Editor's Daily Blog: May 2005 Archive

James Gosling says 1+1 = i in today's Weblogs. He says: "I need to stop talking to reporters. It's so easy for what results to get misunderstood. I was not trying to say that all open source projects are chaotic: there is a spectrum. Apache is at the very high end of the scale, on average exhibiting excellent behaviour."

I don't think that he should stop talking to reporters. Even with the ascendence of blogging, traditional media can play an important role in the communication of news and ideas. On the other hand, Gosling has a blog that he could have used for an outlet on such an important topic as the launching of Harmony.Imagine instead he had written his own take on the proposed Apache project -- it would have appeared unedited with links from the front page of java.net and many other Java sites.

It may seem obvious to others that you can speak directly to the developer audience using your blog but remember this is a relatively new phenomenon. More traditionally the only way to communicate was through reporters. Now you can just draft a blog entry and think about it a day or two and tweak it until it says just what you mean it to say. Then if someone wants to know what you thinks about a particular issue, they can read exactly what you said in your blog. Reporters will still pick up the quotes and write their own stories - and that's an important part of the process as well.

Kirill Grouchnikov has the real story on The real story about how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, in the form of J2SE 5.0-compliant code. "Warning - contains spoilers on 'Revenge of the Sith'."

In Blarg #15: How can I do image processing on the server-side?, Jayson Falkner writes " met Fred and John and they asked about doing clever image manipulation on the client-side, but without requiring the client to run anything but a web browser. It seemed like doing a few tricks with ImageIO on the server-side would solve the problem, and it'd eliminate the piles of JScript they had been working on. Here is the code so that others can easily write servlets that manipulate and generate images."

In our Featured Articles, Darren Duke looks at the question of how to support login and controlled access to your JSPs. LDAP is great, but configuring OpenLDAP for use with Tomcat is not straightforward. In Tomcat and OpenLDAP, from Configuration to Application, he shows you how to bring the two together.

In Also in Java Today , Frank Sommers shows you how to "Write a Web service in 15 lines of code with JAX-RPC 2.0 Early Access" in his Artima.com article Three Minutes to a Web Service. His example "illustrates how JAX-RPC 2.0's use of annotations allow you to create a simple, working Web service in just 15 lines of code, comments included. Only two lines in the simple example have any reference to Web service-related code in the form of a single annotation. The rest of the code focuses entirely on business logic—the arduous task of saying hello—and JAX-RPC 2.0 tools generate all other required artifacts."

The JDesktop Integrated components allow you to integrate Java applications into the native desktop. In Communicating with Native Applications using JDIC you will "load a web page using the JEditorPane and consider some of the limitations of this approach. You will then use two different features of JDIC to view the web page (as part of a JFrame) in your existing web browser." The code in the tip is not yet supported on Mac OS X but runs on Solaris, Linux, and Windows.

In Projects and Communities, the Java Enterprise Community recently announced that the Java Blueprints book Designing Web Services with the J2EE 1.4 Platform: JAX-RPC, SOAP, and XML is now available as a free PDF download. It provides guidelines, patterns and examples of J2EE 1.4 web service development

Keep your private IM's private with Whisper IM. This Java Communications Community project is a Jabber client that supports end-to-end encryption. It supports all typical instant messaging features, as well as a large set of Jabber Enhancement Proposals.

In today's Forums, furbottow writes that "in build 38 the java cache viewer dialog is... well, horrible: when it first start it contains a combo at the top, filling the entire horizontal space. when I select another item the combo is resized: it is much shorter and "fat", it isn't surely following any gui design guidelines!

Tlund adds to the HTML and JAVA thread asking "Are you interested in launching the default webbrowser, or displaying html content within java-frames? JEditorPane has basic support for HTML, but it is not good enough for modern web-pages. (only support for HTML < 4.0) I suggest you check out JDesktop Integration Components: https://jdic.dev.java.net/ . That project has an desktop-package which let's you launch an url in the systems default webbrowser, or you can embedd the default webbrowser within an java-frame with the Browser-class."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

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 :

May 31- June 3, 2005 Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop New York City
June 3 - 5, 2005 Central Ohio Software Symposium
June 10 - 13, 2005 Research Triangle Software Symposium
June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005
June 20 - 21, 2005 Pragmatic Studio
June 24 - 26, 2005 Central Florida Software Symposium
June 25, 2005 JXTA Town Hall Meeting at JavaOne
June 27 - June 30, 2005, JavaOne Conference

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.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.

JIUL

Posted by daniel on May 30, 2005 at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

YAL

I was just sitting here saying to myself, "do you know what we really need? Another license for code." CDDL, JRL, and JIUL might be a whole lot better than SCSL but it seems as if Sun is releasing new licenses more often than dot releases of J2SE.

There are some people who live for licenses, and they are already weighing in on Ray Gans blog. There may be wonderful new features of the Java Internal Use License - I'm not knocking the license. We've just seen a lot of conversation in the java.net forums on whether or not Harmony is justified if "all that it does is change the licensing of J2SE". With the additional license now available for Tiger source code, it seems as if having the right license for the Java source code is important to those inside of and outside of Sun. The difference of opinion is in what is meant by "the right license".

Ray Gans blogs Java Internal Use License (JIUL) released for JDK 5.0 in today's Weblogs. "End-users of Sun's implementations of J2SE 5.0 now have the ability under the JIUL to fix any critical issue in the code that adversely affects their business operations. In addition, Sun will waive the commercial requirement to pass the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) for J2SE (a.k.a. the JCK) as long as all code changes are made with diligence to assure the resulting implementation remains true to the specification and that its use is restricted to the licensee's internal business or organization."

Greg Sporrar has some thoughts About that proxy server. He takes you through the details from examples created by "Roman Strobl [who] shows how easy it is to create a client that uses Google's web services API. Brian Leonard also does a demo of a web services client that uses Google."

Kirill Grouchnikov discusses Using Java compiler in your Web Start application. He has some generated java source files which he needs to compile and load. He discusses the problems with the standard tools.jar technique and how to create a more flexible solution.

In Also in Java Today , Krishnan Viswanath has written Java Annotation Facility - A Primer. For better or worse, annotations are now popping up everywhere. His article takes you through "defining annotation types, how to use defined types as annotation and how to go about generating code or other supporting files based on annotation." He concludes, "This new and powerful technology is transforming the way we code. As more and more tools and products start using this facility, developers will realize improved quality in their code and a concomitant increase in productivity."

