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June 2005 Archives


JavaOne Day 3

Posted by invalidname on June 30, 2005 at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reaching the breaking point

JavaOne is a conference not timid in its ambition. With keynotes as early as 8 AM and BoF's stretching until 11:30 PM, perhaps only ADHOC/MacHack is more determined to keep paricipants from sleeping. And on Day 3, participants who've been slamming down sessions, BoF's and walking the pavilion may finally be hitting the breaking point. It wasn't hard on this day to finally say "Enough!" and flop down in a beanbag chair in front of the big-screen JavaOne highlights in Moscone South, or in Moscone North with one of the XBoxes playing Halo 2 and Madden NFL 2005.

To cap the last three days of activity, JavaOne's "After Dark Bash" featured comedian Dennis Miller, an all-female Led Zeppelin cover band, and throngs of attendees trying to keep going. For those still determined to learn and share information, Birds of a Feather sessions offered a gathering of Jini developers, an editor's roundtable, and advice on writing a Java book, among many, many other topics.

The energy level has been high, and there is perhaps a sense of renewed optimism among certain segments of the Java population. Client-side Java sessions attracted many attendees, and a session showing how J2ME will be used to power the interactive features on Blu-Ray movie discs was completely sold out.

Day four wraps things up with James Gosling's address, the finale of the annual t-shirt hurling contest (one element of the conference that has been a bust compared to years prior), and a final slate of sessions. We'll probably also see attendees making a last run on the book store in Moscone North, and the gift shop under Moscone South. It's your last chance for a plushy Duke, as seen in the picture below (taken by Scott Schram).

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From the community corner

Posted by daniel on June 29, 2005 at 06:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From the keynote to the show floor to the sessions it seems as if java.net is everywhere. Stop by the java.net booth and check out some of the presentations from our community and project leaders. If you are a member pick up your java.net sticker - if you aren't, we're happy to sign you up and then give you a sticker. It's nice to see what a large percent of attendees are community members.

It struck me during the keynote, how much activity there is on java.net that people don't know about. Many of the people with cool projects on stage this morning during Scott McNealy's keynote address host their code on our site. The JUIC project is being used to speed up produce transactions. This same mobile phone bidding system can be adapted to other industries.

The highlight of the morning address for me was to see Fabiane Bizinella Nardon in a video on the Brazilian health system and then to see her on stage with McNealy. Her group is doing great work making it easier for Brazilians to get easier access to health care. Instead of having to fill out multiple forms with the same information about name, allergies, etc., a person's data is available throughout the health care system. Nardon told stories of how this has dramatically reduced the wait time for service. Their system is open sourced and people in other countries can access and adapt their code base.

This fit in with McNealy's challenge to help eliminate the digital divide. Healthcare was one of his targets. He said "no industry is more screwed up than the computer industry, except healthcare." He cited statistics that included 98,000 preventable deaths each year. He then turned to Education as being disjointed and fragmented. Some of his goals included providing students and teachers access to the best content, addressing the needs for better teacher education, and helping schools with the challenges of technology obsolescence. The java.net GELC community is helping with these efforts.

After a busy day in sessions and on the show floor, Chris Adamson and I headed over to the Communities in Action party. There java.net and other Java-based communities set up tables and talked to people about what they are doing. It was one of those gatherings that really personalized the conference. So many people have come to know each other from this gathering each year that it's a great time to catch up with developers working on interesting projects with interesting technology.

Scott Schram took this picture of Bruno Souza with the JUGs community mascot "Juggy".

The JUGs Community launches its new mascot,

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JavaOne Day 1

Posted by invalidname on June 28, 2005 at 06:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

New names, old friends, and a roadmap

For many of us, JavaOne 2005 started off in the form of a line stretching out of the Moscone Center, around the Sony Metreon, and past the Yerba Buena Gardens. And I had arrived 15 minutes before the beginning of the general session. Given the stream of attendees I saw arriving as I waited, the end of the line was probably around the block and then some.

This year's general session included much welcome news, not the least of which was a detente between Sun and IBM - the latter having renewed its Java license for another 11 years - and the retiring of the confusing and often-mocked "Java 2" naming scheme, in favor of "Java Standard Edition 6", "Java Enterprise Edition 6", etc.

Java's ubiquity gained further credibility with numbers showing that far from "slowing", Java's reach is advancing in many key measurements: number of developers, number of licensees, and number of devices. On this last point, Sun's John Loiacono revealed that the number of Java-capable devices went up 42% last year and, for the first time ever, now outnumbers Java-capable PC's (and 708 million devices is not a small number either).

Members of the original "Green" team - the project that became Oak, and later Java - were invited up on stage with Scott McNealy and Duke to commemorate Java's 10th birthday, complete with a massive cake prepared for the occasion.

Looking to the future, Graham Hamilton offered a roadmap of Java SE's Mustang and Dolphin releases, and Bill Shannon toured the goals and features of Java EE's next version. Both are driven by JSR's, and Mustang's developments can be seen as it happens on the Mustang snapshot releases project on java.net.

In the afternoon, JavaOne was its usual flurry of activity, with the roadmaps spelled out in greater detail in technical sessions (including one for Java ME, which was not previewed in the general session). The pavilion was packed with exhibitors, and the java.net booth was busy all day with mini-talks describing the many projects and communities on the site.

So that's some of what I saw, but what about what you saw? We hope you'll visit our JavaOne forums to discuss what you're seeing and doing at the show. These forums are open to all java.net members, so those who aren't at the show can join in the discussion too. The JavaOne 2005 Discussion is for discussions of happenings at the show, while the Java One 2005 Links is where you can add links to JavaOne content you've seen around the web.

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JavaOne Day 0

Posted by daniel on June 27, 2005 at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

JavaOne officially begins today. The java.net page will be devoted to coverage this week and we invite you to get involved. If you are a java.net blogger, set the "Primary Category" of your entry to JavaOne and we will be able to include you on the front page. If you blog elsewhere, we have set up a special forum for you to post links to your entries on other sites and to interesting items you've seen elsewhere - JavaOne 2005 links. You can also join the conversation by posting to a JavaOne forum we've set up for you called JavaOne 2005 Discussions. We'll be featuring these items along with news pieces from the wire in the center column all week.

On the right side of the page you'll find a java.net survey that will help us shape the site. You'll also find an updated Java bookshelf for the Safari book service and a rolling list of the latest news and blog posts.

This weekend we met with java.net community leaders to talk about how we might better serve the projects and communities. It was great to meet so many of our community and project leaders and hear their thoughts on what is good and bad about our site. Also, JUG community co-leader Bruno Souza unveiled a puppet of the new mascot for the JUGs community (shown here with Bruno and Sarah).

