 |
|
 |
 |
|
|
 Editor's Daily BlogJuly 2005 ArchivesSqueeze BoxPosted by invalidname on July 29, 2005 at 06:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Let's put everything into Java? There's an interesting discussion in the forums. It started with the topic Are you for or against "native XML support" in Dolphin?, but has expanded past that to include ideas for embedding other kinds of content in Java code, like SQL.
Native XML in java sucks because it is so small minded. If anything is needed to solve this problem, then what is needed is a mechanism to support native ANYTHING. (Well anything that can be expressed in unicode anyway) On the one hand, there's a definite appeal here -- if we're going to have efforts to embed different kinds of content into Java, it makes sense to have a common approach, since that would offer a consistent, predictable means of doing so. It would probably also eliminate overlapping and potentially incompatible appraoches among different embedding efforts. The fact that generics has already taken the angle braces so obviously needed by XML is one example of this. On the other hand, at what point does this stop being Java? What is the learning curve like when you need to know not just Java, but anything that can be embedded into it, in order to read an arbitrary source file? Sure, I can think of some times when I'd rather have done something in LISP than Java, but how maintainable would it be for me to actually drop into LISP in the middle of a method? Then again, we already build up SQL statements in code today, and if this non-Java stuff were off in another file, how different is this scenario from needing XML deployment descriptors to be maintained in parallel with Java code today? I suspect a lot of you have strong feelings about these issues. I hope you'll stop by the forum and let us all know what you think.
Also in today's Forums, This week's java.net Poll asks Have you ever used a non-Sun Java runtime? Cast your vote on the front page, then check out the results page for results and discussion. In today's Weblogs. Ed Burns has an irc followup: let's try JXTA: "To follow up to my previous blog about the desire for irc.java.net, I'd like to talk about using Project JXTA in the interim (and perhaps indefinately, if people like it) to fill the gap." In Project Matisse: An update, Gregg Sporar writes: "I did a demo of Project Matisse for the Austin Java User's Group. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Read on for an update on what it's like to use Project Matisse in its current state." John O'Conner reveals Charset Pitfalls in JSP/Servlet Containers: "The J2SE platform has come a long way in internationalization. Some things are just easy...like entering your name in a Swing text field. Unicode prevails within the Java core. Unfortunately, entering non-ASCII text in the J2EE world isn't nearly as easy." In Also in Java Today, Automatic garbage collection doesn't exempt you as a developer from the risks of memory leaks. Retain enough objects in caches, hashtables, and other such structures and you may find yourself memory constrained. According to Staffan Larsen, there are two things you need to do: learn best practices for writing non-leaking code, and employ a tool to find the leaks you do inadvertently create. In the dev2dev article Memory Leaks, Be Gone, he discusses how to write non-leaking code, and how to use the JRockit Management Console to find the leaks that get through. Using business rules can help you develop more agile application; the power of business rules lies in their ability both to separate knowledge from its implementation logic and to be changed without changing source code. The specification for the Java Rule Engine API (JSR 94) defines a Java runtime API for rule engines by providing a simple API to access a rule engine from a Java client. Toward Rule-Based Applications article provides an overview of JSR 94 and discusses how to fit business rule technology into Java technology applications. In Projects and Communities, the Portlet Community home page is highlighting the article Liferay open source portal 3.5 released. Liferay is an open-source portal "designed to deploy portlets that adhere to the Portlet API (JSR 168)." It also notes that Liferay integrates with Spring and has been used for a number of significant deployments. Amy Roh's weblog announces FishEye for GlassFish: "FishEye delivers a unified view of your source repository that provides easy navigation, powerful search, historical reporting..." and that "GlassFish just started to support FishEye for its CVS repository and folks are finding this very useful." 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. Join TogetherPosted by invalidname on July 28, 2005 at 05:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)How to make your project succeed Just because you can easily kick off an open source project, should you? java.net makes it easy to get your project started, providing you with tools like mailing lists, forums, cvs, a web page, etc. But more important than all of that are you, your code, and (later) your community. The open-source landscape is littered with projects that were launched and subsequently abandoned. What happened? Did a hoped-for community not form? Did the project not address an important enough problem? Did the project founder just lose interest and move on? It's critical to get your project off to a good start. The tools can help, but they can only do so much. The rest is up to you. In our Feature Article, Creating and Managing an Open Source Project, Part 1, Michael Nascimento Santos takes these kinds of concerns to heart : "there are many hard decisions to be made, and some of them cannot be undone easily. Besides that, many of these projects fail miserably because of misconceptions people have. The aim of this series of articles is to explain when you should create your own open source project; how to do it, and how to organize it so it succeeds."
