While Joshua Marinacci presents his ideas on making your Java desktop applications feel more like native applications, you can play along at home.

Today in Projects and Communities, the Java Desktop community has added the Mad Chatter project. Ostensibly Mad Chatter is a shell of an IM application that is the companion application for the series that began with Make Your Swing App Go Native, Part 1. It is also a sandbox for experimenting with coding in native look and feel into a Java desktop application. Add support for your favorite platform and help polish the code that is already there. Like what you see? Use the techniques in your own project.

The MSV project is the Sun Multi-Scheme Validator that is a member of the Java Web Services and XML. MSV validates documents against ""RELAX NG, RELAX Namespace, RELAX Core, TREX, XML DTDs, and a subset of XML Schema Part 1." The nightly builds are described as relatively stable. The "download package includes binaries, source code, and detailed documentation."

Frank Sommers sent us a link to an article featured in the IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing Newsletter that we link to in Also in Java Today. Zoltan Juhasz writes that "Future grids will be pervasive, invisible, and provide access to a wide range of services, at any time and from a variety of electronic devices. Future grids will also be used not only for high-performance computing tasks, but also for carrying out business, and assisting society and individuals in many aspects of everyday life." In JGrid: Jini as a Grid Technology, Juhasz "presents a case for Jini as a tool for grid construction [and describes] several grid services the JGrid project has developed with Jini: A compute service for executing Java programs, a service for executing batch jobs on Condor pools, a storage service for remote file access, and a router and grid access point service for wide-area network service discovery."

Kulvir Singh Bhogal and Javid Jamae introduce you to Load Testing with Apache's JMeter. In this DevX article they provide an example you can follow to test a web application. In particular this article targets the Thread Groups, Timers, Listeners, and Target Web Page elements. At the end they point out that "Many times, performance optimizations make your code ugly. It is usually not good to hang on to changes that make your code harder to read when those changes didn't make any significant improvement on your performance."

Philip Brittan leads off today's Weblogs , with The Battle Over Java. Philip revisits conflicts in the tools arena and says that "the critical issue is what bearing this battle will have on the future of Java and whether it will weaken Java in the face of an onslaught from Microsoft .NET. Java is a grand experiment. Is it possible that many independent vendors, who normally compete with one another, can come together and work for the betterment of something as complex and with as many facets as Java? The answer to that may be key to whether the larger grand experiment of open standards for software will prevail." In the talkback, krage replies that "When big corporations compete, the winner is consumer."

John Mitchell's pick of the day is the story about Microsoft phasing out products which depend on Java. John reprints Tony Goodhew's quote from the eWeek article "We will not ship products that include a piece of software we can not provide security fixes for". In Standing on the shoulders of giants... John Reynolds points to the article by Craig Larman and Victor Basili that we highlighted last week on Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History.

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• ObjectWeb and Apache Collaboration for Open J2EE
• Java Desktop System at Walmart
• JSR 237 - Work Manager for Application Servers Under Review
• OpenReports 0.5.1
• Book Review: The Art of Java Web Development
• Kaffe 1.1.3

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Current and upcoming Java Events:

• December 9 Web Seminar: Developing Wireless Applications using MIDP2.0, WMA, and MMA
• December 10-11 Borland Conference France
• December 11 Dallas J2ME User Group
• December 13 DFJUG Christmas

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