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Dear Friends

Posted by invalidname on June 24, 2005 at 06:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Join us, in person or online, for next week's JavaOne happenings

Not all Java developers go to JavaOne. This is important, so let me repeat it: not all Java developers go to JavaOne. Sometimes we in the computer media get so focused on the major announcements, new software releases, and other activity that are timed to match the conference, that we may be overlooking the fact that the huge majority of Java developers don't want, don't need, or just can't make the pilgrimage to San Francisco in late June. For you, we'll be changing the front page next week, as we did last year, to provide a rolling view of what's happening at the conference. We'll have blogs, coverage from around the web, and other frequently-updated Java news. Think of it as all the excitement of JavaOne, without waiting for 2,000 people ahead of you on the Moscone Center escalators.

On the other hand, if you will be at JavaOne, we hope to see you. The java.net presence in the pavilion will offer a Community Corner where you can learn about hosting and managing your project on java.net, meet community leaders, and learn about other projects in the form of 30-minute Mini-Talks.

We're also hosting an event Tuesday night, open to all java.net members. Please join your fellow java.net members at the Java Communities in Action event Tuesday June 28 at 6 PM at the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. The event is free and you need not attend JavaOne to participate in this event.

Also in today's Projects and Communities section, the Java User Groups now have a mascot: Juggy, the Java Finch. JUGs Community co-leader Eitan Suez introduces Juggy in his blog I believe I can fly ;-), noting that Juggy has been donated to all JUGs under a Creative Commons license.


Chet Haase has some information about JavaOne Desktop Sessions in today's Weblogs. "I don't know about you, but I find conference program guides and websites somewhat difficult to use. There are just so many sessions in so many different areas that it's tough to wade through the universe of possibilities and figure out where I'm actually supposed to be at any given time (besides looking for a good cup o' coffee, of course). To that end, we wanted to give you a condensed guide to the Desktop sessions at the conference."

Felipe Leme has an idea: SOIA - Specify Once, Implement Anywhere: "Have you ever wondered how hard it is to switch the implementation for a JCP-based technology? Here is my recent experience on the JSF arena."

Doug Kohlert notes that the JAX-WS 2.0 RI Early Access 2 is now available. "This version of JAX-WS provides support for SOAP 1.2, MTOM. This is also the first implementation of a dynamic runtime that does not rely on non portable artifacts."


In Also in Java Today, JavaServer Faces provides an alternative to Struts or Spring MVC for those who want a Web application framework that manages UI events in a Java Web application. JSF is now a standard part of the J2EE specification and provides a viable alternative to non-standard Web frameworks. In Face Up to Web Application Design Using JSF and MyFaces, Javid Jamae looks at how JSF works and has a surprising opinion on whether it's ready for mission-critical use.

Are you developing Java web services? Then consider this: "Web services are increasingly becoming an integral part of next-generation web applications. They're also vulnerable to attacks. The nature of these attacks is the same as for traditional web applications, but the modus operandi is different. These attacks can lead to information leakage; further, they aid in remote command execution." What's your defense option? In the ONLamp Security DevCenter article Securing Web Services with mod_security, Shreeraj Shah shows how to deploy and configure the Apache mod_security module to defend against common forms of attack, without changing your source code.


In today's Forums, jwenting disagrees on the subject of Some important classes missing: "Java is modular. There's libraries out there that can do just about everything you want if you go looking. I'm sick and tired of this 'XXXX should be in the core API because YYYY has it' (or 'because I use it a lot and therefore everyone needs it NOW!!!!'). The core APIs are bloated and have way too much crud as it is, and it looks to only be getting a LOT worse."

cowwoc has a request for Automatic proxy settings for normal applications: "I know that Mustang and Tiger now support automatic proxy settings for applets, but why can't we also auto-import these settings from the OS browsers for normal applications? That is, if I'm running a standalone application, why can't Java check the registry (or wherever else it's stored) for the proxy settings and import them on demand? Is there a big difference here between applets and normal applications?"


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 :

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.



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Find Your Way

Posted by invalidname on June 23, 2005 at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A path to radically simpler webapp development.

By this point, most developers have heard about Ruby on Rails, a web application framework that has generated a level of enthusiasm and advocacy not seen in some time. Java has multiple frameworks - competition is good after all - some of them fairly light-weight and some, um, not. But RoR is about more than casting off the shackles of XML deployment descriptors: it's about the idea of "Domain Driven Development", allowing the developer to focus on modelling business logic and not managing relationships between various parts of the framework. If only someone would bring that to Java...

In our Featured Article, RAD That Ain't Bad: Domain-Driven Development with Trails, Chris Nelson introduces the Trails project, hosted on java.net, as a Ruby-on-Rails-inspired Domain-Driven Development webapp framework. He shows how straightforward it is to create simple business objects as POJO's and immediately get a webapp that provides the typical means of manipulating those objects via a web interface.


Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein is answering complaints about Bloated Mustang? in today's Weblogs. He writes: "Build 40 of Mustang was the first drop with the first significant new API additions. And the inevitable happened as some people started to complain about the addition of 'useless' features: who needs Web Services, Javascript or an HTTP server? Why Javascript instead of [put favorite language here]? Some of these features are indeed hard to justify in J2SE, if we miss the big picture."

John Reynolds is predicting good things as Java Business Integration, JSR 208, passes final ballot: "JSR 208, will probably lead to a new crop of JBI-based ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)offerings. For me, JBI's advent will probably be a really good thing. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is a paradigm, not a product. I've bought into the SOA paradigm hook-line-and-sinker, but getting from vision to reality has proved difficult."

"GlassFish has its first external commitor, Jacob Hookom! Wait, how is that possible? It's only been a couple of weeks?" In GlassFish external commitor, Carla Mott has the answer.


In Also in Java Today , Narayanan A.R. says "I have been developing software systems using object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques for many years. So when I read that aspect-oriented programming (AOP) addresses many problems that traditional OOP doesn't solve completely or directly, I wanted to better understand its benefits in real world application development." In Aspect- vs. Object-Oriented Programming: Which Technique, When?, he attacks a case study with both OOP and AOP techniques and makes a line-by-line comparison of the two approaches.

The Java 2D is not a new API, but you can use it to create some stunningly high-quality graphics with Java technology. The Java 2D API is easy to use and includes features such as image processing, alpha-based compositing, antialiasing, geometric transformations, international text rendering, and even support for advanced printing. In Learning Java 2D, Part 1, Robert Eckstein introduces the concepts Java 2D uses to render on-screen components.