In today's Weblogs, James Gosling offers a " Transcendental Meditation": "I got into a conversation with some folks who've been moving a large sophisticated image processing application to Java. They've been getting great performance numbers, much to the surprise of the C crowd in their shop. With one exception..." Programmer Friendly Pages are on Jacob Hookom's mind: "Everyone wants to be a little more designer friendly with web page development, but whoever said that maintaining HTML markup was easy? What will help programmers take back their web pages without offending your designers?" In Rant: I found Subversion immature, Kohsuke Kawaguchi writes: "I just had a frustrating hour or so with Subversion. No, it's not that I have problems with its functionality (well, I actually do, but today isn't time to talk about that.) It's the lack of craftsmanship that bothers me." In Also in Java Today, Artima blogger Eric Armstrong says Messaging is the Right Way to Build a Distributed System: "A message-based design is fundamentally the right way to think about building a distributed system, as opposed to code sharing, remote procedure calls, and the like. This article explains why." He stresses messaging's superiority to RPC-like systems in five important traits: transparency, testability, immunity and evolution, interoperability and evolution, and stateless scalability. A recent News.com article says, "when it was first introduced, Sun Microsystems' Java software for cellular phones was supposed to let developers write a single program that could run on any handset. A half decade later, Sun's Java for cell phones, called the mobile information device profile, or MIDP, is used in half the world's 1.4 billion phones for downloading other bits of software. But writing a program that can run on any handset still isn't possible." The article "Write Once, Run Anywhere" Not Working for Phones says the cause of the problem lies with phone makers and service providers not willing to wait to hammer out a standard, and adding their own mutually-incompatible extensions instead. In Projects and Communities, if you're not involved with a Java User Group, then check out John Reynolds' blog entry Austin (as in Texas) Java Users Group meeting for a taste of what you're missing. He discusses presentations on Matisse, EJB 3.0, annotations, generics, JavaOne impressions, and more. The Java Tools Community has just published their 46th Tools Community Newsletter. The newsletter contains a tip on a German version of the Eclipse tutorial, highlights on various projects, and an announcement that the Pencil project has graduated from the community incubator.
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. Summertime BluesPosted by invalidname on July 27, 2005 at 06:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)Is it the heat, post-JavaOne doldrums, or is everyone on vacation? With apologies of those of you south of the Equator -- when it's already 80°F (26.5°C) at 5:15 AM in Atlanta, mid-winter Sydney looks mighty appealing right now -- these can't help but be the "dog days" of Summer. But it's not just the heat, or the humidity. There's also the fact that a lot of people are taking summer vacations, and projects both commercial and open-source, inevitably slow down when key people are away. Also, everyone who raced to put out a release in a JavaOne timeframe has now returned to work on the next release. Heck, even video games are boring this time of year (naughty language alert... of course, you should probably expect that with Penny Arcade). Contrarian logic says this is a great time to get noticed. Put out a new release of your project now and it'll get a lot more attention than it would, say, in the middle of JavaOne. So, if you're working on a new release, feel free to drop me a line or get your community manager to put it on your community's home page. Oh, and keep cool. In today's Weblogs. David Herron considers MVM from a quality viewpoint: "Chet mentioned in his posting the issue I have, from a Quality perspective that is. Namely: If that MVM process were to crash, it would take down all Java applications running on the system. All." Carla Mott has some advice on Getting started with GlassFish: "I downloaded GlassFish and now what? I added a web application and instructions so that you can get a jump start on trying out new features in GlassFish." In Jody Garnett's XML Standards as ObjectOriented Code Part I, "the relationship between the visitor pattern and XSLT is discussed with respect to GeoAPI and Geotools." In Also in Java Today, Ruby on Rails is a relatively new Web application framework built on the Ruby language. It is billed as an alternative to existing enterprise frameworks, and its goal, in a nutshell, is to make your life -- or at least the Web development aspects of it -- easier. In Ruby on Rails and J2EE: Is there room for both?, Aaron Rustad compares and contrasts some of the key architectural features of Rails and traditional J2EE frameworks. What Is Business Process Modeling? In the article of the same name, "Essential Business Process Modeling" author Mike Havey defines it as "a set of technologies and standards for the design, execution, administration, and monitoring of business processes." But instead of a single monolithic implementation, there exists an ad hoc architecture: "the