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Posted by editor on August 8, 2006 at 10:10 AM EDT

Journeys in time and space with Flying Saucer

I remember when Josh Marinacci first got going on Flying Saucer... this was before Swing Hacks and his joining the Swing team at Sun team, mind you... and this was one of several projects that seemed to come and go from joshy.org, like a webmail viewer he wrote a while before that.

If you look at Flying Saucer's announcements, you'll see the initial check in from two years ago, a nonchalant item saying "I'm just getting started with the project. First up is to check in the code (that always helps). If you stumble across this project and want to contribute, please sign up to the mailing lists and start talking."

Did it ever.

It turns out a lot of people were interested in putting together a 100% Java, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS renderer. They joined the project and over the course of two years, they've built it into a very capable renderer. At first you had to spoon-feed it carefully crafted HTML, but each version has brought in more and more of CSS2, something that this project team seems more capable of and interested in than the Internet Explorer team.

We're noting Release 6 of Flying Saucer on the front page today. The team writes: "Release 6 includes major improvements in performance and stability--plus we've taken big strides in our CSS 2.1 support." A feature list shows what's available in the new version, while online demos show off its rendering abilities.

Also in Java Today, the early draft review of JCP 286, Portlet Specification 2.0 is now available. "The main goal of this version is to align the Java Portlet Specification with J2EE 1.4, other JSRs relevant for portlet programming, like JSR 188, the next version of Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)." New features include portlet filters, inter-portlet communication, enhanced portlet tag library, and more.

The new Mobile Service Architecture (MSA) specifications (JSRs 248 and 249) define the next-generation Java platform for mobile handsets. The first part of the MSA specifications were recently completed, with the JCP's final approval vote slated for this month. In the interview The Future of Mobile Java, MSA spec lead Asko Komsi, who is also Nokia's Director of Industry Relations, talks about the future of mobile Java, and how the MSA standard will help make it easier to develop for mobile handsets

Today's Feature Article looks at Contract-First Web Services with Apache Axis2. It's tempting to throw down your business logic and expose it as a web service later, but this "code first" approach is fraught with peril. In this article, Ajith Ranabahu argues for a "contract first" in which you use code generation to create server-side code.

Scott Violet has a desktop Java tutorial on Cut, Copy and Paste in today's Weblogs: "After a long hiatus I'm returning to a series of blogs on architecting applications. This time around I'm covering a simple way to provide rich cut, copy and paste behavior in an application."

Malcolm Davis identifies Redmond's One Big Vista Mistake: "On the eve of WWDC, more of Microsofts problems become apparent. It is more than just another delay in an operating system."

Do you know How to encode Enums? Sergey Malenkov, writes: "As you know, Enums were introduced in Tiger, but they are not supported by XMLEncoder. This article describes how to encode them into XML properly."

Is it because it's WWDC week, or is there some other reason Mac topics have popped up in today's Forums? In Autocomplete combobox usability under Aqua look and feel, Jesse Wilson reports: "there's a problem with editable JComboBoxes on the Mac. When the list of options is small (ie. less than 10), the popup obscures the editor so you can't see the text being typed. This also happens for any number of options when the combo box is near the bottom of the screen. Although this problem applies to all JComboBoxes, it's particularly annoying for those with AutoComplete because then the popup is opened automatically. I've created a tiny webstart app that demonstrates the problem, plus a fix!"

In Re: Java3D JOGL & Mac OS X, yottzumm writes: "Okay, I haven't tried this yet, but is it possible to get Java3D 1.5 JOGL working on a mac through applets/Java Web Start? I have gotten JOGL working before, just wondering if Java3D 1.5 will throw a kink in it. I'd like our users to be able to use VisAD, and I think this combination may be critical to our success until Apple comes out with a better solution."

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Journeys in time and space with Flying Saucer
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