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Shine A Light

Posted by editor on August 10, 2005 at 7:05 AM EDT

Instead of cursing the darkness...

If you use QuickTime on Mac or Windows and have paid for the "Pro" features -- editing, saving movies from web pages, full-screen playback -- then you're probably aware that every few major versions and without prior warning, your registration key stops working and Apple asks you for another 30 bucks. It happened when they released Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger"), which doesn't offer a way to not upgrade to QuickTime 7, meaning Pro users had to either stay on 10.3, go without QuickTime Pro features in 10.4, or pay up.

Elliotte Rusty Harold (of Café Au Lait fame, and author of many Java books) had enough and declared that he was "mad as hell":

There's another, much bigger company that's pissed me off lately by asking for another $29.95 more for a product I'd already paid for, just to support the new release of their own operating system. In this case, there's no good open source alternative to this product; but I'm in a position to do something about that. After about a week of part time coding, I've already reimplemented more than half of their application, and I've added a couple of features they don't have to boot.

The result of this effort is Amateur, an open-source re-implementation of the QuickTime Player Pro application, coded with QuickTime for Java. In its third developer release, this JavaDesktop Community project already offers a Mac double-clickable application, at a modest 550 KB, that offers most of the features of the real QT Player, including basic playback and editing, undo/redo, full-screen playback and more. There's no Windows double-clickable yet, but he estimates it would take just a few hours -- having done a little QTJ myself (wink), I think it's probably a matter of minutes, not hours, as the basic QTJ features do work really well across platforms, and QuickTime 7 now includes QTJ by default on Windows.

Also in today's Projects and Communities, the JavaPedia entry for Barcode will be useful for anyone whose application, server-side or client-side, needs to generate barcodes. The page collects open-source Java, native, and commercial barcode generation libraries, and links to standards bodies and other external sites with more information.

In today's Weblogs, Xiaobin Lu discusses what the Java Performance Team is doing on a particuar issue where Perception == Reality: "One of the issues we have run into our work on the Java performance team is the difference between the physical memory size of a process and the perceived size of that process. "Perceived" footprint is the number reported by the operating system (by tools such as "ps" and "top" on Unix/Linux, and "Task Manager" on Windows) that a process takes up in RAM."

Navaneeth Krishnan has thoughts about encapsulation in SOA -- A Realization?: "I think the SOA hype is essentially a realization. The IT industry has realized that today's cutting edge technology is tomorrow's legacy. And that systems we create today ought to work with systems to be developed in the future."

In IntelliJ IDEA 5.0 and custom look-and-feel, Kirill Grouchnikov says "IntelliJ IDEA 5.0 was released a week ago. Here's how you can set your favourite look-and-feel to make you feel at home."

In Also in Java Today , annotations let you specify metadata as part of your source code. With this feature, you can embed tool instructions in your code rather than creating separate configuration files that you then need to maintain in parallel to the source code. But, as Java consultant Dennis Sosnoski explains in Annotations vs. Configuration Files, configuration files still have their uses, especially for aspect-like functions that cut across the source code structure of an application.

Hibernate 3 allows developers to make much greater use of "formula," as either an attribute or an element, in many more elements than were permitted in Hibernate 2. According to Dai Yifan, this opens up new opportunities for Hibernate developers: "This adds much flexibility to object-relational (O-R) mapping, and thus allows further fine-grained interpretation of complex data models." In Hibernate 3 Formulas, he shows how to use formula to achieve polymorphism, joins, and other useful combinations.

In today's Forums, bmesserer has questions about Glassfish features (esp. Java EE 5/EJB3): "I'm not sure, maybe its just me who didn't find it but could anyone involved/responsible for glassfish please post a "feature matrix" or sort of a change log for the published builds? I'm currently working (testing) Java EE 5 and - at first - couldn't find anything whether glassfish supports the draft-features or to what degree. Only by going through these forums have I found that it at least supports a subset of JavaEE5 or... well, whatever. I won't just use "trial and error" to check whether the (as said, Java EE 5, especially EJB3) features I use in my app are supported or not (you know, when working with a new platform its difficult to distinguish my own faults from glassfish's); believing some postings in this forum, the Java EE 5 implementation is quite complete and implements "the latest draft" (whichever this may be) - maybe I could already test (?)."

In Re: Javac compiler option to build Windows native exe, danielmd has more thoughts about third-party libraries and tools: "Still I hate the SUN licensing scheme of see but don't touch, they should allow for projects like GCJ to use their libraries or provide something like partial library distribution something like IBM does with SWT, for SWING. I hate SWT by the way it is an aberration, one of those forks that in time will be hated by all GUI developers. It works well for one kind of application, it is just so problem domain specific in its design that will never be a good general GUI library, unless they redesign it, and then it will look exactly like SWING."

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Instead of cursing the darkness...
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