In Projects and Communities, the Java Communications Community project Mobicents, an open-source implementation of JAIN SLEE, is celebrating its recent certification, having passed the JAIN SLEE TCK. Mobicents is a professional VoIP platform that is applicable to other low-latency problem domains, such as financial trading and online gaming.

The JavaServer Faces reference implementation is now available under the Java Development License (JDL). Ed Burns' blog entry about the development describes the upshot for JSF implementors, and he has updated the project FAQ so you can choose JDL or JRL before checking out code.<


Today's Forums, offer an interesting idea in Proposal: Annotation @Optional. User mcnepp writes "I have a proposal for a new standard annotation. This annotation would present a standard way of declaring interface methods as 'optional'. @Optional would replace those tedious JavaDoc comments 'this is an optional operation' just like @Deprecated will supersede the corresponding JavaDoc-tag."

rogerhernandez reports Build problems with user names: I ran into two build problems because my user name has a space in it: 1) In Sanity.gmk, in the check for the unicows.lib size[...] The script should probably use 'echo $(USERNAME) | wc -w' to set the size offset 2) In hotspot-rules.gmk, building the hotspot compilers [...]"


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 :

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.



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The future of Java

Posted by daniel on June 22, 2005 at 06:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Looking forward to next Thursday's keynote

The JavaOne conference has always had lots of keynotes. In a way, it confuses those of us searching for the key note. Other conferences have more than one address and many of them now call them keynotes. When I was a mathematician, the national meetings had different invited addresses which each had a different flavor. The Gibbs lecture, for example, was held at night and was the most accessible to non-experts.

To be fair, JavaOne calls these gatherings "General Sessions". In the early days of JavaOne I thought of these as a morning convocation. John Gage would greet us and start our day out on the right foot with a series of announcements. He would punctuate the morning session with observations that reminded you there are some deep thinkers at the helm. There was a theme song to JavaOne - a sort of Pat Metheney-esque piece that would play accompanied by lights. You'd walk in each morning with a sense of excitement as you saw the stage and heard the music and rushed to your seat.

It could be me, it could be them, but over time this feeling waned. It could have been the year that the message of the morning keynote was "you can make money with Java" or it could have been the growing number of keynotes from show sponsors. I like a t-shirt contest as much as the next guy, but I remember the days when James Gosling would talk to us about programming, the language, real time, or when he would show off the cool applications of Java that he had encountered.

One of my favorite keynotes, however, used to be non-technical. It was accessible to non-experts but pushed us to think. Danny Hillis one year talked about the long now. These presentations were often followed by a panel discussion that looked at trends and discussed the future. It looks as if the "Futurist Panel" is back this year for a peak at where technology is going. We are a week away from this session and the JavaOne website doesn't tell us who will make up "this lively panel of technologists, analysts, authors, and financiers" but I'll be heading down to Moscone for this one. Hey - maybe I'll catch a t-shirt this year.


James Gosling gives a nice sports analogy that illustrates why Real Time != Real Fast in today's Weblogs. "Since I've been involved in real time programming and the Real Time Specification for Java (JSR1) work, I've had a lot of people ask me about where real time can be used. There's more than a little confusion: many folks who've asked for "real time" actually want "real fast" (throughput computing)."

Laird Nelson posts on Detachable Root Panes and Desktop Hopping "On today's menu: how to make a JRootPane subclass that can pop itself in and out of JInternalFrames and JFrames. Let's dive right in."

Kirill Grouchnikov says You say Eclipse, I say IBM "How many times have you heard the statement from IBM people that Eclipse has been out of their hands for as long as they remember? Maybe their minds forgot, but their hands still hold tight."


In Also in Java Today , working with JAI involves passing in operations as Strings along with the parameters they require. For an introduction along with code examples, check out the recent Core Java Tech Tip Introduction to Java Advanced Imaging. The example takes you through reading in an image file as a JPEG, applying a convolution to the image, and then transforming it so that it can be written out as a TIFF

Whether it's summer barbecue season or a formal JavaOne industry event, it's inevitable that someone will come up to you and want to talk... about Jini service discovery, smart proxies, and JNDI. OK, even if this doesn't happen, it's nice to be able to chat up your friends when the occasion arises, so to commemorate the release of Head First Java, 2nd Edition, ONJava is featuring the very popular How to Talk About Jini, J2EE, and Web Services at a Cocktail Party by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates.


In Projects and Communities, Kirill Grouchnikov's blog entry Working with JAXB 2.0 - JavaOne BoF describes the projects in the Java Web Services Developer Pack project and previews a JavaOne "birds of a feather" session in which he and other community members will present and discuss the various JAXB projects.

Good news for members of the Linux Java Community: Blackdown's Linux port of J2SE 1.4.2-02 is now available, in both x86 and 64-bit AMD versions. Debian packages are also available and can be installed with apt-get install j2sdk1.4 or apt-get install j2re1.4. The release also addresses an applet security issue.


Kellohair from the Peabody team explains the thinking behind mustang source - possible to build only native parts? in today's Forums, "The idea is to import the pre-built libraries (*.so's and DLL's) just like the it does now for Hotspot VM. Using the location JDK_IMPORT_PATH (or your own ALT_JDK_IMPORT_PATH setting) as the source of the built libraries. It would be important that this JDK binary match what you are building and also that you aren't changing any of the native interfaces. If this worked, a C/C++ compiler might not even be necessary for anyone just making changes to Java source files. But you would need a matching built JDK 6.0 binary tree."

HLovatt contributes to the thread on Operator overloading (again) and functions "I think operator overloading is difficult to do and current approaches from other languages are lacking, that is why so many people are against it. We need a fresh approach because operators are slightly different than normal methods in that they are related to each other and in general efficiency is a concern."


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 :

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.

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This is Your Story

Posted by invalidname on June 21, 2005 at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Too big for a single book

Yesterday, Daniel blogged on Tim O'Reilly's blog entry The Rise of Open Source Java, which noted an upturn in Java book sales, attributable to both a Tiger-timeframe refresh of popular titles, and to major open-source projects based on Java, such as Spring, Struts, Lucene, and AspectJ.

One of the talkbacks caught my eye, and not in a good way:

Doesn't this suggest that Java has maintained or increased in complexity, thereby requiring one or more books on a variety of topics for one to do anything useful? And that the Java community has failed to provide adequate documentation and support?

At this point, I'm finding that it is impossible to be productive in Java without several books. As opposed to working with Ruby, where Dave Thomas' book is pretty much all needs (unless you go the Rails route, then you'll be lost without one of the half dozen books due this summer. )

On its face, this is almost self-discrediting: by acknowledging the difference between language and libraries in the Ruby world, he immediately shows why a basic Java text can't also teach you how to use JSP's or Swing, any more than reading Kernigham and Ritchie will teach the budding C programmer how to write an app that uses CORBA, QuickTime, or some other third-party library.

