Editor's Daily Blog

Building a better brain

When creating a new web service, keep it simple and reuse existing technologies.

In java.net featured articles, Joshua Marinacci writes about "designing a simple but robust web service protocol called BrainFeed, considering alternatives and balancing pros and cons. Throughout the process, we will stay focused on making the protocol simple and reuse existing (preferably open) technologies wherever possible."

In Building a better brain, part 1, Joshua models his web service after some of the strengths of RSS. Note that after designing his protocol he thinks about the developers he wants to adopt the protocol and create clients. His final step is providing comprehensive documentation for implementors. Read through his process and weigh in in the talkback with what you think of what he's done. In a week and a half we'll publish part 2 which shows a Swing client.

In today's Weblogs , James Gosling has thrown a weekend hack over the wall. He wrote an RSS feed reader called JNN (the "Juicy News Network") seeded with a list of technology blogs. James explains that " The most interesting thing is what it does to be fast at startup: all news feed reading is done by a swarm of low priority threads, one for each feed. So all feeds get fetched in parallel. This is very easy to do in Java: the threading API and networking support made it all straightforward."

Why should you host your project in java.net's Education and Research community? Daniel Brookshier answers "there is more than software for the sake of education. There are also projects related to student thesis and school projects. There are also many researchers that need a space to work with their peers in an open way."

Attention webloggers There continues to be some sort of glitch in the system that is being addressed. For now to create a new entry you should login and then go to the weblog home page.

In Also in Java Today, SLIK is the Simplistic Skin Interface which allows you to build multi-platform UI's in C. Vladimir Silva writes that this is a perfect candidate for JNI in Design skinnable Java UIs for media players with native performance . Although you will need an OS specific component, your Java code will communicate with "The SLIK JNI layer is a platform-independent component that acts as the glue between Java code and OS-dependent code."

Dejan Bosanac presents two ways to implement Job Scheduling in Java. For simple cases he uses the Timer class with your own custom-written code. For more complex cases he introduces Quartz, an open source job-scheduling system with Jobs (the work to be done) and Triggers (the time when an action is to be performed). Dejan shows you how to use Quartz in a distributed application using RMI and points you to a "plugin that allows you to export the Scheduler interface as XML-RPC".

In today's Projects and Communities , the Java Games community manager, Chief Gaming Officer, Chris Melissinos talks about the future of games and Java Technology.

The java.net Education and Research community invites you to host your projects there.

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Schwartz: Sun Not Inclined to Open Source Java over Compatibility
• JSR 241 - The Groovy Programming Language - Submission and Review Ballot
• JBoss 3.2.4 RC1
• JForum RC2
• db4o (database for objects) 2.9
• JSmooth 0.9.7

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Current and upcoming Java Events :

• March 15-19 Software Developer Conference West
• March 19-21 Gateway Java Software Symposium
• March 22-26 Game Developers Conference, 2004
• March 23-25 7th Jini Community Meeting

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