There's a new programmer competition for developing 3G applications for the Motorola A920 handset.

From the announcement:

The competition is open to developers from companies and individual developers who wish to enter. The competition covers three separate technology environments: Symbian OS, Java and Macromedia Flash. In each of these technologies there are three categories for the type of application presented: Games, Music/entertainment/infotainment and Business/Utilities/E-learning.

Also in Projects and Communities, the JavaPedia page on Books includes favorite books in a variety of categories. Add to the listings of General Programming, Introductory Java, J2EE, J2ME, and Java Performance or create new categories.

In Also in Java Today we link to two JavaWorld magazine articles. In the first, Brad Rippe shows you how to Start developing portals with JA-SIG uPortal . Brad writes, "Although, the software is a collaborative effort of educational institutions, it might be worth the investment to create the perfect corporate portal environment." The second article features the BeanShell framework in Dawid Weiss' Discover new dimensions of scripted Java . As a bonus, BeanShell developer Pat Niemeyer writes a sidebar on the improvements in the 2.0 branch of the software that incorporates most of the features that Weiss covers.

Will Iverson's Weblog entry The Future of Native Interfaces is a follow-up to his ONJava article Mac OS X JNI Revisited. Will remembers that Apple used to make it much easier to call into native code from Java and asks "is there a place for improving these native integration tools? Should it be done in the JVM itself, in the JDK tools, or as an external project? Or is there even enough interest in Java-native bridging for it to matter - it's possible now, there's a bit of a steep learning curve, and that's just ok?"

Yesterday we featured Jayson Falkner's first post in which he asked for suggestions on what he should blog about. Today he responds to zander's question Are JSP Still Relevant?. Although Jayson's response has more hype than the typical java.net post, but at it's core he says "JSP is great for generating dynamic web pages, think any web page that uses markup, e.g. HTML, XHTML, WML, or even just plain text."

Andreas Schaefer also weighs in with a response to Simon Brown's entry from yesterday with RE: File Access in EJB . Andreas highlights the need for a solution that works well in a clustered environment. He writes "maybe each deployed EJB needs to have its own file that is not shared on the cluster. I think it is very important for each J2EE developer to see that there is much more between heaven and earth that a specification can ever capture. But it is important for the future of the code/project that ‘unportable code’ is kept localized and under control and that the assumptions and restrictions of that code is documented well."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Report: P2P Could Make Internet More Reliable
• JSR 168 Portlet Specification Formally Approved
• CollabNet Joins Eclipse Consortium
• BEA Adds Performance Monitoring to WebLogic Server 8.1
• IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4 1.1

Registered users can submit news items for the java.net News Page using our news submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review by news director Steve Mallet before being posted to the site. You can also subscribe to the java.net News RSS feed.

Current and upcoming Java Events:

• until Oct 10 IDUG 2003 - Europe
• Oct. 10-12 Lone Star Software Symposium
• Oct. 13 -15 ITU Telecom World 2003
• October 14 Java Live Chat: What's New in Javadoc?

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.

This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Once this page is no longer featured as the front page of Java Today it will be archived at http://today.java.net/today/archive/index_10092003.html. You can access other past issues in the java.net Archive.