Join the chat tomorrow with java.net on Java Live

The city is working on the water main for our street. We have a small red hose running water to our house from a 4 inch temporary pipe that runs down the street for the length of the block. At the end of the block it branches to a two inch pipe that crosses the street and runs up the other side of the street. You can see a red hose branch of the pipe in front of every house and connects to where their garden hose ordinarilly lives.

Usually, we don't see the water main, nor the pipe that runs to our house. The water comes in and is metered and so we think of our water use in isolation. With the pipes running above the street we can see how water is a shared resource. That changes the perspective.

Some time today, java.net is going to be running blogs with the pipes exposed above the ground. We're moving to Movable Type - I'll say more about this tomorrow. But the big point is that we've always believed in making changes in full view of you so that you can point out how we can improve the site. Every once in a while the site feels a bit rough - a bit under construction - to remind us that every web site is a work in progress.

You can always submit feedback here on the site, but tomorrow you have a special opportunity as java.net is featured on Java Live. The Sun members of the java.net infrastructure team, John Bobowicz (JBob) and Chris Cheline, have been selected to talk about java.net and answer your questions. Join the chat September 28. 11:00 A.M. PDT/6:00 P.M. UTC.

Brett McLaughlin starts off the week by striking up some controversy. This time his target is Open Source. In today's Weblogs, Brett provokes you with Open Source - A Divider? saying " I'm actually a little tired of the Java-open source dynamic. Here's another discussion that's raging along, with relatively little interaction between the really smart people on both sides. Instead, we seem to have lots of little skirmishes between worker bees, when nobody is looking."

What is the right tool? The answer is, of course, It depends. Malcolm Davis blogs " The experienced engineer seems indecisive. Whenever asked a question, the engineer simply replays with 'it depends'. What is the web site developer trying to accomplish? If it's a static content site, maybe Cocoon is the answer. Is it's a portal site, maybe Jetspeed. Perhaps Struts if the site requires dynamic web forms. Does the customer allow open source? Has the customer already invested in a specific technology? Who are the other developers on the team? What is the time frame of the project?"

The t-shirt flinging contest is on again for this year's JavaOne. The plans are already underway and James Gosling invites you to Design your t-shirt launcher now! He advises you to " get thinking, get creative, and most important: get wierd."

In Also in Java Today , in Advanced SiteMesh, Sunil Patil digs into this open source technology, which uses servlet filters to provide a consistent look and feel to web sites, even those where the content is generated by different underlying technologies. He writes "the easiest possible solution is to let each of your web applications create plain HTML content without knowing about how it is being decorated, and only then have something else choose and apply appropriate decorators. This is precisely what SiteMesh does."

Wes Munsil takes you through an example to show you the potential problems with Converting to Java 1.5 Type-Safe Collections. He says that the result is more efficient and easier to understand but the process can take quite a while. He suggests that you have good regression tests in place, remove "unchecked" warnings that you find with -Xlint:unchecked and introduce parametrized types. You will also replace raw types, the use of Iterator, and (when possible) instanceof.

In Projects and Communities , MyJXTA 2.3.1a has "recently incorporated some of the JDNC components to uplevel the "rich content" editor component. This element of code is targeted for a future release of BlogEd as well. "

The JELC hosted Giant Picture Dictionary project is building a web site or desktop application where you can type virtually any word to instantly retrieve strikingly descriptive pictures and symbols for that word.

"What will happen when the ONLY software left is that community maintained code?" asks J Wenting in today's Forums. "At that point there will be no more community because all developers will have changed jobs in order to make a living, jobs that will require the same amount of dedication software development does leaving them no time to maintain all that software."

Simon Phipps responds, "You're making a common, huge mistake here. Who is the community? You assume it's all people who have a 'day job' who are writing the code in their spare time (away from their jobs in McDonalds). It's not! It's people like the ones Sun employs, experts at Apache, Gnome, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org and so on, who are working on the projects. That is their day job."

Jonathan Simon continues the discussion of "Hackers and Painters" chapter Taste for Makers. "I have met few developers that aren't really picky about how their code is formatted. And I have seen more than one team get very agitated over disagreement with others code styles. (code braces, carriage returns, spacing ...)"

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• JBoss Joins Eclipse Foundation
• Lucane Groupware 0.7.3
• JFox Application Server 2.0 M1
• ASM 1.5.1
• XDoclet 1.2.2 RC1
• jME 0.7

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

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• September 28, 2004 java.net chat on Java Live
• September 29-October 1, 2004 OSCOM

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.

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