But the more interesting idea is the suggestion that it is the community that is responsible for providing documentation and support, and that the Java community is lacking. It's hard to imagine someone seriously leveling this accusation at the Java community, where every public API is expected to have publicly-available Javadocs (and anyone with the source can generate those docs easily), where most frameworks and libraries with significant traction are covered by feature articles and tutorials on sites like java.net and others, and where those resources are collected at one-stop shops like CodeZoo.

To top it off, isn't the number of books proof that the community is providing documentation and support? True, books aren't free, but given that the average book costs less than the average Java developer makes in an hour, and given that we authors do have mortgages and health insurance to pay for, the situation seems fair to me.

Is the Java community doing enough to document and support its many frameworks and libraries? Is that even a fair expectation? Let's hear what you have to say in the talkbacks below...


In our Featured Article, Nigel Warren and Philip Bishop apply SOA principles in the small device realm. In Taking Service Oriented Architectures Mobile Part One: Thinking Mobile, they describe how to implement SOA onto mobile devices, show how to implement a simple messaging application using mobile SOA design principles, point to some of the security implications and how to handle them.


In today's Weblogs. Greg Murray has some BluePrints for writing JSF Components that use AJAX: " This entry discusses different strategies for AJAX enabling new and existing JSF components. "

N. Alex Rupp is scoffing at "an odd story on news.softpedia.com this evening about how ISO 18629 is going to grant computer programs the ability to reason." In Software Language Makes First Step Towards AI? Hardly, he writes: "don't buy the hype -- it's bad reporting, and I'll tell you why."

Krishnan Viswanath writes: "I always thought that the Hash implementations (table & map) used buckets that are prime in number." In Hashmap Implementation, he writes: "But, recently, after digging around the source code to see what that default size is resulted in a bit of a puzzling situation."


In Also in Java Today, NewsForge's Nathan Willis laments the Decline and Fall of the Version Number: "The world used to make sense. As the first rays of dawn broke over the horizon, farmers strode nobly into their fields of grain to reap the harvest of an honest season's living, while across the country programmers put to rest another night's coding and packaged a well-honed x.0 release, wistfully watching it bound off into the Internet to replicate blissfully on the mirror servers. People everywhere were happy. Then our version numbers collapsed. There was chaos. Some numbers got longer and longer. Some turned into letters and words. Some became dates. Nobody knew what the numbers meant anymore. People were afraid to ask what the numbers meant, and they became afraid of numbers themselves."

Are you tired of building and maintaining toString() methods for all your data classes? In Automate run time classfile modification, consultant Dennis Sosnoski shows how you can automate the process using J2SE 5.0 annotations and the ASM bytecode manipulation framework. He takes advantage of the new J2SE 5.0 instrumentation API to invoke ASM as classes are loaded into the JVM, providing on-the-fly class modification at run time.


In Projects and Communities, you may be aware that periodic builds of the next major version of Java are posted to the J2SE 6.0 (Mustang) Snapshot Releases project, but do you have a good idea of what's in Mustang? The article Core Java Technology Features in Mustang describes the major new features and bug fixes, and whether they've already been integrated.

The latest Java Tools Community Newsletter notes the graduation of two projects from the community incubator: jTrac, a web-based generic tracking tool, and ThinNB, which provides Thinlet support to NetBeans by housing ThinNB NetBeans modules and installing the ThinNB Update Center in the NetBeans IDE.


In today's Forums, bartspedden asks about Unit Testing JAXB Objects: "I need to write some unit tests with junit to validate that two JAXB objects are identical. I've read that the .equals() on the JAXB object will not work here for some reason. I could write a sorter to sort the object data and then implicitly test each attribute, but that seems like the wrong approach since the JAXB object could change. I've gotten one idea of using the Jakarta EqualsBuilder but I figured I would post a question here to see how you all test your JAXB objects."

philrace clarifies some issues Re: Getting kerning: "In general, we can't assume simple pairwise kerning, though most of the time that's what we'll be getting from the fonts, so this may be too simple. Since it's quite possible you may want to use kerning in conjunction with ligatures, how do you expect to handle that? The fonts describe kerning pairs in terms of glyphs not chars."


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 :

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.



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Industry trends

Posted by daniel on June 20, 2005 at 07:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Java book sales back up

Tim O'Reilly (for whom I work) looks at book sales as one of many indicators of trends. It is not his only source of information, but at last year's Open Source Conference (OSCon) he showed a chart detailing a drop in Java book sales in the months that preceeded the conference this past August. It was a tough OSCon for Java developers - the audience applauded at this revelation.

Java programmers noted that the next release of J2SE included major changes to the language and that it was unlikely that people would buy soon to be out of date books. In addition there was a growing number of third party and open source frameworks that had not yet been documented in books. It's hard to say such things out loud in a gathering of Perl, Python, etc. developers and not sound like a bunch of whiners. So, for the most part, we quietly grumbled amongst ourselves.

In his weekend blog on The Rise of Open Source Java, Tim updates his slide from last year to include results up through a week or so ago. He comments:

You can see that there was a sharp uptick in Java book sales starting in July of 2004 -- Java's share of all programming books sold is up about 3% since June of '04. A lot of this growth spurt occurred shortly after JavaOne and the new Tiger release, which happened around that time. All of the top titles were revised, and saw a healthy sales increase as a result. However, when we analyzed new books (versus revisions), it appears that a substantial portion of Java's sustained growth, outside of the classic titles, has come from books on Open Source Java projects, such as Spring, Struts, Lucene, and AspectJ, which collectively performed at nearly double the unit and revenue volumes of new books on their non-Open Source counterparts.

Long before this trend was noted, OSCon Program Chair Nat Torkington doubled the size of the Java track from last year and invited me back as track chair. It was tough to choose among the many strong submissions but I think we've built a solid track and look forward to seeing you in the beginning of August in Portland. Shameless plug: head to the registration page today as it is the last day to save $400 on the registration.


Can the AJAX label include Java applets? In today's Weblogs, Hans Muller explores this a bit in his post If You've Got a Name - Check out this Applet. "Applets are old and AJAX is new: the hot technology du jour, the saving grace for developers who've toiled for years, trying to make browser applications palatable. While the AJAX discussion lumbered along, I kept an eye on my neighbors' screens. On my left, an interesting looking animated application appeared. Given the discussion, I assumed that the application was some AJAXian miracle, like Google maps, [but] I discovered (insert trumpet fanfare here) that what I'd been watching was an applet."

