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Tiger is here

Posted by daniel on September 30, 2004 at 2:57 PM PDT

J2SE 5.0 available.

Although there have been fairly stable beta versions available for
months, it's nice to have the final version of the Java Tiger release
downloaded and installed. If you are just getting acquainted with
Tiger, take a look at our excerpt from the book "Java 1.5 Tiger: A
Developer's Notebook". Brett McLaughlin and David Flanagan have
written an "all lab, no lecture" overview of the new Tiger
features. The featured chapter is href="http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2004/09/30/varargs.html">varargs. Brett
will also be leading us through the book when he moderates our next
bookclub.

Graham Hamilton makes it official in his announcement that the href="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kgh/archive/2004/09/j2se_50_tiger_i.html">The
J2SE 5.0 final bits are out in today's href="http://weblogs.java.net/">Weblogs. He reports " The
JCP Executive Committee approved the last 12 Tiger JSRs on September
14th. Less formally, but just as importantly, we then received our
official blessing from the J2SE Quality Assurance team that we meet
all the release criteria and are ready to go. Yesterday we did the
final round of formal release approvals inside of Sun, including
things like getting formal approval from the product support team
that they believe the product is ready to ship and they are ready to
support it."

Joshua Marinacci has tuned his latest mini-app in href="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joshy/archive/2004/09/weather_watcher_1.html">
Weather Watcher: Release Deux. One of the issues he is addressing
is "The JNLP spec (of which Web Start is an implementation) lets you
select only one of two security levels: all and none. More importantly
for most end users, if you download a signed app that requests all it
will throw up a huge warning screen saying don't do it. Right there
I've lost 50%+ of my audience."

Bob Lee points to an article from the latest edition of Oracle
Magazine that uses the java.net application Dynaop in href="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/crazybob/archive/2004/09/taking_abstract.html">
Taking Abstraction One Step Further.

In
Also in Java Today , Mark Balbes reports that "J2ME is
maturing at the same rate as the rest of Java. The JCP, which
defines the new features that will become part of the Java
platform, now features 62 specifications relating to features for
J2ME." In The
Mobile Media API, Balbes writes that "MMAPI allows us to
develop software for mobile phones, pagers, and PDAs that can play
and record both audio and video. In addition, cameras are
supported so that a photograph can be captured and used within a
custom application."

JSR-94 specification lead Daniel Selman has posted his thoughts on
what should be next for the Java Rule Engine API in href="http://www.javarules.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=23&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0">JSR-94,
What Next? A good starting place is href="http://www.javarules.org/articles/jsr94_next/jsr94_next.gif">his
diagram. Selman argues that the pasic problem is that "the
specification is very loose. Defining a bunch of interfaces and
exceptions to invoke a black-box 'rule engine' is not particularly
helpful. [..] JSR-94 barely defines what a rule engine is (this is a
contentious topic!) and can of course therefore not enter into the
details of how rules are constructed or manipulated, the effects of
invoking rules, binding of rules to the Java language or many other
interesting topics."

In Projects and
Communities , the latest projects to join the href="http://community.java.net/edu-jelc/"> JELC include
JRobotics, an admin tool called edumis, an open source IDE for
learning POO, and a portable interface display environment.

This JXTA
community post href="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/gonzo/archive/2004/09/jxta_webstart_a.html">JXTA,
WebStart, and You explains "a bit of detail describing JXTA's
use of JNLP (Java Network Launch Protocol) and the process it
enables."

href="http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=816&tstart=0#816">
Programmer's can't be replaced by magic, says Murphee in today's

Forums."In the past decades, we've been getting more
and more powerful libraries (or components), but that doesn't mean
that they'll soon string themselves together by magic [...] there
is still plenty of need for paid programmers in the future, no
matter how good the components get."

Aaston thinks that the href="http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=826&tstart=0#826">human
jobs may change, saying "Anybody read the Asimov robot books?
Assume that computers get smart, and that applications *do* string
themselves together. Somebody is still going to need play the roll of
psychologist."

Tools can help with the href="http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=838&tstart=0#838">code
formatting wars. Gary Kephart writes "One of the cool features of
Eclipse 3.0, as I found out just a few days ago, is to be able to
define a coding style and then export it to an XML file. Others on the
project can then import the file and with a ctrl-shift-F, format the
code."

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Current and upcoming
Java Events
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  • September 29-October 1, 2004 href="http://oscom.org/events/oscom4">OSCOM
  • October 1-3, 2004 href="http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/2004-10-chicago/">Great Lakes
    Software Symposium
  • October 8-10, 2004 href="http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/2004-10-seattle/"> Pacific
    Northwest Software Symposium
  • October 15-17, 2004 href="http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/2004-10-atlanta/">Atlanta Java
    Software Symposium
  • October 19-22, 2004 href="http://www.educause.edu/conference/annual/2004/"> Educause
    2004
  • October 19, 2004 href="http://www.jxta.org/servlets/ReadMsg?msgId=109045&listName=discuss">
    JXTA Developer Kitchen

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J2SE 5.0 available.

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