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Decidedly

Posted by editor on September 11, 2006 at 8:56 AM EDT

Of polls and ballots

I don't know if it's that the responses have been chosen with an eye to mixing up the results, or if the Java community is really this divided, but the last few polls on the site have been striking in their lack of consensus.

Consider the recent poll asking Do You Use Groovy? With five responses, four of the five responses are clustered right around 25%, with a fifth getting less than 1%, leaving the response almost equally split four ways between Groovy fans, Groovy wanna-be's, Groovy doubters, and those who just don't know what it is.

Then check out the poll asking Would you like JDK 7 to support closures? If it were a political election, it would need a run-off, as no response got 50%. "Yes" came in first with 41.3%, but was followed by "What's a closure" at 27.2%. Is it too early for some to have an opinion, or does not knowing what the feature is argue against its inclusion?

One more: What license would you like Sun's open-source JDK to use?. It's probably not terribly surprising that Apache and GPL are the top choices. What's maybe a little more interesting is how closely they run with the option of not open-sourcing the JDK at all, which of course isn't an option under Sun's announced policy of open sourcing everything.

It's probably a good sign of diversity that opinions run a wide gamut in the Java community. There are so many Java developers, in so many different fields, it's only natural that different members are going to see things very differently.

From polling to voting: balloting for the NetBeans Governance Board elections has begun, and ends September 21, 2006 midnight last time zone. The nominees are Iwan Eising, Frank-Michael Moser, Edson Carlos Ericksson Richter, David Strupl, Rich Unger, and Gregg Wonderly, and you can read their profiles and positions on the candidate profiles page.

Also in Java Today, the ninety-third issue of the JavaTools Community Newsletter is online, collecting tool-related news from around the web, welcoming new projects to the community and congratulating maven-xmlvalidate-plugin on its graduation from the tools community incubator. Just for kicks (ha ha), the weekly tool tip suggests you watch the video Meet People - Practice Kicks, in which Bruno Souza and Ean Schuessler filmed various Java luminaries at JavaOne 2006 being kicked by a giant green shoe.

Mobile network operators must continuously monitor their networks in order to improve service. The new Event Tracking API for J2ME, JSR 190, currently in public review, standardizes event relay and collection for mobile networks, enabling application developers to build event tracking into their applications based on that standard. In the interview Event Tracking in a Mobile Environment, JSR 190 spec lead Shai Gotlib shares with Artima the requirements of mobile event collection, how JSR 190 provides reliable event collection in the face of intermittent network failures, and discusses the privacy and security aspects of mobile event collection.

This week's Spotlight is on GlueGen which makes JNI programming easier to manage. The project page describes GlueGen as "a tool which automatically generates the Java and JNI code necessary to call C libraries. It reads as input ANSI C header files and separate configuration files which provide control over many aspects of the glue code generation. GlueGen uses a complete ANSI C parser and an internal representation (IR) capable of representing all C types to represent the APIs for which it generates interfaces." GlueGen is used to generate several Java-to-C wrapper libraries, including JOGL and JOAL.

Cay Horstmann explores The Power and Pain of POJOs in today's Weblogs. "I wrote a quick-and-dirty quiz application to check whether my software engineering students do their reading assignments (or at least google quickly). Can an Elvis-level programmer do this in a couple of days with EJB3 and JSF? Here is my experience report."

Mason Glaves reports back from Ruby-land with thoughts about Blocks and Locks: "I have been playing with another language recently, and one of the little tricks I have found really interesting is the concept of code blocks. Unfortunately, Java doesn't really have this built into the language, but that doesn't mean you can't simulate them and have nearly as much fun."

In Extending GlassFish's WebContainer, Jean-Francois Arcand says "the GlassFish's WebContainer can be extended by registering interceptors and several listeners. This blog will explain how easily it is to extend the WebContainer."

In today's Forums, bdaniliuc tries to figure out Custom certificate login: "Scenario: the user has a certificate she uses to connect to the application over HTTPS. The user group assignment is kept in a directory service (active directory). The user distinguished name in the directory corresponds with the subject name in certificate. How is it possible to perform the login in glassfish in this case? I have tried using a custom realm but this does not work because when HTTPS is used the certificate realm is enforced. Also, the certificate realm needs an instance of "com.sun.enterprise.security.auth.realm.certificate.CertificateRealm" which is final. I have also tried using a custom login module but this does not work either because the certificate realm class does not make use of login modules."

aaronhughes has a Mustang webstart cache question: "It seems in Mustang the webstart caching has been completely revamped, all well and good but has anyone considered an easy method of upgrading the old cache into the new format?If someones downloaded a huge application they aren't about to want to do it all again just because they're on 1.6. I've noticed only once in playing around with Mustang that an upgrade cache pop-up box has appeared but I have no idea what set this off or how to try and force Mustang to upgrade an old cache. I've tried forcing an -offline start and all sorts of rubbish with no luck."

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Of polls and ballots
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