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In Bluer Skies

Posted by editor on March 9, 2009 at 1:32 PM EDT

Anticipating 2009 Summer of Code

Let's start right off with Felipe Gaucho's blog about Google Summer of Code 2009.

Few days ago I was prospecting collaborators to my open source project when Björn Jensen - JUG leader of Hamburg - called my attention to the Google Summer of Code 2009 . After a brief reading of the program rules, my teacher vein started to pulse - yes, that's exactly what I was looking for.

For those that might have missed it, the idea of the Google Summer of Code is that small stipends are available for students to work on open-source projects over three months in the middle of the year (with apologies to those of you south of the Equator [wait for cheering Brazilians] for whom June through August is not Summer).

Felipe goes on to suggest:

Reading the program documentation and asking the program organizers, I've soon realized the role of open source organization as an important criterion for the selection of the participating organizations. It is hard for Google to check the quality of the mentoring provided by individuals or projects without much visibility. The natural selection of the applying organizations points to the big players of the open source community.

Discussing that issue with other JUG leaders, we quickly target java.net as our best representative organization. The idea is simple:

Java.net projects would be nominated by SUN/java.net to participate in the Google Summer of Code.

Actually, the thing is, java.net projects already have been part of Google Summer of Code, since way back in 2005. Project Looking Glass, SIP Communicator, and JXTA have all participated in the past, and there are probably others I'm forgetting or failing to find. In all these cases, the projects themselves were accepted by Google as sponsoring organizations. Of course, it's also possible that a java.net community might want to act as the sponsor/mentor if that makes more sense for a given proposal.

But if you're waiting for Sun or java.net itself to sponsor you, that's probably not necessary (or useful). Successful, active, and interesting projects have proven to have all the expertise and organization required by Google for Summer of Code participation.

So, project leaders, go make a proposal! You have nothing to lose but long sunny days and fresh air (and, in the Southern Hemisphere, not even that).

Also in today's Weblogs, Van Riper looks a little earlier on the calendar to talk up the advantages of a Spring Fling: CommunityOne West and JavaOne in June. "For Silicon Valley Java Developers, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for missing JavaOne this year. Even if you can't swing the registration fee for JavaOne, a FREE CommunityOne West registration will still give you access to the JavaOne General Sessions and the JavaOne Pavilion during the main conference."

Finally, Sourath Roy talks up ME graphic goodness on a new platform in LWUIT on TV. "After its success on mobile, Light Weight UI Toolkit (LWUIT) has a new destination - TV! LWUIT on TV is pretty similar to LWUIT on mobile, but it has to now work with bigger screen resolutions and different aspect ratios on TV."

In Java Today, Joe Darcy has posted a Project Coin: Week 1 Update, listing the first 17 submissions for consideration in Project Coin, the "small language changes" JSR for Java 7. Neal Gafter has submitted several of the first few proposals, including Block Expressions for Java, Improved Exception Handling for Java (multi-catch and checked rethrow), while Josh Bloch offers Automatic Resource Management. Joe's post also reiterates that proposals should be extensively thought out, "specifications approaching JLS quality, preferably with a prototype to help validate the design."

Monday is the final day for the JCP special election to fill a vacated seat on the ME Executive Committee. Candidates for the seat are Aplix, Cox Communications, Marlon Luz, and Shawn Fitzgerald. A special forum has been set up to host the candidates' statements and to facilitate Q&A between the JCP membership and the candidates. JCP members should have received voting instructions via e-mail (contact the JCP Program Management Office if you have questions or concerns).

Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart reminds us of this week's GlassFish event in First GlassFish Bootcamp - Santa Clara... Where should we hold the others? "This week (the 10th) is our first public GlassFish Bootcamp, a full-day of "how-to" presentations around the GlassFish Server. The bad news is that the event is sold out, but the good news is that we are considering hosting other camps, so please send us an email to glassfishcamp@sun.com (or use this link) with your contact into and geographic preference, and we will see what we can do."

For anyone interested in writing a Feature Article for java.net, we have recently updated the writer's guides, specifically the topics we're interested in page, which now lists over 20 specific topics (many from JSRs expected to comprise EE 6 and SE 7) that we're highly interested in getting article proposals for. If you're interested in proposing an article on one of these topics, take a look at the process guide and then send us your proposal.

This week's Spotlight is on the program to offer Free JCP Membership for JUGs, the deadline for which was recently extended by the JCP. The program's benefits also include a special Education discount for Java training classes with Sun Learning Services, assistance getting speakers and logistical supprt for JUG meetings and other events, a special JUG gathering at JavaOne, promotion in the JCP Program Member Newsletter, and more.

In today's Forums, bernard_horan announces a Fix for 0.4 release of Wonderland. "There have been several reports of a bug that's become apparent on Windows clients with java 6 update 12. It appears as a grey/white rectangle in the upper left quadrant of the client window after logging in. This seems to be affecting so many users that we've produced a 0.4.1 release of Wonderland to fix the problem. More details on today's Wonderblog: http://blogs.sun.com/wonderland/date/20090309."

corical is still hoping for a Table in LWUIT. "Hi, yes there's been a couple of posts on this subject but it never really cleared up the matter, hopefully we'll get it this time. Goal: a table like structure that will display data which in turn will change (underlying model) and needs to be updated live with some cell animation. In short, think of a table containing stock market values. These needs to be updated as you receive new data, the individual cells needs to be updated (values) and I need to flash the background of that cell to graphically indicate an update occurred."

bondolo explains JXTA IDs in Re: IDFactory weird behavior. "You are right, the documentation on the IDFactory is incomplete. However, fixing it is not as easy as adding the documentation for IDFactory class. The IDFactory creates IDs using the id provider appropriate for the peergroup (all ids which specify a peergroup will use the same id type as the peer group). You will notice that for a few id types you need to specify the id provider. In the default case the id provider used is the 'uuid' type. The documentation for the uuid idtype does indicate that it uses only the first 16 bytes. However, since this documentation is on an implementation sub-class and not the factory it is understandable that it is not clear. The 16 bytes of seed are intended to be used with a cryptographic hash function. uuids are fixed size 128 bits and the seed size matches this."

Finally, eric_marsh asks, Is there a way to automatically instantiate a bean at startup? "All I want to do is to create a bean that will periodically ping mysql to see if there are any new records in a mail table, and if those records exist to send some emails. I'm using Glassfish for the rest of my app and so it makes sense to me that I would want to use it for this function too. I don't want a web interface or anything like that. I've looked at the ServletContextListener but from what I can see it requires a bean to be instantiated. So far I've not been able to figure out how to automatically instantiate a bean when Glassfish starts up."

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Anticipating 2009 Summer of Code
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