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The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Posted by editor on June 28, 2006 at 10:28 AM EDT

Mustang later this year, Dolphin in 2008

Ray Gans' blog Update on Mustang, Dolphin and the JDK Community is on the site's top spot today, because it's absolutely jam-packed with information. Coming a month after JavaOne, what he lays out is an updated roadmap of JDK-related efforts and timelines.

Currently, an overlapping period of time is about to begin, when Dolphin development will begin in earnest while the final touches are put on Mustang for an Autumn release (Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, that is... your climate may vary). Mustang development now means bug-fixes only: "new feature work, contributions and non-critical bug fixes will now be considered for future inclusion in Dolphin."

Since some people were disappointed when they had feature requests or API changes that didn't make the Mustang cut-off, now's probably the time to engage the bug parade, JCP, or other means of getting your voice heard for Dolphin. 2008 seems like a long way off, but you don't want to miss this deadline and have your feature request slip to 2010, do you?

Then there's the topic that so many people are focused on, the promised open-sourcing of Sun's JDK implementation. Here's the unedited line from Ray:

No date has been set yet for open sourcing the JDK (though we definitely plan to do this within a reasonable period of time). There is a lot of planning and preliminary work that must be completed before we can roll things out. We are working hard to resolve business, community and compatibility issues around open source, plus we're investigating the infrastructure and organizational changes needed to support it -- so stay tuned, we'll have much more to report during the coming months. In the mean time, we're continuing our efforts to improve the JDK by working closely with interested developers through the JDK Community on java.net.

Ray also mentions two java.net projects in the JDK community of particular importance to certain subsets of the developer community. The jdk-distros project supports the Distro License for Java which allows for Linux and OpenSolaris distributions to include Sun's JDK or JRE. Then there's the jdk-api-localizations project, which hosts multiple volunteer efforts to translate the JDK javadocs into various languages.

Also in Java Today, the JavaServer Faces project's wiki page RealWorldJSFLinks collects instances of known real-world deployments of JSF technologies. "It turns out that there are hundreds of public sites on the web obviously using JSF technology. We don't know how many non-obvious JSF sites are out there, nor how many intranet sites are using JSF."

Airlan San Juan talks up the value of Java User Groups in Jugging in Place. "Where can you snack on free pizza, get some freebie books, mingle with other Java knuckleheads, and bone up on the latest fashion trends in Javaland - all these being just a drive away from your home? If you answered JavaOne, then you weren't paying too much attention to the question. Give yourself a wedgie and say 'Jumanji'. The answer, of course, is your local JUG, which is the usual acronym for a Java User Group."

Vikram Goyal asks Did you ask the users before implementing AJAX? in today's Weblogs. "Would it come as a surprise to you that my good intention of using AJAXish behavior on an existing web application turned into a nightmare of gargantuan proportions, and it had nothing to do with knowing how to use AJAX? It had all to do with knowing when to use AJAX."

John O'Conner has an important reminder: String's equals method isn't always enough. "Comparing Strings with '==' is almost never correct, and comparing with the equals method is often wrong too."

In Swing and Non Blocking JAX-WS, Richard Bair offers a mea culpa for making an unfortunately common mistake: "This is a follow up on yesterday's blog about using JAX-WS and Swing. Yesterday I was a bad, bad, boy. I was making a web service call from the Event Dispatch Thread. Doh! Today, I introduce BackgroundWorker, a SwingWorker like JavaBean and repent of my old EDT-blocking ways."

In today's Forums, the message Re: JXTreeTable: Icon in hierarchical row & proposed interface changes explains a coding philosophy and how it relates to Swing: "Generally, I prefer delegation over inheritence if the functionality of the delegate is nicely bounded. That's the case when it comes to change notification. It's in-line with PropertyChangeSupport but contrary to core Swing custom of providing a AbstractXXModel which doesn't do much more than change notification. I never liked the Swing way - it forces me to c&p the whole bunch of notification code if I can't extend the AbstractXX."

afishionado seeks Sound effects for GPL/MPL projects: "I'm trying to find some beep/click sound effects for some of my Open Source projects. I want to be able to play them without having to pull in any extensions to the JRE, so they need to be in .wav or .aif format. Does anybody have any suggestions for places to look? Google so far has been pulling up lots of really crummy free sound collections. I don't think that what I'm looking for is that hard to create--just some little beep noises for doing a countdown sequence, and maybe a happy startup sound."

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Mustang later this year, Dolphin in 2008
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