Jean-Francois Arcand posts his debut entry on Grizzly: An HTTP Listener Using Java Technology NIO. "Writing scalable server applications in Java technology has always been difficult. Before the advent of NIO, thread management issues made it impossible for an HTTP server to scale to thousands of users. I'm gonna start blogging on Grizzly, the HTTP Connector based on NIO shipped in GlassFish."

Ben Galbraith offers a solution to applications that require different versions of a jar file in Classloading in J2EE Applications "We're increasingly seeing frameworks co-exist in an application that in turn rely on different versions of the same libraries. And the solution is?"


In Also in Java Today , Bruce Eckel has moved his blog to artima.com and posted on his experiences with Object Design. He stresses that design must be simple and that people have difficulty separating abstraction levels, saying "we are drawn to the complexity that we know." After a long rant on UML, the piece ends with the observation that " if you insist that complete information must be available at every stage, you rapidly converge on analysis paralysis on the project level, and the waterfall approach on the method level. On the other hand, accepting that information is incomplete allows a project to become remarkably nimble. At each stage you know you will only be able to mine some of the information about the project, and when a vein begins to dry up you move on rather than wasting time trying to pry out every possible nugget. From experience, you know that you'll move forward a lot faster by moving on, into a design pass, or even by pseudocoding your design."

Laszlo offers a dramatic rethink to rich internet application development. You code not with procedural declarations, but with XML markup. You don't compile; a servlet does that for you. And your code runs in the user's Flash plugin, even though you don't need to know the first thing about Flash to use Laszlo. In Exploring Laszlo Classes, Attributes, and Events, Satya Komatineni shows you how to set up and start writing Laszlo applications.


In Projects and Communities, the JavaDesktop Community project XUI strives to make coding GUI's easier, and now it offers a greater level of attractiveness by integrating the Synth L&F and SVG. "With these visual enhancements we hope to silence the most vocal LAF critics. Well OK, being practical we hope they will at least have less to carp about!"

From the Mac Java Community: Apple has released WebObjects as part of XCode 2.1, for free. This Java-based application server is commonly used for building e-commerce sites, most notably Apple's Online Store and the iTunes Music Store. As recently as May 2000, WebObjects had cost US$ 50,000.


In today's Forums, TomWitmer asks if USB (and javax.comm) support benefit from support of unsigned types? A few of us discussed it in another thread. It's possible to work without unsigned types, but as Java communicates with more devices, devs are going to need simpler ways of exchanging unsigned data with those devices. The two times I've run into this issue, I was working in someone else's protocol. Both instances were resolvable through much bitmasking and up-conversion (uchar -> short, ushort->long, etc.), but direct support for unsigned variables would have greatly simplified that effort — tomwitmer

Is there Strange Swing behaviour with -Xcomp or -server -XX:CompileThreshold:50? dtrehas writes that when he runs "a Swing based desktop application ( for a big telecommunication company ) with-Xcomp switch or -server -XX:CompileThreshold:50, a JLabel becomes shorter. e.g. xxxx yyy zzzzz becomes zzzz"


In this week's Spotlight: The JXTA Community has just completed what it calls a "triple play": simultaneous releases of three different implementations of the JXTA P2P protocols, all of them interoperable. The three releases are JXTA-J2SE 2.3.4, JXTA-J2ME 2.0, and JXTA-C/C++ 2.1.1. Community members are also invited to meet up face-to-face at Sunday night's pre-JavaOne JXTA Town Hall meeting.


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Countdown Crunch

Posted by invalidname on June 17, 2005 at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One work week until JavaOne

Whether or not you're going to JavaOne, it would be hard not to notice the flurry of activity as the event looms (one work week away, at this point). News editor Steve Mallett e-mailed me and Daniel the other night to express his surprise at how many news items were available for the front page. I noted that two of his news items were for "RC1" releases of projects... perfectly timed for a JavaOne release after a final week of testing. For everyone working hard to get your stuff out the door in time, here's wishing you the best, and hoping you get a break after the crunch.

For those of you who won't be at JavaOne, Max Goff wants to help improve the blog coverage of the event. In today's Weblog entry, Blogging JavaOne, he writes: "There should be a plethora of bloggers at JavaOne this year, which is only a couple of weeks away (June 27-30). With Microsoft co-opting ... I mean co-sponsoring the event, it promises to be an even more interesting gathering than any previous Java celebration. Is there anything in particular you would like to see a blogger from java.net cover at JavaOne this year?"

Tom Ball talks about presenting Project Jackpot at JavaOne: "I will be giving a JavaOne presentation on Project Jackpot: A New Java Technology for Source Transformation, and have been working hard on a NetBeans plug-in to demonstrate it. I am really excited to be able to finally discuss our work to such a wide audience."

Ed Burns has a jumpstart on using java.net for your JSR: "This is what we did with JSP and JSF to host our projects on java.net."


In Also in Java Today, the Sun Developer Network article What's New in the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit 2.3 beta outlines the new features and APIs in the latest version of the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit. You'll learn about the toolkit's support for the Location API, SATSA, and the Content Handler API. Read the article to learn how you can create MIDP applications that discover their location, communicate with smart cards, respond to specific content types, and more.

Whether you're targeting it with your web application, writing client-side DHTML or AJAX code for it, or just using it to surf the web, chances are you're aware of Firefox, the lean, fast browser from the Mozilla Foundation. But how much of its functionality are you really using? In the Mozilla DevCenter article A Firefox Glossary Brian King (contributor to Firefox Hacks) describes the terminology and concepts of this compelling client.


In Projects and Communities, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's latest weblog entry announces: JAXP Builds now available. "The JAXP team has just posted early access builds of JAXP 1.3 and of JAXP 1.4. Specific JAXP 1.3 builds will eventually show up in GlassFish builds, while JAXP 1.4 will be in Mustang builds, but having separate builds will allow more flexible uses."

The GELC is spotlighting SchoolClipse, a tool for managing a small private school. In Project Spotlight: SchoolClipse, project owner Stavros Kounis talks about the project as a "playground" for developing rich-client platform applications, as well as the project's current status and goals for the future.


User cowwoc has a problem with Mustang's system tray icon feature in today's Forums. In Re: Able to show balloons from system tray icon?, he writes: "The problem is that Sun chose not to expose an API which allows end-users to specify whether a window may or may not overlap the taskbar. They simply may not, period. If you look at the underlying Tray API code, what Sun does is use reflection to get at a private variable, change its value and this allows that specific window to display on top of the taskbar. If Sun wants to hack its own code, great, but we end-users shouldn't have to."

hr_stoyanov is looking for more depth in Re: WS-SECURITY in JAX-WS 2.0?: "What about the other WS-* security protocols: WS-TRUST, WS-SecureConversation SAML and XrML. Is there a roadmap of what to expect in JAX-WS in future? Are there JAVA.NET hosted OSS projects to provide some implementation?"