Why are web services so popular? Debu Panda says that an "independence of platform and implementation technology is the primary reason for web services' popularity. The clients do not have to know the implementation technology involved and can simply invoke the service over the network." However, building and configuring a web service is an involved process, and Constructing Services with J2EE shows how it's done.

In Projects and Communities, from the Mac Java Community page: the ADC article Develop for Java with NetBeans 4.1 on Mac OS X offers an introduction to the popular open-source Java IDE, walking through the basics of setting up and building a Hello World application.

Ray Gans blogs about the new Java Internal Use License. "This license lets developers easily make changes to the JDK for internal deployments. It's free, click-through and should be easy-to-read by non-lawyers."

In today's Forums, jwenting writes "actually, copyright is implicit not explicit. Nowhere do you need to file your copyright (not anymore, used to be you had to until about 40 years ago at least in the US) though it can help with enforcement in some cases if you do file. The moment you commit something to any medium it's copyrighted to you (or to whomever you signed over copyright contractually like an employer) unless you explicitly denounce your rights."

Wantar argues "Code is art. Just as some musicians makes a living pouring their soul into songs - while others never get their "break", so some coders are lucky enough make a living pouring their ideas into binary - while the rest of us are stuck following the whims of the latest marketing research. Whoever makes a living doing what they love always has higher-ups to please. "

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

May 31- June 3, 2005 Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop New York City
June 3 - 5, 2005 Central Ohio Software Symposium
June 10 - 13, 2005 Research Triangle Software Symposium
June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005
June 20 - 21, 2005 Pragmatic Studio
June 24 - 26, 2005 Central Florida Software Symposium
June 25, 2005 JXTA Town Hall Meeting at JavaOne
June 27 - June 30, 2005, JavaOne Conference

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.

What's that in dog years

Posted by daniel on May 27, 2005 at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Java at ten

My six year old loves the concept of "dog years". She thinks it's cool that our dog has lived a dozen years and that that is equivalent to being in her eighties. I thought of that because of a response to Chris Adamson's blog on three new platforms for Java. There is much in the first response that I started to reply to myself, but I kept returning to the phrase "but the Java developer community is still in its teenage years".

Sure Java's been around just ten years, but what's the equivalent in technology years? There's plenty of technology that's come and gone in that time. There are also languages and stacks that have been around a lot longer. So, can we say that the field of programming in Java has yet to mature? I wouldn't think so. We didn't really start from scratch. Many of us programmed in other languages and bring that experience (for good or bad) to our Java code. How do you assess what stage we are in with a language?

In any case, Chris Adamson's blog points out that " Three new platforms were announced last week. Each will move tens of millions of units. And in all likelihood, none of them will support Java. " In New Platforms, No Java he writes "All of these platforms will have broadband network connections, and are talking about features like instant messaging, voice, and video chat. Who's providing those apps, not to mention the media browsers, streaming audio clients, personal organizers, etc.? Not us, apparently."

Marc Hadley is back with a blog on On "Rethinking the Java SOAP Stack" in today's Weblogs. " Steve Loughran and Edmund Smith of HP Labs have written an interesting piece on JAX-RPC and JAXM that discusses their suitability as programming models for Web services. Unfortunately much of their article ignores the advances we've made with JAX-WS (nee JAX-RPC 2.0). As co-spec lead for JAX-WS, I'd like to point out a couple of the salient features. "

Doug Kohlert notes that JAX-RPC 2.0 renamed to JAX-WS 2.0 . His post explains the primary reasons for doing so. Ludovic Champenois points to cartoons on Bugs, bugs, bugs...

In Also in Java Today , many developers are switching their source control to Subversion, the compelling CVS replacement that continues to win praise for its flexibility and multiplatform support. This flexibility is on display in the ONLamp.com article Setting Up a Secure Subversion Server, in which BSD Hacks author Dru Lavigne shows the steps to set up a Subversion server (with help from BSD's ports, of course), and considers the options available for securing access to the repository via local access, Apache integration, or Subversion's mini-server.

Erich Gamma explains that a mature design often exhibits "patterns popping-up around some central abstraction." Gamma talks about How to use Design Patterns with Bill Venners. "Do not start immediately throwing patterns into a design, but use them as you go and understand more of the problem. Because of this I really like to use patterns after the fact, refactoring to patterns. [..] People should learn that when they have a particular kind of problem or code smell, as people call it these days, they can go to their patterns toolbox to find a solution."

In Projects and Communities, the recently-graduated Java Tools community project args4j makes it easier to parse command-line arguments to your Java application. It uses J2SE 5.0 annotations to allow you to quickly define and document your annotations, which makes it easy to create a usage screen.

The JXTA community has put out a call for demos for its pre-JavaOne Town Hall meeting on June 26th. "Cool, exciting community member demos of JXTA Technology" need to be submitted by June 10th for consideration.

Kbr explains Why clone much slow than new instance in today's Forums. "Actually in the HotSpot JVM Object.clone() is not currently heavily optimized, while new instance is. You can feel free to file an RFE about this in the bug database. You can work around this problem by overriding clone() and manually allocate the new instance and assign the data into it. In fact, I think this is already probably necessary once your data structures get more complicated, which is why slow performance of Object.clone() hasn't shown up on our performance radar."

Wangzaixiang points out that reflection allows you to support the smalltalk's become feature. "It is simple by learning the Java's reflect API: 1. query the Class for its fields. and we get a java.lang.reflect.Field instance 2. if the Field is private, we can modify its access flag first. 3. then call the Field.get/set method to read/write it."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

May 31- June 3, 2005 Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop New York City
June 3 - 5, 2005 Central Ohio Software Symposium
June 10 - 13, 2005 Research Triangle Software Symposium
June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005
June 20 - 21, 2005 Pragmatic Studio
June 24 - 26, 2005 Central Florida Software Symposium
June 25, 2005 JXTA Town Hall Meeting at JavaOne
June 27 - June 30, 2005, JavaOne Conference

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.

Send us your pics

Posted by daniel on May 26, 2005 at 08:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last call for Anniversary cards

I guess deadlines are made to be missed. We had a request to open the submissions up again for anniversary cards for our second birthday. Take out your camera or draw your pictures of Duke helping us celebrate java.net's second anniversary and email them to us by next Tuesday. We'll email you back when we've received your submission. Thanks.

