When rebels become part of the establishment

You're in an elevator not really paying attention and then it hits you. That song in the background with no distinctive rhythm and an innocuous melody being played on a flute was the hard hitting, cutting edge, hip, anti-establishment, subversive song you liked just six months before. Later you head to the gym to work out and there are people old enough to be your mom working out to the original version of the song. Is it a signal to move on?

In the world of Java, according to John Reynolds, "By and large, the old battles are over, and the rebels either won outright or they were able to reach acceptable compromises with the establishment. That is a really good thing." This seems to be related to the arguments over whether Java has matured or whether it is no longer cool.

John Reynolds writes more about this vibe at the recent TheServerSide conference in his post TSSJS Impressions - We won; Now what do we do? in today's Weblogs . He writes that "Many of the past articles and discussion threads on TSS have been focused on how horrible J2EE was (primarilly focussed on EJB), and many of these former critics were presenters or attendees at this year's TSSJS. Unlike past years, these folks are no longer the voices of reason railing against the unreasonable establishment. In some cases these folks now are the establishment (for example, Gavin King is now a member of the EJB3 working group)."

In other blogs, Alex Toussaint points to information on JSR 170 in a post labeled JSR-170 - almost here!! James Duncan Davidson was just remarking yesterday about how hard it is to follow conversations that have moved from acronyms to spec numbers. JSR 170 is about the Content Repository for JavaTM technology API

Fernando Lozano asks EJB 3.0 two steps ahead, one step backwards? He reasons "he Java platform is about compatibility and interoperability, but the J2EE platform have failed so far on this respect because their standards were not always complete enough to let the app developer do this job without interference from the app deployer. An example of this was the absence of a standard for OO/Relational mapping, but this is being solved by the EJB 3.0 spec."

In Also in Java Today , the Java APIs for OpenGL continues to be a popular java.net download. In Introduction to JOGL you will see how to use JOGL to include basic two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics in an application. The examples are a rotating square and a rotating cube.

For a look at one man's take on last week's TheServerSide Java Symposium, take a look back at Ed Burns' reports from TSSJS. He began with Mark Hapner Keynote , his coverage of AJAX with Ben and Dion , and Rod Johnson - Why J2EE projects Fail . After attending a reception and getting a good night's sleep he covered Rod Johnson Keynote , a session on Tapestry, the Keynote panel, and finished with Gregor Hohpe - SOA Same Old Architecture?

In Projects and Communities, check out the new Data Set and Authentication features in JDNC (JDesktop Network Components ) as well as a list of the bugs that have been fixed.

The Java Enterprise community's Workeffort project is a "Work effort / time tracking application [..] built using some of the most popular and widely used open source frameworks in the J2EE space."

Tim Bell answers java.lang.instrument.Instrumentation questions in today's Forums. "In the 1.5 (Tiger) implementation, if the agent tried to redefine a class that was not linked yet, you would get a VerifyError: Bug-ID: 5092850 Synopsis: RedefineClasses causes VerifyError. This will be fixed in Tiger update 3 under bug-id 2123794. It is already fixed in the Mustang snapshot releases (5092850)."

Kohsuke writes on Identity constraint accessor/mutator generation. "You are right that the current draft of JAXB 2.0 spec doesn't have any concrete description of how an identity constraint affects the data structure of the generated code. The problem (for us) is that the identity constraints are so out-of-place with other schema definitions, and therefore it is somewhat difficult to make a meaningful/reliable inference about them."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• JIDE Software Product Line 1.7.0
• XStream 1.1.1 - Java to XML Library
• JDistro 0.34
• Controversial EU IT Patent Legislation Goes Forward
• Mantaray 1.6 - P2P Messaging
• UIHierarchy 1.2.5 - UI Library

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