The latest java.net Poll asks "Have you ever run a Java Web Start application?". Cast your vote on the front page, then join in the discussion on the results page.


In today's java.net News Headlines :

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Jobs' commencement address

Posted by daniel on June 16, 2005 at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Connecting the dots

Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs gave this year's Stanford commencement address. Although much has been written about it, take the time to read through the transcript. The first of three stories that he tells talks about how the things that you learn and take time to investigate may have long term impact on what you do. His particular example is about taking a calligraphy class in college and later working on the typefaces for the Mac saying " it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later."

When I taught high school and college, I would often hear students ask "when are we ever going to use this". The answer may be "never". You may never need to calculate a second derivative, analyze a work of art, have an understanding of a historical event, or have an appreciation of piece of literature. But it all makes up who you are. I just listened to a podcast of Science Friday where Ira Flatow talked to Richard Feynman's daughter about her book collecting his letters. What made Feynman such a compelling character was that his interests were much wider than just physics. In fact, even the work that led to his Nobel prize was the result of having the time to just play around and feel free to explore whatever interested him. As Steve Jobs says to the graduates:

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Another of Jobs' points is that when your career takes an unexpected turn, that can be a great opportunity. Of course being fired from a job is stressful, but Jobs was fired in a spectacularly public way from a company that he helped found. He looks at the wonderful things that have happened to him recently:

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

Jobs' third story is about being told he would die within months of pancreatic cancer. He explained that he had always thought of death and that his time was limited - but it was abstract. Being told by a doctor that he had a couple of months to live was concrete and he advised the graduates:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.


Clark D. Richey, Jr. is connecting a different set of dots in his article Managing Timed Tasks Within a Cluster Utilizing The StopLight Framework in java.net's Featured Articles. You want tasks in your cluster to run at a specific time, but you want to establish some control over them, so that your sequence of tasks won't run concurrently on different boxes and fail to coordinate. The StopLight framework offers a solution, managing tasks' execution and verifying their health.


In Greasemonkey Goodness in today's Weblogs, Ben Galbraith writes "Firefox's Greasemonkey extension is another piece of web technology that changes the game... are there any analogs for Java desktop applications? We've had to put up with poor user experiences in applications ever since the dawn of the desktop computer. Being able to fix annoying website UI glitches is a wonderful experience."

Mohamed Abdelaziz writes about Distributed Collections, and Maps. "Have you wondered whether it is possible to create a distributed Map, or a Collection over JXTA? There's no reason to wonder any longer. The JXTA platform is well suited for the task, and provides several mechanisms which allow a variety of features which can be offered by such applications."

Your latest NetBeans 4.1 Tip from Brian Leonard is to Move 'Scanning Project Classpaths' Dialog to the Background "Tired of waiting for NetBeans to scan your project's classpath? Check out this tip on how to push that process into the background. Plus, the latest news on what's happening at NetBeans Software Day."


In Also in Java Today , "Anyone who has used Flickr, GMail, Google Suggest, or Google Maps will realize that a new breed of dynamic web applications is emerging." The key is the use of JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) features to create dynamic client side applications that work across systems and on all the major browsers. In Asynchronous JavaScript Technology and XML (AJAX) With Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition, Greg Murray shows how AJAX works with such J2EE technologies as servlets, JSP's, Java Server Faces, and more.

There are widgets that developers keep building over and over again. It seems as if a calendar widget is one of them. In the Core Java Tech Tip Calendar utilities in JDesktop Native components, you will see how to use the prebuilt widgets to pop-up a monthly calendar view to pick dates. You can also use a related widget to display and select special events, certain dates, and ranges of dates.


In Projects and Communities, the third-annual Java Communities in Action event will be held Tuesday June 28 at 6 PM at the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. The event is free and offers a chance to meet with community leaders and members of the JSR, JXTA, Jini and java.net communities. You need not attend JavaOne to join this event.

Stanley Ho notes the submission of JSR 277 to the JCP, addressing "an area that has been long overdue for an overhaul, and the goal is to make it easier to bundle, distribute, and deploy Java applications and Java extensions," by addressing issues of versioning and inter-JAR dependencies.


Rick Carson argues that money matters in today's Forums. "This is somewhat disingenuous. Suggesting that changing the way money flows won't effect the software industry is... interesting. You may be right. But historical examples show that changing the flow of money is usually catastrophic. The idea of the flow of money is an interesting one. Unlike others have suggested I don't think that it will entirely dry up, but there's every reasonable expectation that in many cases free software can act as a substitute (in the Econ 101 sense) good for paid software. Given the presence of a lower cost substitute, the average amount of money spent on that good will (should) decrease."

s690716 posts on TWAIN / SANE / WIA Support . "Neither Java Imaging nor JAI have basic support for standards like TWAIN or platform-specific implementations/abstractions like SANE (Unix, Linux, OSX) or WIA (Win32). Are there any plans to support these standards? Using JNI is a bad workaround for a platform independant language... java."

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The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Posted by invalidname on June 15, 2005 at 07:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Isn't this great? Well, you can't have it yet.

I need a new laptop. I switched to a desktop last year, but now JavaOne and a late-summer working vacation are looming, and I'll need portability. I'm only looking at Mac portables, because I think life is too short and too precious to use anything less. Problem is, while Steve Jobs got the Mac fans enthusiastic about Intel-based Macs the other week, his company isn't going to actually sell them for another year. So now I'm looking at buying into a dead-end technology... and given Apple's previous behavior, they will use a system update to push users off PowerPC at some point, perhaps sooner than I'd like. Plus, the current iBooks use a lousy video card that can't do certain high-end tricks that I might want to play with while I'm on the road (I'm a Java guy by day, but I do have an increasingly native dark side when it comes to media programming).

So what I want isn't ready. I need to work with what's out there today.

I'm not the only one waiting for good things to come down the pipeline. In today's Weblogs, Chet Haase talks about the the Multi-Tasking Virtual Machine (MVM), why it's so exciting, and yet why it's not in Mustang. In Mmmmmm VM..... he writes: "Finally, I get down to the question of 'Why isn't it in the platform yet?', or more specifically, why isn't MVM going to be included in Mustang? Well, frankly, it's always a question of tradeoffs, just like any software project. [...] Given the niche category that I've backed this technology into [...] is it a critical feature that we should focus on in preference to some other Mustang feature?"