Cool news from Pat Niemeyer in today's Weblogs. He announces JSR-274 - Standardizing BeanShell. " The goal of this JSR will be to formalize the langauge and provide the RI and TCK which will allow it to be included in a future release of the J2SE. This effort will build upon the introduction of the javax.script API by providing a standard, Java syntax compatible, scripting language as part of the Java platform."

Marc Hadley has some updates in WADL Revision. "I got some useful feedback following the publication of my original Web Application Description Language - herewith a revised specification."

Arun Gupta links to an article by Frank Sommers on creating Web services using JAX-RPC 2.0. Also, Eitan Suez helps the JUG community in Getting to know each other. " I'm proud to announce that the JUGs community's first JUG Profile interview is now published: a JUG Profile with JUG.RU (JUG.RU is based in St. Petersburg, Russia)."

In Also in Java Today , in his JavaWorld article Secure data files embedded in MIDP applications Simon Ru writes, " as consumers upgrade to new generations of phones, a new breed of knowledge-based MIDP applications with practical uses are getting noticed. [..] Unlike games, the value of knowledge-based applications lies in the data. Due to the hardware-imposed simplicity of a MIDP application, if the data file is compromised, one can easily come up with a competing application. [..] Until the cost of wireless data comes down and wireless connections become more reliable and ubiquitous, embedding the data file into the MIDP JAR is the only option. Therefore, protecting the data file from copyright thefts becomes imperative."

In the Core Java Tech Tip on The enhanced for loop you will see how to move from familiar loops over arrays and collections to the new construct. You can often eliminate the need to explicitly create an iterator. The language feature added in Tiger is also designed to simplify your work with generics.

In Projects and Communities, the JavaDesktop Community's front page has The Last Word in Swing Threads. This Sun Developer Network article describes how the SwingWorker class uses J2SE 5.0 concurrency to move expensive tasks off the event-dispatch thread while still maintaining Swing thread-safety.

The NetBeans Community home page has posted a link to the transcript of the May 3, 2005 NetBeans 4.1 chat. This chat discusses NetBeans support for JSF's, web services, Mustang... and how a lucky few can get the new NetBeans Field Guide for free.

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

May 31- June 3, 2005 Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop New York City
June 3 - 5, 2005 Central Ohio Software Symposium
June 10 - 13, 2005 Research Triangle Software Symposium
June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005
June 20 - 21, 2005 Pragmatic Studio
June 24 - 26, 2005 Central Florida Software Symposium
June 25, 2005 JXTA Town Hall Meeting at JavaOne
June 27 - June 30, 2005, JavaOne Conference

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.

The OBLOOYAS pattern?

Posted by daniel on May 25, 2005 at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Knowing where to look

Your Swing app seems inexplicably frozen. You blame Swing but the truth is you've done something that has been explictly cautioned against at countless presentations and in many articles. Chet Haas is sympathetic says " if someone has not read the right article or attended the right talk or thought through the problem thoroughly, it is not immediately obvious why this has the horrible frozen-GUI effect that it does."

In today's Weblogs Chet blogs on Swing development and commands Enjoy It! He writes what "people tend to look for are frameworks that can assist in application development, especially for large applications. This can be anything from good sample code that people can cut and paste from to tools that have code- production wizards. Some examples of these gotta-have-but-tedious-to-figure-out-and-write elements of Real World applications include lazy loading, splashscreens, asynchronous operations, status and error reporting, internationalization, accessibility, error recovery, context-sensitive help, and persistent configuration preferences. Also of interest in larger-scale applications are things like plugin frameworks and scripting support. There are examples of frameworks out in the wild, although solid frameworks for Swing in particular are not yet in existence (or at least not standardized). "

Jayson Falkner cautions Why custom tags aren't worth your time and says "Stop encouraging people to make their own custom tags. Especially new developers who don't know better."

Andreas Schaeffer invites you to try jPodder: your Pod's best Friend. " I am delighted to announce that several months of hard work finally paid off and we could release jPodder 0.9 last Sunday. If you like podcasting or where wondering what it is or where not quite happy with your current Podcast receiver then you should read on. "

Arun Gupta posts on Method-based security asking " If a WSDL 1.1 document has two operations in a portType, how to apply different security requirements to them ? "

In Also in Java Today , Ant may have started as a sensible, Java-friendly alternative to make, but over time it has evolved to pick up further responsibilities, not just compiling code, but packaging and deploying it as well. In Developing for the Web with Ant, Part 1, an excerpt from Ant: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition, Steve Holzner shows how to package code that's destined for web distribution, creating WAR archives for Java web applications and CAB archives for .NET.

The JDesktop Integrated Components are a java.net project that "lets portable JavaTM applications access native desktop features. " In OCI's article JDIC Tray Icons Erik M. Burke leads you through an example of "a dummy weather forecast service that shows current weather conditions as an animated GIF on the system tray. Balloon help alerts you when a new forecast is available and you can click the icon to view a detailed forecast in a Swing JFrame."

In Projects and Communities, Eitan Suez, Java User Group community co-leader presents a JUG Profile with JUG.RU is an interview with Yakov Sirotkin about the St. Petersburg, Russia JUG.

Members of the Portlet Community may want to check out the JCP's Portlet 1.0 Errata, which clarifies and corrects issues in version 1.0 of JSR-168 to be addressed in version 1.1.

Hr_stoyanov asks about JAXRPC 2.0 EA and exceptions in today's Forums. "JAXRPC2.0EA tutorial says I am allowed to throw exceptions from my webservice class. But the client (JAXRPC2.0 code) does not get any? Can someone explain how WS clients (Java/JAXRPC2.0 and non-java/.NET) handle/receive exceptions, thrown from the web service object."

Regarding static boolan Integer.isInteger(String) "I like the approach by caching the parsing-result of the isInteger method for later usage by valueOf or parseInt. As you see, we have just two methods for parsing a string to an integer. So why not have three, all caching the result."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

May 31- June 3, 2005 Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop New York City
June 3 - 5, 2005 Central Ohio Software Symposium
June 10 - 13, 2005 Research Triangle Software Symposium
June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005
June 20 - 21, 2005 Pragmatic Studio
June 24 - 26, 2005 Central Florida Software Symposium
June 25, 2005 JXTA Town Hall Meeting at JavaOne
June 27 - June 30, 2005, JavaOne Conference

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.

Also on the track - AJAX

Posted by daniel on May 24, 2005 at 05:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"Old tricks, new dog?"

