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It's A Wild Weekend

Posted by editor on February 16, 2007 at 10:54 AM EST

Got time for your project?

Some work on open-source for their day job; for the rest of us, it's a weekend activity, to be juggled with all the other demands on our time, like fixing the garage door, organizing the tax records, and taking the kids to the circus. It's easy to understand why some projects get stuck when their developers just never have enough time to work on them. Well, that's my excuse, anyways. Still, I've got three emacs windows (two Java, one Obj-C) and one terminal that have been minimized for two days and want to at least get compilable again... hopefully this weekend.

And how do we get the younger generation into our projects? Sure, they've got time, but they have demands on their time too: school, career-building, part-time or summer jobs, etc. Well, there's help for the last of these... a recent blog announces that Google will again host its Summer of Code, which provides stipends for students to work on major open source projects. In the past few years, java.net projects such as JXTA and Project Looking Glass have participated as mentoring organizations in the SoC.

So there's your heads-up -- for appropriate projects, it's time to apply for the program, and for students, this could be a chance to hack away the Summer months. Unless you're south of the Equator, in which case it'll be Winter.

In Java Today, A NetBeans Enterprise Pack 5.5.1 community acceptance testing (NetCAT) Beta program offers an advance look at upcoming NetBeans enterprise features. The 5-week program is scheduled to begin on February 26. "We are looking for community members who have previous experience with enterprise features and who have the availability to provide us with their feedback in a timely manner. All participants will be directly supported by the product team on the Enterprise Pack mailing list."

The 111th issue of the JavaTools Community newsletter is out, compiling tool news from around the web, welcoming new projects to the community, congratulating a graduation (JLab), and featuring a Tool Tip on how to write java.net feature articles as a means of promoting your project.

Mark Lam returns to the topic of software performance in today's Weblogs. In Software Territory: Where Hardware can't go!, he writes: "Previously, I showed that software can be faster than hardware. Now, I'll explain some JIT optimizations, and show why hardware cannot (or will have a really hard time) implementing them."

Tomas Brandalik looks into Skinning WTK on Linux: "I'm working on Linux release for some time and I feel I need to have a fun little bit. I've googled for a look and feels which would work on linux and found a page with custom LnFs."

Finally, in Displaying messages in the system tray, Michael Nascimento Santos writes: "You probably have seen messages popping up in the system tray (or status area), such as "Low battery" or "Updates are ready to be installed", produced by system tray icons. Did you know it is possible to show these messages with Java SE 6?"

The latest java.net Poll asks "What's your initial reaction to JSR-311, Java API for RESTful Web Services?" Cast your vote on the front page, then check the results page for current tallies and discussion.

In today's Forums, rah003 updates the status of SwingX in the thread Re: Download broken link: "Where are we in terms of release, milestone and so forth? Hmm, not easy one to answer. We are working on the next milestone. There are many things that need to be done and many people involved. Although it doesn't show much on the surface, lots of work is done in the background. If you have followed the discussions over past few weeks, you would know there was big infrastructure overhaul. This was part of the changes needed in preparation for the milestone and for setting up the process for releases. Swinglabs is more then just swingx and future releases should reflect it so the effort to orchestrate it all is huge. All I can ask you is to give us bit more time and stay tuned for the milestone. Its coming soon."

neognomic is questioning The Need for Motif: "Sorry if it looks a bit long but I try to be clear and that takes extra words. Sun is doing good, ithink, but this ''must use Motif 2.1'' for Linux build has my head spinning just a little. First, AFAIK, nobody in the OSS/GPL community uses Commercial Motif. Commercial Motif is bad(license). Either lesstif or openmotif is used. Sometimes both depending on application. openmotif has Open Group Public License. lesstif is LGPL license. (1) Will JDK build properly with openmotif? [...] (2) How about building properly with lesstif?"

Finally, rummyr has a Lazy question about saving huge images: "Sorry, I'm being lazy. I've got a large Mosic'ed image generated from tiles all the way down. The problem comes when I try to save it as Jpeg. I get an OutOfMemory error. Increasing the JVM max memory isn't an option - I just don't have the RAM. Is there a way to save a jpeg that internally saves in horizontal strips so it only uses enough memory for (in the extreme case) a single row of tiles/macro blocks?"

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