realization of those sketchy flowcharts drawn by business analysts on whiteboards requires an architecture built on the best of BPM's many standards: BPEL, BPMN, and WS-CDL," and this collection of tools is the focus of his article. In Projects and Communities, the Ninth Jini Community Meeting is being held in Chicago, October 19-20, and a call for papers has been announced. Proposed presentations are due September 6, and can cover Jini-related topics ranging from commercial uses and community projects to technical issues and design philosophy. Members of the Embedded Java Community will find much to think about in Bruce Boyes' weblog entry First Java support for a DSP core?, which discusses the reported porting of a cleanroom JVM to a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Core, and considers whether this could lead to greater standarization, reliability, or portability.
In today's Forums,
philrace considers the gotchas of properties and API's colliding in
Re: Subpixel anti-aliasing: enable it programmatically for Swing components:
"We'll have to be careful not to have too many ways of specifying all these - or at least a clear and simple story on how these are resolved. A system property is certainly hacky compared to an API when you have the option but is nonetheless useful to some class of users (those who aren't updating the program source) and want all their Swing apps to look like the desktop. The requirement here is somewhat different."
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. Trick of the LightPosted by invalidname on July 26, 2005 at 06:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Clearing up Java text at the sub-pixel level When was the last time you used a CRT? Apologies, of course, to anyone still using one of these power-hungry, heat-spewing, desk-monopolizing monsters, but if you can get yourself over to LCD, chances are you'll be happier once you do. Aside from the aforementioned advantages of heat, power and size -- I'm still galled at the beastly 19" and 21" monsters on some of the desktops at the last place I worked -- there is also a certain elegance to the bright, flat LCD screen. As it turns out, they also offer another intriguing advantage. The layout of red, green and blue color bands within each pixel is simple and predictable, which offers an opportunity for some graphic trickery that can be put to good use. In today's Featured Article, Chet Haase looks at how the features of LCD monitors can be used to achieve text anti-aliasing at the sub-pixel level, which improves the appearance and readability of onscreen text beyond what can be achieved with regular anti-aliasing. This feature is coming to Java in Mustang, and in LCD Text: Anti-Aliasing on the Fringe, Chet shows how the effect works. James Gosling wonders if you're Happily Subversive? in today's Weblogs: "I've been spending the last few days helping figure out what we (Sun) should do about version control for all of our source files. I'd love to hear from folks who have used SubVersion (with or without svk) for multi-million-line code bases with thousands of versions." Kirill Grouchnikov has some advice on How to create scalable icons with Java2D: "Next time, instead of bundling multiple differently-sized versions of the same icon with your application, why not create them with Java2D on the fly?" In JDIC@JavaOne 2005 and Deeper Desktop/Java Integration, George Zhang writes: Beginning with a late report of JDIC at JavaOne 2005, this article takes an exploration of missing features in the scope of desktop/Java integration and solicits inputs to prioritize them to enable deeper desktop/Java Integration. In Also in Java Today, JSF Central editor-in-chief Kito D. Mann's A Week at JavaOne: Spotlight on JSF has a thorough recap of the conference's JSF-related sessions, BoF's and pavilion-floor activities. Reflecting back on Java's 10th anniversary and JSF's recent prominence, he writes: "Has it really been that long since I saw the first applet on a web page and printed out the Java Language Specification? It was a long week, but the energy of the 15,000 attendees was fantastic, and JSF was truly the star of the show. It's quite clear that JSF has a bright future." While XQuery was designed for querying large document bases, it serves as a fine tool for transforming simple documents as well. In Java theory and practice: Screen-scraping with XQuery Brian Goetz shows you how XQuery can be used effectively as an HTML screen-scraping engine. XQuery is the perfect tool for you if your goal is simplifying complex pages for display on small screens, or extracting elements from multiple pages to aggregate them together on a home-grown portal, or simply extracting data from Web pages because there is no other programmatic way to get the data. In Projects and Communities, the Mobicents project, the first open-source SLEE implementation, will be the focus of the session Writing VoIP Applications with Service Building Blocks at the Open Source VoIP Communications Summit on September 19, co-located with the Fall VON conference. A nice trick for JavaDesktop Community developers: Joshua Marinacci's weblog entry Using Java2D to build a Stacked Image Editor shows how to build a multi-layer image editor, using Java2D affine transformations as a simple and efficient alternative to doing a genuine 3D effect.
