art of assembly-language programmers and the most hard-core of performance freaks, but Glen Pepicelli reports that it is possible and even desirable to use these techniques in Java. In "Bitwise Optimization in Java: Bitfields, Bitboards, and Beyond", he notes Java's use of boolean flags and new bitset features in J2SE 5.0, then dives into the example of representing a Chess board as bitsets, and how some expensive operations can be converted into fast logical and mathematical manipulations.

In Projects and Communities, help Sun choose the best selection of desktop sessions for this year's JavaOne conference. Take a few minutes to fill out the JavaOne 2005 Desktop Track Survey featured on the front page of the JavaDesktop community.

The NetBeans community points to a new article on NetBeans IDE 4.1 which reports that this "new release allows developers to not only develop applications in the web tier but also includes Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) and web service development capabilities."

Cowoc asks for rt.jar with debug symbols in today's Forums. "I feel it would be invaluable to be able to get line numbers with stack-traces when an exception is thrown by JRE code. Can you make rt.jar with debugging symbols available for Tiger update 1 and Mustang?"

Zander takes issue with those asking Sun to create a datepicker. "Asking Sun to donate even more resources so you don't have to go out and find a datepicker from one of the dozens of providers does not sound unreasonable? I could also say that if you write one datepicker twice you could have said to one of those companies to do it in an open source manner so two companies can divide the costs for one component. "

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Call for papers closes Feb 13 for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
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