That's David Rupp's question as he looks at AJAX. While everyone is making a big fuss over AJAX, Rupps notes that "As far as I can tell, we've had the moral equivalent of Ajax available to us since the last century, and yet applets are now regarded with the same esteem as a sleepover at Neverland Ranch. Where did we go wrong? The one key difference I can think of is that applets had the unfortunate requirement of needing to be loaded all at once. It's the "asynchronous"-ness of Ajax that's permitted it to evolve into the high-flying eagle of the Internet, while applets have sunk into the AWTar pit with the other dinosaurs."

Jayson Falkner thinks it is silly that your HelloWorld servlet produces static content in his post in today's Weblogs. " Why is it that the first servlet people teach is on that produces static content? HelloWorld.html is appropriate. HelloWorld.java is silly. I'm taking suggestions for the best dynamic, simple HelloWorld servlet idea."

Kito Mann gives a run down of presentations he's just given at the NFJS - Northern Virginia Software Symposium. His classes included introductions to Portlets, JavaServer Faces, and Struts Shale and one on migrating from struts to JSF.

In Also in Java Today , Max Goff looks back at the past take in his JavaWorld article Celebrating 10 years of Java. He has picked out ten items that he considers notable about Java - one for each candle on the cake. He considers JavaOne to be the Acme of conferences, he notes the importance of Java the brand, and writes that certification has exploded in this era. Goff covers technology evangelism ( part of his role at Sun for many years), Gosling as a programmer's programmer, and the value proposition of WORA.

Lara D'Abreo shows you how to address the problem of JUnit tests that run fine in development but not in deployment in the DevX article Execute EJB JUnit Tests in Your Deployed Apps. The steps outlined include creating a JUnit Test Service, a mechanism to pass parameters to tests, and a way of passing the results back. You then wrap your test service with an EJB for deployment being careful that you can roll back any data created by your tests whether or not they were successful.

In Projects and Communities, the Jini community points to Sebastian Lohmeier's article Jini on the Jnode OS which shows "how Jini technology can be used to dynamically and automatically extend the Jnode Java-based OS with components retrieved from the network."

The Embedded Java community front page reports that Sun is moving J2SE into the embedded space, which offers "simplification of your test and development environments" as well as significant code-reuse opportunities.

There's more about support the smalltalk's become feature in today's Forums. alexlamsl follows up with a note that "The access keywords nonetheless serve as a compile-time (& run-time) checking feature - if you accidentally tried to access an inaccessible method or field you'll be shouted at. This safety feature would be broken by the introduction of "become", don't you agree?"

Yawmark writes "I don't consider the command-line compiler or classpath settings to be 'features', nor do I see learning how the basics work first is harmful to the learning of more advanced topics. I have witnessed the converse, however, and have seen how relying on a particular IDE has retarded the user's understanding of the Java platform."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

May 31- June 3, 2005 Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop New York City
June 3 - 5, 2005 Central Ohio Software Symposium
June 10 - 13, 2005 Research Triangle Software Symposium
June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005
June 20 - 21, 2005 Pragmatic Studio
June 24 - 26, 2005 Central Florida Software Symposium
June 25, 2005 JXTA Town Hall Meeting at JavaOne
June 27 - June 30, 2005, JavaOne Conference

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.

Is the train leaving the station

Posted by daniel on May 23, 2005 at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Watching others riding the Rails

This is not based on any sort of science - I have not done a double-blind study or anything. I've just been watching the status messages in my instant messenger buddy list and a lot of the guys who led the way to Java and to some of the frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, and Tapestry now seem to be playing with Ruby on Rails. One by one their status says something about Ruby on Rails.

It's hard to know which technologies will stick and which ones won't - but Rails feel right. People are just playing with it and jaws seem to be dropping at the amount of code that doesn't need to be written. There isn't a rush to over standardize it and over complicate it. What do you think - will we all be riding the rails soon?

In Also in Java Today , Spring and Hibernate are popular frameworks for building web applications, but can they take care of the enterprise challenges that J2EE was built for? Binildas Christudas considers the case where you have multiple components, each with its own data store: "When we speak of assembling two or more components, we are expected to maintain the atomicity of operations done in many data stores, across components." In Wire Hibernate Transactions in Spring, he shows how to handle transactions across the components' data stores to allow a rollback across all of the stores when an error occurs.

Frank Sommers' article Broadcast Once, Watch Anywhere looks at "SR 272, the Mobile Broadcast Service API for Handheld Terminals [which] aims to define a common API layer for interacting with broadcast services, such as digital television, from a mobile device. [...] JSR 272 aims to provide an API that abstracts out the transport layer, and gives developers high level access to digital broadcasts, according to Wong. JSR 272 will define both the management of interactive services received via digital broadcast, and the management of applications contained in the broadcast stream. Along with Motorola, the JSR 272 initial expert group includes Nokia, Vodafone, and Siemens.

Weblogs, Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein provides what he calls " A comprehensive analysis of whe debate over Free/OpenSource Java" in Opening Java. He writes "Java is huge, the top business app development platform. Meanwhile, FOSS increased in importance, volume and mindshare by orders of magnitude, and it has also become serious business. Unfortunately, Java is increasingly seen as a problem in the POV of FOSS users and developers. This is despite many significant improvements in openness since '96"

How do you format code in blogs and elsewhere? Jonathan Bruce asks about this in Blogging Java code - standard mark-up tools?

James Gosling writes that he is having Fun in Brazil. He reports " This week I'm in Brazil, visiting with developers. We're doing a couple of days of technical seminars today and tomorrow in Sao Paulo, then a couple more in Brasilia. "

In Projects and Communities, John Reynolds, leader of the Global Education and Learning community's Tapestry Webcomponent Examples project talks to community leader Daniel Brookshier. John explains that the project grew out of some Tapestry examples he originally published in his java.net blog.

Java developers using Mac OS X 10.4 can speed up JavaDoc searches. Type the class name into the JavaDoc Dashboard widget from seriot.ch to immediately bring up that class' JavaDoc page. This and other Mac resources are collected on the Mac Java Community page.

Alexlamsl follows up on the thread on using strings in switch statements in today's Forums. "The primary argument for extending the use of switch statements here is the ease of development, and even with the better optimisation chances. This sounds good, and in which case we should somehow extend this in such a way that all Immutable objects can use this construct (String, Integer, BigDecimal etc...) "

Sasjaa responds to the question Anybody ever had the classloader deadlock on you? "This is tracked in the javasoft bug 4735126 which they have marked as a low priority bug. The only workaround we have found is to flatten the classloader stack as much as possible."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

May 31- June 3, 2005 Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop New York City
June 3 - 5, 2005 Central Ohio Software Symposium
June 10 - 13, 2005 Research Triangle Software Symposium
June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005
June 20 - 21, 2005 Pragmatic Studio
June 24 - 26, 2005 Central Florida Software Symposium
June 25, 2005 JXTA Town Hall Meeting at JavaOne
June 27 - June 30, 2005, JavaOne Conference

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.

