Editor's Daily Blog: The Community

Last week I got an IM from somebody at 6:30 am asking for help with something he was putting together on java.net. He needed some quick thoughts on community. I'm guessing it was due that morning at eight - but that's a different story. If he were IMing me today with that question, I would direct him to Joshua Marinacci's blog mouth.whereIs().put(new Money()).

Joshy's blog is a good one about the Flying Saucer and RSI Buster projects. RSI buster is a web startable MiniApp for helping you deal with Repetitive Stress. What I found striking about the blog was the feedback it elicited from the community. Some people posted about miniApps they had developed and others posted about RSI. We have a long way to go before we have the community we are hoping for, but thank you for participating and helping to take us in so many wonderful directions.

Also in today's Weblogs , Bob Lee reports that "Click and Hack provided an example of subverting compiler exception checking (i.e. throwing a checked exception like an unchecked exception) using the deprecated Thread.stop(Throwable) method, and then challenged the reader to do the same with a non deprecated method and without any sort of bytecode trickery. They knew of two possible alternate solutions, one that would work with any JDK, and one that was JDK 1.5 specific."

Stuart Sim is trying not to judge SAKAI too early but he does have some thoughts on SAKAI - Open Source LMS or Developer Framework? He considers the difficulties in trying to work towards to connected goals in parallel.

In Also in Java Today , Markus Gebhard created JDemo to test GUI components. It uses JUnit's idea of tests with "demos", which bring up UI widgets and allow them to be visually inspected and verified. In JDemo:Interactive Testing Refactored, he writes, "demos are not only useful during the development of a software component, but can also be very valuable later. Demos can be used to directly access all of the software components in a large library. They also provide example code for how to use the API properly."

Martin Fowler blogs "As there is a growing interest in dynamic languages, more people are running into a programming concept called Closures or Blocks. People from a C/C++/Java/C# language background don't have closures and as a result aren't sure what they are. [..] Closures have been around for a long time. I ran into them properly for the first time in Smalltalk where they're called Blocks. Lisp uses them heavily. They're also present in the Ruby scripting language - and are a major reason why many rubyists like using Ruby for scripting. Essentially a closure is a block of code that can be passed as an argument to a function call. "

In Projects and Communities , the Java BluePrints Solutions Catalog is a "set of guidelines and best practices and small applications to illustrate these guidelines on the J2EE 1.4 platform." Join the team tomorrow for a live chat .

Daniel Brookshier muses about Day one with the JELC Advisory Board and, in particular, the benefits of having a central place.

In Forums Javakiddy explains that " There is a downside to hackability. The more hackable a system is, the harder it is to upgrade it while keeping it backwards compatible. Access modifiers aren't intended to annoy the hell out of programmers (although they do). They define the boundary between the API developer and the API user. By restricting access to something the developer is saying 'this is implementation detail, and my responsibility - keep off'".

Are layers in the language the answer? Billksun writes "It's nice that Java has all these encapsulated codes and that it's easy to use. But it would be even better if Java allows access to the fine grains of Java. I think layering is the best answer to this. High-level or low-level, your choice. And that's a powerful choice."

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September 15, 2004 JavaZone 2004
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