In Bean Browsing with JXPath, Rich Unger writes: "Here's a little trick I've found useful for browsing the contents of my JAXB model, though it works just as well with any java beans. It's a GUI for testing JXPath expressions on a given Object."

Ben Galbraith writes about some SVG Goodness: "After a long time rotting on the W3C website, SVG is finally getting some uptake... and Java is well-positioned to take advantage of the fun. Thanks to the Batik project, Swing applications can embed gorgeous (and often interactive) SVG files into their UIs today."


In Also in Java Today, John Zukowski discusses assistive technologies in his Core Java Tech tip Accessibility and the Java Access Bridge. The good news is that "Provided you configure your Swing components properly, everything related to the javax.accessibility package happens behind the scenes. Accessibility aids are connected to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on a platform. When a user loads a program through the JVM with an attached aid, the Java Accessibility API provides the necessary information to the device in use." You do, however, need to consider what features you will be supporting e.g. accelerators or mnemonics.

Killer Game Programming in Java author Andrew Davison is still playing movies in his 3D world. In Playing Movies in a Java 3D World, Part 2, he takes his Java 3D-based movie-playing application and replaces the Java Media Framework movie-playing functionality with one based on QuickTime for Java. Thanks to an MVC design, it's not too difficult: "as a consequence of the design pattern, the replacement of JMF by QTJ has little effect on the application--only the movie class (JMFSnapper) departs, replaced by a QuickTime for Java version called QTSnapper."


In Projects and Communities, Greg Sporar's weblog NetBeans Day: Even more cool stuff has the rundown on new presentations added to the schedule for Net Beans Day, to be held Sunday, June 26, one day before JavaOne kicks off. Greg's highlights include demos of the NetBeans profiler, Project Matisse, and Project Looking Glass.

Heads up to members of the Java Enterprise Community: BEA is hosting a 30-minute online session today called Service Infrastructure in the Enterprise, discussing the deployment and management of service-oriented architectures (SOA's). The event will be held today at 9 AM and 7 PM Pacific, and the sign-up is available online.


In today's Forums, bino_george discusses AWT and Swing issues in Re: Able to show balloons from system tray icon? He writes: "If you have tried the JDIC version, you will remember that we used JPopupMenu instead of PopupMenu there and the reason you mentioned was exactly why we did it that way. Unfortunately, a lot of people were unhappy aout some of the quirks of JPopupMenu (such as not overlapping the task bar). Also since the API is in AWT, we did not want to have a dependancy on a Swing API from AWT. Typically, we do it the other way around."

User skelvin says the Splashscreen does not automatically close and asks: "Not yet implemented or bug? Javadoc says 'It is closed automatically as soon as the first window is displayed by Swing/AWT'. Yet, it does not close unless explicitly closed."


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Prepare to Qualify

Posted by invalidname on June 14, 2005 at 08:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A naming convention you won't soon forget

Overly generic names are a hazard for programmers. J2SE 5.0 already has multiple Timers, Dates, and Documents, and it doesn't take much to overload such common terms as Node or Component. In a java.net Forums message, user zixle, discussing Mustang's table sorting API, notes that "We are rapidly running out of non-overloaded names in the JDK. From one perspective RowSorter has a model, that is called Model."

You can, of course, go the other way. Today's feature article discusses a database benchmarking framework called "PolePosition", that takes its naming conventions to an extreme, and arguably past it. A series of tests is a "circuit" (sometimes also caled a "racecourse"), each test is a "lap", and the code to execute calls to a database or other persistence system is, of course, a "driver". Thus, you run the drivers through a set number of laps on the circuit to determine the winner. You can almost hear the TV announcer calling out "db4o goes inside, he's trying to get around Hibernate on the turn!"

You can say this for Pole Position: nobody's going to confuse it with an XML parser anytime soon.

In our Featured Article, An Open Source Database Benchmark, Rick Grehan takes a look at PolePosition, which describes itself as "a benchmark test suite to compare database engines and object-relational mapping technology." He writes: "the impetus behind PolePosition came from the observation that developers evaluating candidate databases for future applications often resorted to constructing ad hoc benchmarks rather than using "canned" benchmark tests (or relying on vendor-provided data). This is entirely understandable; to properly evaluate a database for a specific project, you would want to exercise that database in ways that correspond to the application's use of it."


Upcoming Mustang improvements are front and center in today's Weblogs. Stanley Ho writes about Security and networking enhancements in Java Deployment: Most of the enhancements are already integrated into Mustang... the remaining enhancements will be available in a Mustang snapshot in a few weeks.

Grzegorz Czajkowski writes about Releasing the Multi-Tasking Virtual Machine: The actual technology has proven relatively easy to implement and the original release was planned for early 2005. Well, so much for the plans. A whole bunch of items crept in, all the way from legal issues to handling large code releases on java.net

Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart announces JAXP 1.4 at Java.Net: The CVS repository for the JAXP 1.4 Reference Implementation just went live at Java.Net in the JWSDP community. One of the nice things of this JAXP 1.4 implementation is that it provides a ready-to-use package that combines the StAX implementation with SAX and DOM implementations and all the benefits of JAXP 1.3 (like validation).


In Also in Java Today , author and analyst Richard Monson-Haefel has some serious second thoughts about JAX-RPC. In fact, his latest blog entry is entitled JAX-RPC is Bad, Bad, Bad! He continues: "There I've said it. It wasn't as painful as I thought it would be to admit that the subject of my last book, J2EE Web Services, is a terribly flawed piece of technology. I'm glad I wrote that book, I think it has helped a lot of people understand a very, very complex Java technology (i.e. JAX-RPC), but I'm sorry that JAX-RPC and the rest of the J2EE Web services stack became the standard for Java web services."

Matt Asay, of Novell's Open Source Review Board, has written a NewsForge opinion piece in which he asks Does 'community' still exist in open source? Noting that many of the gear-heads and hackers that used to represent open-source have been hired by corporations interested in OSS, he writes "in our rush to commercialize Linux and other open source projects, we tend to cloud the community aspect, which obviates many of the benefits vendors (and customers) derive from open source in the first place. Word-of-mouth marketing, supra-corporate QA testing, etc. These benefits disappear when community is trampled in the rush to commercialize open source."


In Projects and Communities, Jini technology has a new licensing model, with recent specifications and implementations (like the Jini Technology Starter Kit 2.0.2) licensed under the Apache License v. 2.0. In Sun opens the Jini Licensing Model, Bill Venners discusses this change with Jini team members Jim Hurley (also a community contact for the java.net Jini Community) and Bob Scheifler.