Congratulations Sarah

Posted by daniel on May 20, 2005 at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Our MVP gets married

Sarah Breen is one of the most amazing people that it's been my pleasure to know and to work with. She is the java.net producer and is a large part of the reason that the site is so rich and runs so well. Project leaders, community leaders, and bloggers have all been helped by Sarah. Anytime we think of some feature we'd like to add to the site, Sarah makes it happen. Her implementation is always better than what was suggested. If something goes wrong with the site, she fixes it.

Last year when it was time for JavaOne, the infrastructure group met to discuss awards that we wanted to give to recognize people, projects, and communities here at java.net. Everyone agreed that Sarah needed to be singled out and recognized but we didn't have a category. So we created MVP (most valuable player) and Helen brought a tiara to give Sarah to go with the special award.

Today is Sarah's wedding day. I am so happy for her. There's something special about a day that starts the beginning of forever. While Kimmy the wonderwife and I would love to be in Hawaii right now enjoying a cup of Kona and getting ready to attend Sarah's wedding, we are instead in Cleveland preparing Rice Crispy treats to bring to our eldest daughter's bridging ceremony from Brownies to Girl Scouts.

Sarah, we are thinking of you and wish you well. As happy as we are for this wonderful event in your life, those of us at java.net are even happier that you're coming back to work soon.

In Also in Java Today , Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi explains how to "Get started developing cross-platform P2P applications using Jxta and its Java binding" in part one of his JavaWorld series on Peer-to-peer applications made easy. In his introduction he writes "Most of the difficulties involved in creating P2P applications are related to maintaining the network of peers, formatting and passing messages, discovering other peers, and other similar issues. Project Jxta and its Java binding handle these aspects of your application. By using Jxta, you can focus on your application, not generic P2P issues."

"Business strategies are not static. They change often and the associated business processes change along with them." This, of course, argues strongly against coding those business rules directly into your application flow. In the dev2dev article Business Rules Engines Within Enterprise Platforms, Daniel Jobst, Rainer von Ammon, and Benjamin Gebauer show how rule engines offer an appealing alternative, and compare ILOG JRules to the rule engine in WebLogic 8.1.

Weblogs, Kirill Grouchnikov discusses Signing jars for java.net Web Start applications. He writes, " If you have a project on java.net and wish to provide its Web Start version that needs special access privileges, here is how you can do it."

Ozgur Azan offers his thoughts on GUI Design and SWT. " For some time, I have been working on the GUI of a software that will be used internally at the company I work for. I faced some problems which are mostly related with internals of GUI design, not what is seen on the screen but how to organize the code to make it easy to understand, write bugfixes and make improvements on the software that is deeply connected with the GUI."

Ed Burns talks about his first AJAXian faces component: a progress bar. Also Brian Maso blogs that if you Can't Go to the 1.5 Bleeding Edge? Bring it Back to 1.4! He points to " A couple of O/S utilities to bring Java 5.0 language and annotation facilities to Java 1.4. "

In Projects and Communities, the Java Development Kit (JDK) Community has set up its home page and is encouraging interested parties to join in the development of the JDK. The page defines the roles available for JDK involvement and shows the projects that are being developed as part of the community.

The Java Patterns community project WebSpine seeks to offer a faster and easier means of developing web applications, by allowing the development of rule-based validation processes. It also helps secure applications by offering configurable filters and access mapping.

Kirillcool comments on the Mix of signed and unsigned jars in JAXB 2.0 EA in today's Forums. "There are a few jars that are needed to run JAXB 2.0 code. All of them but one are unsigned. The remaining one, activation.jar is signed by Sun. This poses some problems for Web Start applications that need access privileges. [..] Is there some mention of this fact in JAXB 2.0 release notes or developer guide?"

Wangzaixiang writes "I think the smalltalk VM has a interesting feature of the "become" operation. [..] The become operation provide a most dynamic feature for the VM platform. [It would] support hot-replacing an object with another object, support more interesting AOP or dynamic features."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005

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.

Getting Closures

Posted by daniel on May 19, 2005 at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Learning something new (that isn't)

In our Featured Articles, Craig Castelaz looks at Closures in Groovy. Closures have been around a long time and they top my list of things I need to get my head around. Craig's article gets me to that dangerous stage where I think I know what they are and am ready to start misusing them. He started his exploration just to keep himself fresh. If you're a little bored, learn a new language. Groovy seemed to be a natural choice given his needs and that led him into the world of closures.

In Also in Java Today , Sing Li has written part one of his series on Geronimo: The J2EE 1.4 engine that could. The title is a bit baffling and the article over hypes the promise of Geronimo but it does explains GBeans and "what the Geronimo server is about and why it's an important milestone in open source software development. You've explored Geronimo's architecture and become familiar with some key terminology and concepts"

" Learning to remove a comment can lead to improvements in the code." What? Mike Clark writes this in his recent article Write Sweet-Smelling Comments. He notes "Comments are often good indications that the code can be improved." These problems can be badly named methods or methods which are too long. As for good comments, Mike writes, "Comments themselves are a sweet smell when they tell you why something was done. When you come across a comment while you're reading code, it should stop you dead in your tracks. The programmer before you felt so compelled to tell you something important—something that couldn't be documented anywhere else—that she left you a comment. Ignore it at your own peril."

Weblogs, Inderjeet Singh writes about Securing Web-application state stored on the clients and a lesson in ease of development using cryptography. " Web applications can store their state on the client to reduce the server-side overheads, as well as solve problems like navigating through the browser back button. In this blog, I discuss how various cryptographic mechanisms can be employed to secure this state. I also discuss a tip that the crypto library writers will, hopefully, use in the future to make crytpo easy-to-use by regular Java developers. "

Calvin Austin asks and answers the question Harmony - Friend or Foe by considering " What does Harmony really mean for the Java community ".

Greg Sporrar reports on Exhaustion and Exhilaration. " The purpose of my trip is to attend meetings where we discuss the set of features for the next version of NetBeans. Watching demos for those upcoming features was exhilarating - there are some very cool new things coming in the next release."

