Unleash Java's secret weapon

Every once in a while you need to reassess a decision. The conditions under which you came to an earlier conclusion may no longer hold. There is a famous (and no doubt fictional) story of a man who watches his wife cut two inches off of either side of their holiday ham before popping it in the oven. This happens every year. Finally, he asks her why she does this. She thinks a moment and replies that she doesn't know - her mom always did it that way. He asks her why her mom did it so she calls her mom. Her mom explains that it was because she only had small pans and that the ham never fit inside. She always roasted the ends separately.

Jini technology is in those two inches of ham that get trimmed off before it's time to bake the next release.

If we look back at why our mother-in-law left Jini out in the past it may have made a good deal of sense at the time. There was no room in the pan. But now J2ME devices are as roomy as the desktop devices were then. EJB's are being pushed to the side with room being made for more lightweight solutions. What is more lightweight than the POJOs that Jini helps distribute.

In addition, there are more cooking shows to help us better prepare meals. Look at the lessons from Apple's Rendezvous to see why we should make it easier to Jini enable desktop applications. Let's tie networking in a deep way to Java. Let's ship Jini, JXTA, and the Java APIs for Rendezvous along with the JVM. What if easy dynamic distributed networking was available from and to every Java enabled device. For more of this "tempered rant", check out my ONJava piece Jini: Out of the Bottle and Into the Box.

In our other Also in Java Today feature, we rerun an item that we featured in this blog but never ran on the front page. Chris Justus has looked into how Google's latest instant feedback tool works in Google Suggest Dissected. He writes that this is "the coolest thing I've seen since realizing that Mozilla was embedding a wsdl-enabled SOAP client into this browser... Google Suggest returns suggested results as you type" He works through the "how" behind the magic in his blog entry.

In case you missed it, we're rerunning Chet Haase's Yes, Virginia, There is a JavaOne Call for Papers in today's Weblogs. He writes that the "main goal is to have content there that would make people want to come to the conference. Understanding what people want to see is critical to crafting the set of talks we end up with."

Sean Reilly likes the grouping of multiple catch suggestion in today's Forums. "When an exception is encountered, there are basically 4 ways of dealing with it. a) Take compensating actions to recover from or mitigate the exception. b) Propagate the exception up the call stack as is. c) Ignore the exception (doing nothing but reporting/logging the exception counts here too). >d) Hoist the exception: Wrap it in an exception more appropriate for this api and throw the wrapped exception."

PDoubleya writes about the administration of libraries. "IMO, the issue is that the original packaging mechanism, composed of the classloading/java package scheme, then with jars and zips supported, was a great improvement over what existed before. In fact, it has been so successful that now we have an overload of packaged Java libraries available from all sorts of sources. Originally the classloading scheme helped resolve issues you found in C-style includes (specifically, where to find the referenced classes). It was great for that, but with more and more packages in use (I have several dozen on my machine that I use in different combinations) we need to move up one level to multi-package support, with some sort of versioning."

In Projects and Communities, the JavaPedia page on Garbage Collection consists of links to a sequence of articles by Sam Borman for developerWorks along with pieces by Brian Goetz and Bill Venners. Add your links or contribute to the discussion.

Matt Raible has released Equinox, a lightweight version of AppFuse in the Java Enterprise community. He "was inspired to create it while [..] looking at the struts-blank and webapp-minimal applications that ship with Struts and Spring, respectively."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• JDK 1.5 Update 1
• JBoss4 Documentation Published
• Apache Lenya 1.2.1 - CMS
• Java2XML 1.0 Initial Release
• XOM RC5
• Equinox 1.2
• Carina xVRML Viewer Pre-Alpha

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