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The Community Side

Posted by daniel on March 7, 2005 at 5:31 AM PST

Building a City

A sentence from Richard Gabriel's ACM career recognition award has
stayed with me. They note that "Gabriel conceived of java.net as a
self-creating and self-governed web place where communities join to
build a city of diverse interests engaged in using the Java language
and technology in routine and innovative ways."

So how are we doing? There is nothing in his original notion about the
publication side of java.net. The home page for java.net originally
updated weekly with a daily newspaper-like page called "Java
Today". Many more people were heading to the daily page than the
weekly page so our efforts were moved to the front page. We've tried
many things on this page and some have worked and some haven't. (We're
going to try the bookclub one more time). We can always improve this
part of the site and are always working to do so.

But what about the other side? Technically we have updated the
project hosting component of the site as well. We have added and are
working to add new features that you have requested. So we have tools
for hosting projects and for communicating with project members and
the greater community. Communities also have their own set of tools
for communicating with others.

Looking at Dick's goals, I think java.net is a self-creating and
self-governed web place (of course, if you don't think so, you are
welcome to weigh in below). I just don't know what we should do to get
to that last part - we have communities who are here and many of them
are vibrant. The leaders have found different ways to spread news of
activity. Fabiane produces a great newsletter and RSS feeds for
JavaTools, Daniel, Eduardo, and James blog frequently about new items
in GELC, WS, and JXTA, and Kathy constantly updates the JavaDesktop
homepage and lets me know when there are new items to feature. How do
we form a "city of diverse interests"? We're still trying to
understand what that means and what that requires.

Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart writes that href="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/pelegri/archive/2005/03/the_javadocs_ar.html">
The Javadocs are coming - and that's good! in today's href="http://weblogs.java.net"> Weblogs . " The Javadocs
for JAXB 2.0 and for J2SE 6.0 are now available at Java.Net, and
others will follow. Releasing the javadocs of these, ongoing
specifications is "a (very) good thing" (tm) "

Joerg Plewe asks href="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/herkules/archive/2005/03/will_federate_d.html">
Will federated databases die out? His post examines the question
"Can unstructured information + cool technology do the job?"

Ed Burns checks in from TheServerSide again with href="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/edburns/archive/2005/03/tssjs_keynote_p.html">
Notes from keynote panel . Thanks Ed for comprehensive coverage of
the conference. We'll combine links to his blogs into a single feature
tomorrow.

In Also
in Java Today , WS-Addressing is a new specification that may
soon be of significant interest to web services developers, filling
some of the gaps left by basic SOAP-based messaging. As Beth Linker
writes in href="http://dev2dev.bea.com/technologies/webservices/articles/ws_addressing_intro.jsp">Introduction
to WS-Addressing, a feature from sister site dev2dev.bea.com,
"SOAP does not provide a standard way to specify where a message is
going, how to return a response, or where to report an error. Those
details have historically been left up to the transport layer."
WS-Addressing offers more flexibility in these areas, and more.

Kode Vicious answers a question from href="http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=278">Fond
of Abstractions on an officemate who "writes methods that are
1,000 lines long and claims they are easier to understand than if they
were broken down into a smaller set of methods. How can we convince
him his code is a maintenance nightmare?" The other half of the
article answers another question by recommending the use of
informative comments in CMS checkins.

In Projects and
Communities, in part two of a series on Wireless messaging
with JXTA, Faheem Khan explains how to implement the bridge between a
J2ME client and a JMS application using href="http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/wi-jxta2/">JXTA-for-JMS.

In href="http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/Dmitriev_qa.html">
Better Profiling through Code Hotswapping, Micha Dmitriev explains
"Code hotswapping is probably the most powerful way to address the
performance problems of profiling, while still collecting useful
data."

There is a threaad on the language href="http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=12034&tstart=0#12034">Nice
in today's href="http://forums.java.net/jive/index.jspa">Forums. MarkF
writes "Aside from that, Nice's multimethods and alternative
constructor layout are too different from Java. Adding them to Java
would go beyond a simple extension; it would be transforming Java into
a different language. This thread isn't really about debating Nice's
merits, but whether some subset of its features could be used to
extend Java in a positive way."

Subanark has an extended post on href="http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=12028&tstart=0#12028">
Const values. "I have come up with a semantic for const
values. Its a bit complex, but I think it will work. Its probably too
late for const to be in mustang, but I hope it will be available in
dolphin. [details in full post]"

In today's java.net
News Headlines
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  • March 3-6, 2005 href="http://www.theserverside.com/symposium/index.html">TheServerSide
    Java Symposium
  • March 14-17, 2005 href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etech/">O'Reilly Emerging
    Technology Conference

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Building a City

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