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Turning 50

Posted by daniel on May 24, 2004 at 7:54 AM PDT

Janice Champion is java.net's fifty-thousandth member.

Someone had to point out to me that we had passed fifty-thousand members in less than a year. Although it's on our front page, it's not something we were really tracking carefully. Thanks to you, Janice, and many others who have joined this year. Please feel free to drop me a line on what you'd like to see us do more of in the next year.

In
Also in Java Today, "JSP 2.0 has defined three new directives (<%@tag%>, <%@attribute%>, and <%@variable%>) and two new standard actions (<jsp:invoke> and <jsp:doBody>) that can be used only in tag files." In Creating JSP 2.0 Tag Files, Andrei Cioroianu shows you " how to create and use tag files and how to transform existing page fragments into tag files."

The results of the 2004 ONJava Reader Survey Results are in. Chris Adamson summarizes the results of the voluntary survey of 768 ONJava readers. In addition to Java, 81 percent of those responding use XML, 79 percent said SQL, and 60 percent said Apache. Other answers included Perl (28 percent), PHP (20 percent), and Python (14 percent). 23 percent use C and/or C++ in addition to Java, while 11 percent also use C#. The most cited technologies in this write-in vote were Ruby, JavaScript, and HTML.

Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart is doing a little spring cleaning in anticipation of our first anniversary. In
today's Weblogs
he provides a report and a call for action in his Java WS & XML Community Blog.

Eitan Suez says that Cascading Style Sheets have taken root. He writes that when you use CSS, " the content becomes more semantic. We cannot change the html markup language but it has become flexible enough such that content publishers can now get around the issue of semantic content by applying "class" and "id" attributes to tags. What publishers end up doing is tagging a div with an id such as "sidebar." As far as I'm concerned, this is equivalent to having a tag. Suddenly combining markup with css stylesheets becomes a task more akin to writing content using a specialized markup language such as docbook. The difference of course is that the rules are completely informal; they're invented by the content developer."

Satya Komatineni is Working with ServletRequest's setCharacterEncoding for UTF-8 form submissions. He explains that "when a user clicks on a submit button on a web page. The browser will collect all the arguments on that form and gets ready to send a data stream to the web server. If the arguments are not ascii, then the browser needs to encode them in an alternate format. For example in IE there is an advanced option (which is normally checked) to allow this encoding to be utf-8 allowing foreign characters along with the English alphabet. Although it says '8' a character in utf-8 can take multiple bytes and hence can represent all the variations in the world's alphabet. In fact the 1.4 servlet spec describes this in a bit more detail. To cut the long story short, IE will dispatch this form to the server side in utf-8 format."

In today's Projects and Communities ,
this week's java.net poll asks When should an optional package be deprecated? Answers range from "when active developement ends" to "Never".

The Java Web Services and XML community continues to provide weekly binary drops of the latest JAX-RPC implementation.

Jeff Dinkins provides the User Interface with a URL that makes it easy to provide feedback
in today's
Forums.
He writes that he is "the manager of the Swing team. The entire Swing team reads everything posted here: http://javadesktop.org/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=2"

We can't forget that Software is soft Rick Carson writes that: In 'the real world', if you have a lock that is hard to pick, this is a sufficient deterrent *most of the time* because very few people have the skill that is required. Whereas for breaking encryption, if its just a matter of skill, then someone with that skill can codify it into a piece of software, and every script kiddie in the western hemisphere has it by Friday. The 'fatal flaw' of software, is that it is extremely hard to codify a skill.

Zander responds to an early comment that "They wanted the text to be selected on entry" in the thread on Native vs. cross platform L&F he responds "Isn't this a perfect example of users wanting native look and feel? That is why I choose it. The answer to your question is: 'No' Its a perfect example of the user wanting native feel, not always native look. "

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