In Projects and Communities, the Java Tools community's Tiny Tool of the week is Nully, a tool which provides automated edit-time, compile-time, and run-time checks for illegal null values, utilizing Java 5.0 code annotations.

The GELC project Copycat is "a digital notepad that records your writing and speaking as you solve a problem" and publishes them so they can be viewed with a web browser.

Pelegri issues a challenge for Multi transport/encoding... in today's Forums. "The JAX-Mail (http://jaxmail.dev.java.net) project provides support for Mail protocols (SMTP and POP) but it is based on the older JAX-RPC 1.1 code base. We would very much welcome porting of that to JAX-RPC 2.0... hint, hint! We might even be able to get Sameer (the original author for jaxmail) to help and I know of at least one other developer that was interested in this area."

Javajackibm writes on CD Burning Low Level API for Mustang. "I would like to see a low level JNI code written with a wrapper for Java Classes for accessing CDROM and burning DVD-RAM..DVD-RW...DVD+RW."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005

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.

Java in the Open

Posted by daniel on May 18, 2005 at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

OSCon Europe -- also Gosling thinks there's enough harmony without Harmony

As a self-promotional aside, please consider presenting at European Open Source Convention 2005. This is our first OSCon in Europe and there is a healthy sized Java track scheduled. Submissions close at midnight May 23, so create a proposal and submit it or drop me an email suggesting a speaker we might want to pursue or a topic we might want to be sure to include. I'll remind you again before the deadline.

Now back to Gosling's comments in an article by Glen Kunene that we point to in Also in Java Today . James Gosling has spoken out against the idea of the newly proposed Apache Harmony project saying customers would head for the hills over an open source Java. "'We've got several thousand man-years of engineering in [Java], and we hear very strongly that if this thing turned into an open source project—where just any old person could check in stuff—they'd all freak. They'd all go screaming into the hills.'"

Are you developing a database-driven program with Eclipse? Are you about to drop into the command line to bring up an SQL client? Stop right there! As Deepak Vohra explains in Configuring Database Access in Eclipse 3.0 with SQLExplorer, "with SQLExplorer, you can display the tables, table structure, and data in the tables, and retrieve, add, update, or delete table data." And you get to do all of this with a friendly GUI view of your data.

Weblogs, in Evolving the Java Platform Graham Hamilton provides links to his SD Times article "which discusses Mustang, Dolphin and more."

Greg Murray writes about Storing Secure Session State on The Client. "In a J2EE based web application you have many ways of storing session state which include client-side cookies, the HttpSession object, an EJB, POJO, or database. There is another place to store session state securely which is in the HTML page itself using encrypted hidden form variables.

Joshua Marinacci examines The Power of the Desktop Java Stack. He asks the question "What can we do with Java that we couldn't do easily with Perl, ASPs, PHP, Javascript and HTML? Well, this is sort of a trick question. I've asked: what can we do that is better than other client side or server side technologies allow. The answer is to be on both sides at once."

In Projects and Communities, the OurFaces project develops commonly-needed web UI components such as trees, tables, and calendars on top of JavaServer Faces (JSF).

The J2EE 1.4 Tutorial for NetBeans IDE (available as HTML and PDF) adapts parts of java.sun.com's J2EE 1.4 tutorial for use with the NetBeans IDE.

In today's Forums, cowwoc writes about changing 1.6 to 6.0 everywhere " I also wonder like Furbotto what breaks if one switches version numbers to 6.0 everywhere. I am quite unhappy with the 1.5 -> 5.0 name change, but if you're going to do it at least do it consistly and remove all references to 1.5. Just my 2 cents."

TimBell responds to BZip2 saying "See also: 4505111 Support for pluggable ZipFile compression methods. 4397827 RFE: java.util.zip needs some refactoring These are not on the short list for Mustang, but we will try to increase the visibility if community fixes and interest show an increase."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005

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.

Don't spend your money on my kids

Posted by daniel on May 17, 2005 at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Note to companies targeting developers

You can tell that tech is picking up somewhat because the swag at trade shows has been improving. This is a great place for me to pick up little things for my kids. They especially love the items that light up when you use them - pens, balls, yo yos, you name it. But I give these things to them and then I never see them again. I don't use or buy a product because of these items and I don't avoid a product with a booth not giving these away.

It's not that I want companies to stop giving stuff away, I would rather they consider the places that they are not spending their money where it might make sense to do so.

I was at our local JUG meeting last week and the presenter was about two slides in when he told us that the demo was coming but that it didn't really work well on his machine. He clearly dreaded the demo he was about to give because he spent an extraordinary amount of time on slides about APIs and sequence diagrams. It came time for the demo and. as he promised, it didn't work well on his machine. I'm trying not to specify who he was or what company he worked for because that really isn't the point. He had an application that launched and barely responded to the cursor moving on the screen.

The problem was in the video card for the laptop he was demoing on. He bravely pushed on to the second part of his talk. This was on another technology which, unfortunately could not be demoed on his machine. Now there is a good side and a bad side to that. We've all been wowed by slick demos which glossed over some serious issues in the underlying architecture. I'm ok with a developer demo with some warts but the demo should convey a sense of the technology being described.

Back of a napkin estimate: his salary, benefits, and travel budget for the year is somewhere in the $150K - $200K range. If he faces customers twice a week that's one hundred presentations a year. Buy him a two thousand dollar machine. Spend your marketing dollars on the people you are trying to market to and not on their kids.

Weblogs, Arun Gupta blogs about Indigo Duplex Bindings. He writes that they "enable a bi-directional communication between client and service endpoint. This entry explains, along with source code and generated code, how duplex binding can be achieved. I still do not understand complete magic though, yet!"

Mohamed Abdelaziz reports that JXME on CDC? maybe closer than you think. " In anticipation of JSR 218 reference implementations becoming available soon, the JXME protocol is being updated to provide JXTA edge functionality over CDC 1.1 and the foundation profile."

Kohsuke Kawaguche shares his experience working on Compiling MathML with JAXB 2.0. " This morning I saw that one of our beloved JAXB users :-) is having a trouble compiling MathML with JAXB 2.0. This is the record of my trouble-shooting this, in the hope that this will be useful to others who face similar issues in MathML or other schemas. "

In Also in Java Today , Jay at JavaRSS.com has written an article showing how he is using AJAX to make his site more dynamic. Test out the example by heading to his site and mousing over the links (some browsers worked better than others). In AJAX in Action he shows how to use AJAX to load a page dynamically when the user mouses over various parts of the page. This reduces load time as he no longer is preloading all of the descriptions in the event of a mouseover. HIs sequence diagram shows where the JavaScript code sits in relation to his JSP code.

