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Attracting Programmers

Posted by daniel on February 24, 2005 at 10:19 AM EST

Coding Robots

Check out our latest featured article. It's Krishnan Viswanath's Robotics: Using Lego Mindstorms and Java. To justify the expense, I suppose you could focus on the educational benefits, but it looks like a lot of fun. On the other hand, I worry about teaching computer science through games and robotics. The conventional wisdom is that this attracts males more than females and should we make sure that the doors we are providing to this world of programming attracts both?

I have two young daughters and know that you can not generalize, but girls and boys are different in the way they play at a very young age. There seem to be gender differences in the way kids interact with their world. My kids love soccer and other sport and they spend way too much time with computers and video games so maybe technology has moved us beyond such concerns. When I used to teach programming to college students, I would often use games (Tetris, Mastermind, . . .) as programming assignments. A female colleague asked me to broaden my examples because she was concerned that I was steering potential female majors away.

Thoughts?

James Gosling looks back at Lessons from last years t-shirt contest entrants in today's Weblogs . It's just cool to see the images of the three finalists and read James' take on the strengths of each.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi follows up with more thoughts on JAXB 2.0 and Immutable Objects/Fields. " In the last week, I wrote about how you can use JAXB 2.0 as an XML persistence engine, and I got a lot of comments about the support for immutable objects. So I'd like to elaborate on it today."

Duane Gran joins the growing list of people who think Lucene is a wonderful thing. " Erik Hatcher, author of Lucene in Action has put together a nice presentation overview of Lucene at JavaLobby.org. A login is required, but it is worth it."

In Also in Java Today , Michael Yuan argues in his JavaWorld article On the road to simplicity that "the coolest thing about JBoss AS 4.0 is not the J2EE certification, but the new technologies that currently reach beyond the scope of J2EE and aim to greatly simplify Java middleware development. " In this article he uses "three example applications to show you the simplicity of the POJO middleware frameworks in JBoss AS 4.0 and how they relate to the current and future J2EE specifications. If you are a JBoss user or a general J2EE developer, this article teaches you portable skills that you can use in both today's JBoss AS 4.0 server and the future JBoss 5.0 or J2EE 1.5 servers."

Hans Bergsten writes "Designing a good user interface is never easy, but designing a web application interface is especially challenging." In the Oracle Technology Network's series on mastering J2EE Application development, Hans focuses on Designing and Implementing Web Application Interfaces. He advocates using JSF which "defines a component-based web application development model, enabling vendors and open source projects to create sophisticated user-interface widgets that developers can then use to create easy-to-use web applications, with portability between tools and application servers."

In Projects and Communities, James Todd reports from the JXTA community that Jeff Moore, aka polo, is now a MyJXTA project co-owner and that Jeff dove into MyJXTA feet first and fleshed out, among other things, the prefuse eye candy.

Daniel Brookshier has advice for java.net project owners on Managing membership requests. His blog provides advice for both requesters and for java.net project leaders.

Bino George answers a question about Swing performance on Linux in today's Forums. "waitForEvents is the native method that calls XNextEvent to get X11 events off the queue. So this is normal, but keep in mind this is misleading. Sampling profilers will often show this method because all they do is repeatedly sample the call stack and in the case of the Toolkit thread all it does is sit in the method and wait for events, when there is an event it will push it on to the Java level event queue and go back to waiting. Instrumenting profilers are more accurate, but they have higher overhead."

Talios writes "One thing thats always bugged me about java is the ClassCastException. Not the exception itself, but the total uselessness of the error message it offers. It may mention the line of the problem, but it doesn't mention expected class, or the actual class - two things which would realllp help ease diagnosing problems."

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