Bruce Boyes's Blog

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Where is java.net heading?

Here at the 3rd annual Java.net Community Leader's weekend in SFO there are a lot of interesting discussions and techno-gossip. For example, Collabnet just purchased SourceForge. What does this mean for online open-source communities? Are meta-communities still a viable model for the near future? What new features do we want to see at java.net? Are podcasts gaining traction in this space? What "best practices" are there for java.net communities?

And in my case, how do community leads find the time to keep things fresh? How does anyone?

So it should be an interesting weekend, and JavaOne hasn't even started yet...

Emerging Robotics Standards through OMG

... an RFI has been published and the deadline for response is 2005 Nov 14. I'm writing this from the 2005 Sep OMG meeting in Atlanta, where an initial RFP is being hammered out.

You can download the RFI and get more details here: http://www.jcx.systronix.com/OmgRobotics.html

Anyone with practical knowledge of robotics is welcome to respond -- you don't have to be an OMG member. My company, Systronix, just joined the OMG and is very interested in participating in development of these standards. I'm speaking tomorrow on the topic of teaching Java robotics at the university level. It would be great to teach students robotics on small, affordable platforms, and have their work carry over easily to a variety of larger, commercial robotics platforms.

It would also be great if the java.net robotics community would work on an open source reference implementation of these emerging standards. I'll start such a project ASAP and post results from this week's meeting here in Atlanta. (Other OMG members are already implementing their work in Java.)

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