Mr. Ed reports on his recent frustrations in interviewing for a job by listing all of the things that an interviewer could possibly do wrong in his post Interview with a Sociopath. Although most everyone responding agrees that he describes the situation accurately, they are split between those who think the practices do what they are intended to do and those who agree with the author that they are bad practices.

In Projects and Communities, do you wish Swing had an easy-to-use date picker, a tree-table, or an image panel? The JavaDesktop Community project SwingX adds these extensions to Swing, along with convenience components like in-place editing for JLists, translucency for JPanels, and an easier-to-use grouping scheme for JRadioButtons.

The Mac Java Community page links to some help from Scott Schram's weblog about Java Tiger on Mac Tiger: Endorsed Trouble, which describes a problem that can occur when the new J2SE 5.0 for Mac OS X updates shared archives, if you've put jar files in the lib/endorsed directory.

Sdp asks about Tree navigation in today's Forums. "I was wondering if there was a way for class generated by JAXB2 to find its parent in the data tree? I'm trying to write functions to find the target of an XPath reference. To resolve a relative path I need to be able to move both up and down the data tree created by the unmarshalling."

Bcbeck reports that he "spent many months working on the project to change the version number from 1.5 to 5.0 [..] We tried to find all the places where the version number was intended for end users to see and change those places. Then we tried to find all the places where the version number was parsed by other programs and leave those alone. While it has left us with this dual numbering situation which can be confusing in some cases, we felt the tradeoff with compatibility was worth it."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005

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.

Join us at the Community Corner

Posted by daniel on May 16, 2005 at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The java.net gathering place at this year's JavaOne

Something clicked for me at last week's java.net infrastructure meeting. All of a sudden I got excited about our plans for this year's JavaOne conference. For the most part we are a widely distributed group. At this year's show we're hoping that community leaders will make it easy for project leaders and project members to talk to each other and maybe make some in person contact that can help shrink the distance after the conference ends and we all head back home. We've been given some space to host a "Community Corner" where people can drop by and see what's going on.

In today's Weblogs, Daniel Brookshier explains in his post on the JavaOne Community Corner that "We are putting your open source projects on stage all week long at JavaOne. But not just your favorites, but the ones "you" run and participate with here at Java.net. Every day in the JavaOne Pavilion we are running mini talks on projects in the java.net community.... That means if you or your buddies run a project on Java.net or move a project to Java.net real soon, you can probably get to talk about it. All you need to do is pick a time and propose it on the Community Corner wiki ."

Marc Hadley is Introducing WADL. He writes " Seems like lots of folks are either doing it or talking about it (publishing proposals for alternatives to WSDL that is) so here's mine: Web Application Description Language or WADL for short. "

Kelly O'Hair writes about Bytecode Instrumentation. "Modification of classfile methods by way of bytecode instrumentation (BCI) has become more and more common in tools, but it's not for the faint of heart. Not all classfiles are the same, and there are some very dangerous things lurking in the BCI waters."

In Also in Java Today , Bruce Tate likes his application frameworks lightweight, having authored the classic Better, Faster, Lighter Java. Lately, his attention has turned from the ornate J2EE/EJB frameworks to the blithe Spring framework, which he covers in the new Spring: A Developer's Notebook. In his article Five Things I Love About Spring, he explains how Spring has given him more control, easier coding, greater testibility, and more.

You can find a reprint of Chet Haase' fine article Timing is everything on java.sun.com. He considers what might be needed in an API that keeps you from "re-implementing the same functionality you have written for every application that required timing or animation."

In Projects and Communities, Mohamed Abdelaziz is working on bringing JXTA to the J2ME Connected Device Configuration (CDC) in the JXME project. In his blog JXME on CDC? Maybe closer than you think, he writes that "most of the JXTA protocols have been ported to run on JSR 218," and that volunteers to help finish the port are welcome.

The latest education projects to join the GELC are Evolution-Opt, a Framework to resolve combinatorial optimization problems, javamindmapped, a Java based mind mapping application, OK, an Open Source Software Factory Model for open knowledge, and unEvo, an IDE for Evolutionary Algorithms.

In today's Forums, cambell replies "We're continuing to discuss approaches with the JOGL team to improve the interoperability story between Java2D and JOGL. There's a vague RFE here that you can watch as we make progress in this area: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5037133 There are a whole host of technical issues to work through before the story will improve; i.e. it's not as simple as just "implementing Java2D on top of JOGL". There are changes/additions to the JAWT spec required, as well as a number of tricky changes to both the Java2D and JOGL implementations."

Ryan_ernst posts in the Protected methods in interfaces thread. "Actually, the Serializable interface does NOT have private methods. It actually has no methods. The readObject and writeObject methods are only for special handling of serializing an object. There signatures are defined in the documentation, but they are not overidden from the Serializable interface. They are special methods that are called through reflection by the JVM. They are not meant to be called by users, but only by the system when serializing an object."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005

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.

Not too young

Posted by daniel on May 13, 2005 at 06:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Paul Graham on startups, nurturing good ideas and youth

A cliche ridden commencement address will include some reference to commencement being a beginning and not an ending. Paul Graham doesn't wait until commencement to share his thoughts on the value that young people bring to the working world. He writes, "It's hard to judge the young because (a) they change rapidly, (b) there is great variation between them, and (c) they're individually inconsistent. That last one is a big problem. When you're young, you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you're smart. So if the algorithm is to filter out people who say stupid things, as many investors and employers unconsciously do, you're going to get a lot of false positives."

That being said, he does make an argument that there are many talented young people who can not be appropriately assessed by potential employers. Maybe, he suggests, they shouldn't try to get a job - maybe they should start their own company. The essay goes on to explain why there is an increase in other companies buying startups and the sound reasons behind this. He also notes that although there are notable data points of people who got rich when they dropped out of college, that he is not recommending you drop out to start your start-up. Then again when you are 21 or 22, taking a couple of years to see what you can come up with isn't such a bad idea.

In Also in Java Today , we feature Paul Graham's essay about startups and product development that also includes some thoughts on employing young people in Hiring is obsolete. He begins by pointing out that the difference in costs between being a slacker and in starting a company are fairly negligible. In fact, he recommends that young people consider a startup rather than employment because "The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean." Much later he adds "Maybe if the idea of starting a startup is intimidating, you filter out the uncommitted. But I suspect the filter is set a little too high. I think there are people who could, if they tried, start successful startups, and who instead let themselves be swept into the intake ducts of big companies."

