Skip to main content

Times Like These

Posted by editor on February 8, 2008 at 1:17 PM EST

The conference proposal review slog

Yesterday, I mentioned Tor Norbye's blog on Why Your JavaOne Submission Was Rejected, and I was sufficiently inspired to do my duty to my employer and work through the 80-some Java-related sessions submitted for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. So that was yesterday afternoon, and then some.

I went backwards through the proposals' default sort order, to counter any directional bias... though this still tends to cluster proposals by topic if they all start with the same word. And yes, there probably ought to be something in O'Reilly's web app to just apply a random sort order on the search results, to make it more fair.

Anyways, looking back, it's interesting that I didn't give any "1"s on our 1 out of 5 scale... since scores are averaged among a small number of reviewers for each session, giving a proposal a 1 is effectively a veto. And to be sure, I don't mind killing stuff that is obvious garbage: incomprehensible drivel, corporate sales pitches, and outright spam. I gave out a bunch of 1's last year. This year, the floor at least was raised: the only ones I truly hated were sessions on long in the tooth topics that aren't going anywhere interesting (enough about Axis 2 already!) and one web 2.0 proposal that seemed to be an exercise in buzzword bingo, using Tim O'Reilly's famous What Is Web 2.0 as the answer key. And while those proposals weren't so hot, they weren't deserving of instant death. I'll leave that for the next few reviewers to work through the queue.

But enough negativity... what was good? I shouldn't get ahead of myself, since I've only got one vote, but there were some very appealing proposals about JVM internals, Java FX, the offshoots of the GPL'ed ME VMs, and some interesting projects I wasn't aware of. I think there were fewer java.net projects as the focus of proposals than last year, but then again, but then again, there was a trend this year away from talks just about one project and more on integration, process, and context. All of which should make for good talks.

A friend of mine just turned down a offer to write half of an upcoming Java book, citing the crunch of conference season. A lot goes on to put on these sessions, and the people who propose and deliver conference sessions deserve the applause they get, because it's not easy.

Speaking of conference sessions, the latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobility Podcast 36: James Gosling's MEDD Keynote Address. This week Roger and Terrence recap some of the announcements from the Mobile and Embedded Developer Days. You'll also hear an excerpt from James Gosling's MEDD keynote address.

JavaOne acceptances went out this week, and according to today's Weblogs, Fabrizio Giudici will be one of the speakers you can look forward to seeing. In blueMarine goes to JavaOne - and other updates, he posts "a bunch of quick updates about my projects, as in these days I can't find the time for technical posts... Well, my talk about blueMarine has been accepted for JavaOne."

Want to find the Hidden Hippie? Gregg Sporar writes, ""Hippie" completion continues to be one of the best features of the NetBeans IDE's editor - and also one of the hardest to discover."

Finally, Dru Devore shows off JSF Tables with databases in NetBeans 6.0. "This is an addition to the JSF Visual Web JavaServer Faces in NetBeans Tutorial. For this information to be useful to you you will have to have a JSF Visual Web JavaServer Faces project created. To create the project please refer to the earlier blog. This is the project I will be working with in this tutorial."

Following up all this week's talk about conferences, the latest java.net Poll asks "Have you ever presented a technical session at a conference?" Cast your vote on the front page, then check out the results page for current tallies and discsussion.

In Java Today, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart announce a pair of GlassFish-related releases in the Aquarium post Release Day! Java Application Platform SDK and NetBeans 6.0.1. "Today we completed updating Sun's server-side SDKs to GlassFish v2 U1. The last one was the Java Application Platform, which includes additional components beyond those in the Java EE SDK. Check out Siraj's Note, and the new, very clear, Download Page. And, meantime, in another part of the forest... Roman announces the Release of NetBeans 6.0.1, mostly a BugFix release, with one of the main changes being formal support for GlassFish v2 U1."

Fenxi is a pluggable Java-based post-processing, performance analysis tool. The Fenxi performance analysis tool eases the processing and analysis of performance data and benchmark results. Fenxi parses and loads the data from a variety of tools into a database, and then runs a set of queries to analyze and plot the results. Fenxi also allows you to compare performance metrics from a set of runs, and run your own custom queries.

A new SDN article by Richard Marejka, Using Subversion, NetBeans IDE, and Sun Java System Web Server With Java ME offers toolkit and process suggestions to the ME developer. "A great deal of software is available to developers, even in what many would consider the small Java Platform, Mobile Edition (Java ME) space. With so much choice, it's difficult to determine which software products provide a real benefit. This technical article will highlight two products that improve the life of the Java ME developer by adding support for source-code management and application deployment."

In today's Forums,  Arun Gupta announces the availability of GlassFish v3 gem - now at rubyforge. "A newer and more improved GlassFish v3 gem is available at RubyForge (home for commonly used Ruby gems). Here are the key features: * The Gem replaces WEBrick as the development container and a pack of Mongrels front-ended by light-weight Web server + Capistrano for management by one command and one process (think "eco-friendly"). * Works with both JRuby 1.0.3 and JRuby 1.1RC1. * Multiple applications can be deployed in one instance of gem, each in their own context root and running on separate ports. * Each application can serve multiple requests concurrently. * The applications deployed on this Gem can easily make use of pooled resources such as database connections..."

mthornton discusses memory allocation considerations in Re: Dynamic Upper Memory Limit for the JVM (yes, again). "My understanding is that the current garbage collectors gain a performance advantage from having the heap allocated as a contiguous area of memory. You lose this if you extend the heap address space dynamically. Most users can avoid this isue by simply requesting a very large maximum heap (e.g. -Xmx1000m). Note that this doesn't allocate 1GB of memory it merely reserves the address space. The real problem then arises if you have native code which also wants a substantial amount of address space (and especially if it also wants contiguous address space)."

bedwards is working with Java FX and wants to figure out Using Canvas to paint a word array... "I am trying to display an array of words as Text objects in a Canvas. The array is five words of five characters each. The idea is to use guess words to match a secret word, and display the matching letters in red; unmatched letters in yellow. The problem is that the Canvas only shows four rows of words, omitting row "zero". Any ideas? I'm using the NB 6.0 interpreter for this prototype."

Current and upcoming Java Events :

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.



The conference proposal review slog
Blog Links >>