Skip to main content

It's about Time

Posted by daniel on February 16, 2005 at 9:05 AM EST

Should widgets or adapters be in the box?

Chet Haase has written a Featured Article that presents convenience classes for working with dynamic events. In Timing is Everything he writes "Any time you introduce dynamic effects, animations, or time-based events to a Java application, you find yourself re-implementing the same functionality you have written for every application that required timing or animation. The built-in APIs are powerful, but they require that you write a fair amount of boilerplate code."

In his article he addresses the specific issue and provides you with code in his java.net project Timing Framework . But the issue he raises is not unique to timing. Think of how many tasks that you repeat. Much of your day is spent doing things you have done before and you can generalize Chet's introduction as follows:

Any time you [ common programming task here ] you find yourself re-implementing the same functionality you have written for every application that required [ same task here ]

There have been discussions in the forums over whether these belong in the core APIs. The example that seems to keep coming up is a date picker. Instead of putting these in the core APIs, shouldn't these be independent projects that are not subject to the time schedules of the JCP and standard J2SE releases? But, others argue, then don't we end up with this wasted effort of many people repeating the same task? Others have answered that you can and should open source these succesful widgets or otherwise make them available.

Many of these exist on Sourceforge, java.net, or other repositories - should we have a "commons" area that helps catalog the cream of the available widgets or frameworks? I'm thinking out loud because we keep seeing the same set of questions in the forums. Thoughts?

Meanwhile there is more news from the world of convergence. In today's Weblogs , John Reynolds blogs News from a Parallel Universe: JSF and Tapestry project leads agree on future course. Aspects, persistence, and now presentation. John writes " At the upcoming TheServerSide Java Symposium in a parallel universe, the doppelgangers of Howard Lewis Ship and Craig R. McClanahan will agree to base JSF 2 on Tapestry "

Daniel Brookshier reports from afar on Sun Education and Research Conference. He writes "The Sun Education and Research Conference is getting started in San Francisco this week. Most of us are not at this conference, so we need to rally ourselves within the virtual space of the java.net to promote global education and life long learning."

Eitan Suez blogs that he's about to go On the Road Again. He's preparing to present at this year's No Fluff weekend conferences. These are high quality gatherings and I'm sorry not to be on the program this year. I may have to travel to catch Eitan on the road this year.

In Also in Java Today , Denis Pilupchuk, author of O'Reilly's "Java vs. .NET Security" eDocument, has turned his attention to WS-Security and it really works in the enterprise: "ever since the inception of the commercial Internet, there have been attempts (some more successful than others) to form generic B2B automated processing chains. In such a setting, each participating web service will in turn be acting as a server and then as a client, when it issues a request to the next element of the chain." And from a security standpoint, when each link in the chain may introduce new incompatibilities in handling credentials, building a working and secure chain gets very difficult. WS-Security in the Enterprise, Part 1: Problem Introduction lays out the problem and identifies the steps needed to resolve it.

In his piece Static Versus Dynamic Attitude , Bill Venners wonders " to what extent the mindset encouraged by a language and its surrounding culture influences people's perceived productivity when they use that language." He thinks back to some design decisions he has made and notes "The culture that guided the design of a language influences my attitudes and mindset when I use the language. The Java culture encourages me to build solid bricks that can be combined to build large, dependable systems. The Python culture encourages me to glide smoothly and quickly to a solution."

In Projects and Communities, check out the new front page for the Java Games community. They are looking for submissions for tips and tricks or for recognizing developers or games.

The Java User Group community lists upcoming meetings of the Triangle JUG in RTP and the JUG.RU in St. Petersburg. You can add your JUG meeting to the list.

Sometimes 'final' is not enough. JSBean asks about adding 'fixed' to 'final' in today's Forums . "What I want seems to be very similar to 'const' in C++. [..] 'fixed' would mean: 'will not be changed by this reference or future references to this reference'. I think 'fixed' and 'Immutable' are two useful features that would complement each other. If the language supports both 'fixed' keyword and 'Immutable' interface, an immutable object would be fixed by default and a fixed reference would be final by default."

Bino George is back with a post that "Support for FireFox is planned for Mustang. Meanwhile you can enable and disable java in FireFox using the FireFox Options dialog under the 'Web Features' tab."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Registered users can submit news items for the java.net News Page using our news submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site. You can also subscribe to thejava.net News RSS feed.

Current and upcoming Java Events :

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.

Should widgets or adapters be in the box?
Blog Links >>