Robert C Martin has blogged a wonderful example of Empirical vs Analytical Analysis. He takes on an idea from a comment from the comp.object list that said "So you assume existence of some ideal and want to prove that this is what the program does, by means of tests. That's impossible. Period." Uncle Bob provides an example from checking his son's trigonometry homework that illustrates why he disagrees with this statement.

Weblogs, Rich Unger writes J2EE Architecture for Speech Applications. "I'm convinced that the lightweight container architecture is the right way to go for the majority of voice applications. However, there needs to be some tweaks in the way the UI tier utilizes it, compared to what we're used to seeing with HTML-based applications."

John Reynolds writes Open Office and Java - I'm for it "I think we're long past due in seeing an office suite that takes advantage of Java's capabilities (I know OOo is far from embracing this idea, but you can't blame a guy for dreaming). I know that relying on Java causes ethical conundrums for those who want complete freedom of distribution, but Java is free for download (cost to the end user is not really an issue)."

In Projects and Communities, Jini hits New York on May 25th, with the special event Jini Technology: An SOA Delivering Java Dynamic Networking. This free event in the Crowne Plaza Times Square offers technical sessions from members of the Jini team and a special presentation by Jini inventor Jim Waldo.

Got pictures? Got a JSP container? JGallery allows you to use JSP hosts such as Tomcat and WebLogic to host image galleries, presenting thumbnails, full size images, and even EXIF information. The project's home page has complete instructions for getting your images online quickly.

Hlavac posts about efforts to create a Replacement prototype in today's Forums. "I spent last evening making a prototype replacement clickwrap installer I found that I can achieve much faster startup time by tuning the order of files in the JAR file and their compression levels. I also found that I could achieve about twice as good compression factor when the inner archive (containing the actual payload) is not compressed, and is added as a single compressed file into the wrapping archive."

Rexguo asks "Is anyone aware of any attempts at (partially) implementing Java2D on top of JOGL? The benefits of this is the ability to use high-level Java2D *and* low-level JOGL on the *same* component, namely GLCanvas. This will be incredibly and immediately useful for real-time graphics applications for Java. "

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005

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.

License restrictions

Posted by daniel on May 12, 2005 at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Deciding who gets to use code and how

Your notion of what is good and evil probably differs from mine. Not at the extremes. There are probably things that most people can easily agree are one or the other. But there is a range of things in the middle on which we may differ. So if you have written software and released it, can you do so in such a way that you ensure I don't use it for what you consider to be evil? You might invent a piece of software that makes sharing music (legally of course) easy to do. What if I then use that software and extend it to prevent your music from showing up in any playable form on any network I control. I've used your software in a way that is an affront to your original intent.

Can you specify who uses your code and for what purpose? Mike Loukides notes that you can have a license that restricts commercial use. In today's Weblogs, in New Twist on Open Source he wonders if you can restrict your software from being used by the military.

Mark Little posts on Transactions and recoverability: what they mean to your applications. He writes " Over the years I've seen many complaints about using transactions (e.g., via the JTA) for a number of reasons, including performance degredation, assumptions are impact on application development etc. You don't get something for nothing (there really is no such thing as a free lunch), so there's always a trade-off to be made with transactions: guaranteed completion even in the presence of failures. In this entry I'll look at why you shouldn't look to trade off some transaction properties; either use them all or don't use transactions. "

Our second anniversary is June 10th. We are asking for your pictures of Duke celebrating - for more details check out this request for Anniversary cards with a link to last year's.

In Also in Java Today , Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres, and Tom DeMarco are interviewed about the ideas in Extreme Programming Explained. One of the practices mentioned in the interview is the notion of sustainable pace. Beck says "if you're really focused and intense, then at the end of a good solid work day, the most value you can bring to your team is to get some rest. Exhausting sounds like it's just, it sucks the life out of you. And that's not how I feel. I feel a sense of satisfaction. I can point to concrete things that I've done that are different now than they were at the beginning of the day, a sense sometimes of exhilaration because I know that I've set myself up to do the same thing again tomorrow. And so it's not like running a marathon where you collapse at the finish line. It's more like okay, I'm done with this for today and I would love to do this again tomorrow. "

John Zukowski builds on an example to take you Beyond the basics of enumerated types. He writes "The basic concept of using enumerated types is simple. You define a named, closed set of values. When you need one of those values, you specify it by using its name. The name carries the type of set with it. [..] In addition, enumerated types support having constructors, instance methods, and variables, among other things. Should you use these aspects with enumerated types? While it is certainly alright to use the methods and new support classes, providing constructors and overridden methods just feels wrong. Does it really make sense to say what price to charge for each Size in the enumeration? Or, does that make more sense in a class that has a variable of enum type Size?"

In Projects and Communities, Trung Duc Tran blogs that NetBeans 4.1 is final. He links to the release page which includes notes and downloads.

GELC community leader Daniel Brookshier interviews Ahmet Akin of project Zemberek a Turkish NLP and Turkish OpenOffice Spellchecker.

Stanley H responds to a RFE: Ability to view scheduled features for Mustang in today's Forums. "For upcoming deployment features in Mustang, you may want to check out this page: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/Desktop/mustang/index.html There will be a lot of deployment related changes in the upcoming Mustang b36/b38/b39, and we will announce them once the features are available in the Mustang snapshot."

MarlaParker contributes to Not just a JVM. " The Harmony FAQ, questions 6, 7, and 8: seem to clearly say that it WILL be compatible, it will pass the TCK, and they will apply for the scholarship to license the TCK from Sun."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

Current and upcoming Java Events :

June 16-18, 2005 JustJava2005

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.

500 front pages and 20 communities

Posted by daniel on May 11, 2005 at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Celebrating two milestones

Today is the five-hundredth home page we've published for java.net. We're coming up to our second anniversary (we'll announce the annual picture contest tomorrow) in a month but I wanted to take a moment and do some rough estimates. Of course, the cool thing about the future is that there is always much more to be done than has been done already. We've posted one thousand stories from other web sites and a little over eight hundred stories about our projects and communities. We've grown to 138 thousand members and have 1917 hosted projects. Today we add our twentieth community: the JDK community.

As always, thank you for your submissions, comments, forum postings and all the things that make this a fun site to work with each day.

In today's Weblogs, Roger Brinkley announces