An interesting success story from the JXTA Community: Boeing has decided to use JXTA as part of of its Future Combat System (FCS) for the U.S. Army. A Boeing VP was quoted as saying that "JXTA technology ensures that services registered can be found quickly and efficiently." FCS is a networked "system of systems" the Army hopes will increase its agility and reduce logistics needs.


In today's Forums, bino_george shows off another Mustang feature in Re: Able to show balloons from system tray icon?: "All you have to do is call trayIcon.displayMessage("Caption", "This is an example of Notifications", type); where type is one of: TrayIcon.MessageType.ERROR (an error message), TrayIcon.MessageType.INFO (an information message) TrayIcon.MessageType.NONE (simple message), or TrayIcon.MessageType.WARNING (a warning message). Check out the javadoc. You can try it out with b38 and above."

uncle_alice shares Two reasons why AA text doesn't work in Mustang: "When I first ran my home-grown editor app under Mustang-b40, neither the textarea nor the line-number gutter was displaying AA text (although they work fine under Tiger with the "swing.aatext" property set). I finally figured out what the problems were, and thought I'd share what I learned."


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.


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The GlassFish project

Posted by daniel on June 13, 2005 at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sun's J2EE in the open

One of the repeated themes in the GlassFish documentation is that the "project is designed to encourage communication between Sun engineers and the community and will enable all developers to better understand Sun's J2EE development process." I think that has certainly been the case in the work on the Mustang release. Not so much a look at Sun't process so much as communication in forums and blogs between the community and the engineers.

This week's project spotlight is GlassFish. "The first available module is Webtier, the next generation application server which uses Grizzly, an HTTP listener implemented in Java NIO. Access to more modules is in the works."

GlassFish seems to be everywhere. In today's Weblogs, Brian Leonard answers the question What's It Take To Build The J2EE SDK? "Developing a product like the J2EE SDK is no small feat. Now you can see for yourself exactly what's involved. It's no small feat -- over 30 modules make up the SDK. You'll see the extent of the code and the number of developers involved."

Scott Violet writes Matisse: one step closer to cross platform layout nirvana "Matisse shows work that the NetBeans and Swing teams have been deeply involved in for close to a year (YOW!) now. Get the skinny on what lies underneath Matisse: NetBeans new forms builder."

Lance Anderson announces the JDBC 4.0 Early Draft Review is available. The draft includes "ease-of-development features, automatic loading of java.sql.Driver implementations, enhancements to Connection and Statement interfaces to permit improved connection state tracking, and more"


In Also in Java Today , in the third part of an interview with Artima.com's Bill Venners, Design Patterns co-author Erich Gamma talks about Design Principles from Design Patterns, focusing on two key principles: program to an interface not an implementation, and favor object composition over object inheritance. Gamma says: "You want to build to last. That's been an important theme of Eclipse development since we started. We have built Eclipse as a platform. We always keep in mind as we design Eclipse that it has to last ten or twenty years. This can be scary at times."

Serialization can be handy for persisting Java objects to disk, but it's quite limited in terms of searchability, robustness, and transactional integrity. Most developers reach these limitations and choose to use a database. But there is a middle way: "a prevalent system makes use of serialization... a serialized snapshot of a working system can be taken at regular intervals as a first-line storage mechanism." In Prevalence: Transparent, Fault-Tolerant Object Persistence, Jim Paterson shows how the Prevayler framework offers a compelling prevalence option for Java development.


In Projects and Communities, the next Sun Developer Network Chat Session, What's New in the J2ME Wireless Toolkit , takes place Tuesday 6/14/05 at 9:00 AM PST (16:00 UTC). Join the chat to learn more about the J2ME Wireless Toolkit from lead engineer Ariel Levin, writer Jonathan Knudsen, and product marketing manager E-ming Saung.

From the Mac Java Community: the Apple Sample Code projects Graphics Performance Demo 2 and Graphics Performance Demo 3 illustrate slowdowns that can occur when animating on a non-AWT thread and when using XOR drawing. These demos discuss issues related to OS X's native double-buffering and offer solutions.


In today's Forums, lucretius2 adds his thoughts on the thread Please add types uint, ulong etc... "I think it was one of the great decisions in Java not to have unsigned types. In my experience in C++ they always lead to type mismatch problems when mixing signed and unsigned types, and even bugs. For instance, a classic bug that arises with unsigned types is this: for(uint n = max; n >= min; n--) {...} This looks innocent enough, and works in almost every case, but if min is 0 the loop will never terminate. If n is signed, as in Java, it always works (except in the highly unlikely case that min is Integer.MIN_VALUE)."

Kohsuke responds to JAXB object interfaces and implementations. "How does that 3rd party library knows how to implement an interface generated by JAXB? Or is that interface implemented by a proxy? If you can touch that implementation, you can use JAXB annotations directly on those implementations. I can't think of an easy way to do this. Perhaps you can come up with an utility that copies the object field-by-field into JAXB objects?"


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Two years of java.net

Posted by daniel on June 10, 2005 at 07:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks for your help

When we launched java.net two years ago we stressed that it was a beta site that would grow and change over time. Looking back at the front pages over these past two years (we archived all but the first three) we've experimented with different components and some have worked better than others. As we celebrate our second anniversary today we are also looking forward at elements we might add to the site or existing elements we might change. If you have any thoughts, use the talkback to this blog entry or send us an email.

As of last Monday we had over 145,000 members and 1,976 projects on java.net. We have a great team that works on the site every day. The community leaders work to recruit, support, and promote projects. Helen Chen of CollabNet provides a lot of guidance and support for the community and project leaders and is often the voice of reason in the daily discussions among the team members. Marla Parker of Sun has been filling in several roles and has done a wonderful job of making sure we have the resources we need while making sure we are able to still remain an independent voice.

I work most closely with the O'Reilly team. It is hard to describe what site producer Sarah Breen does - because she seems to do everything and support everyone. Craig Palmer has also joined us this year producing articles and other aspects of the site. Mark Levitt was also with us this year as a producer before moving on to other O'Reilly sites. Miky Vacik's graphic design adds a special something to our pages. I love the tiles he creates for our feature articles. Tony Stubblebine is a programmer who supports us by adding new features and who helped us move our blogs to Movable Type this year and to launch Jive forums. Greg Dickerson does an amazing job of making sure the site stays up and responsive. David Lents has switched from the network side of the team to the programming side. These guys respond cheerfully to pages in the middle of the night and fix whatever has gone wrong within minutes.

What you now see on the front page is the result of the work of Chris Adamson. About a month ago, Chris was promoted from Associate Editor of java.net to Editor. It was not so much a change as an acknowledgement of how much of th