In today's Forums,
Making JAXB just a little more graphical, 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. Won't Get Fooled AgainPosted by invalidname on July 25, 2005 at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Keeping an eye on Java's future Today, I'm going to blog about an interesting discussion on Generics in the forums, though it will take me a bit to get to the item we featured on the front page. Part of the problem is that I couldn't reproduce the post that started the thread, as the publishing system kept trying to turn the generic angle-brace markers (e.g.,
After an example from the JDK source, he continues:
The discussion continues on the merits of Generics, but there's a very good comment that Generics didn't appear in Java overnight. JSR 14 was many years in progress, with any number of opportunities for the community to comment on the proposals. Yet vocal opposition was rarely heard until the final months of the JDK 5 beta and after final release. Like or hate Generics, you have to admit that he's very right on this point. The Add Generic Types to the Java Language JSR started way back in 1999, and if you google for So, what's happening now in Java that you should be aware of? Well, the plans for J2EE 5.0 and Java SE 6.0 were presented at JavaOne and are readily available in many forms: JavaOne slides, the JCP, java.net blogs that spell out the major pieces of Mustang, or, for that matter, the Mustang source-drops on java.net. You don't have to like every change that comes with the next version of Java, but if you get involved now, you have the opportunity to make it better. At the very least, if you take a look now, you won't be surprised later.
Continuing the discussion in today's Forums,
In this week's Spotlight: "The Mobicents project offers the first open-source certified implementation of JAIN SLEE 1.0, which "brings to telecom application developers what J2EE brings to Web and Enterprise application developers." JAIN SLEE allows popular building blocks such as SIP to be plugged into a framework as resource adapters. It also enables the composition of Service Building Blocks (SBB's) for call control, billing, administration and more. Mobicents is also applicable to problem domains requiring high volume, low latency signalling, including financial trading and online gaming." In today's Weblogs, Tim Boudreau discusses Why I'm Proud of the NetBeans Community Awards: "A couple weeks ago, at NetBeans Day in San Francisco, we gave out awards for outstanding contribution to the community. The winners got a framed Duke poster...and a really nice workstation... " John Reynolds wonders about Faces and Flash: "I came across an announcement for IBM's Faces for Laszlo this morning. I haven't had time to delve into the details, but my impression is that they're "filling in" some of the missing Rich Internet Application pieces that I've wanted for a long time." John O'Conner announces a Programmer's Retirement: "Every profession has its share of workers who continue past their prime years of productivity. Maybe you've seen one...the overweight police officer who looks more at home in a Crispy Creme shop than in his cruiser. I'm thinking software engineers have to 'throw in the towel' sometime before 40...before the ol' brain loses too many working cells." In Also in Java Today, "Have you ever wondered why there are six types of Transaction demarcation attributes (NotSupported, Required, Supports, RequiresNew, Mandatory, and Never) supported in beans using container-managed transactions (CMT), but if you're using bean-managed transactions (BMT), the only functionality the EJB spec provides is to begin and commit/roll back transactions via the UserTransaction interface?" This question concerned Dmitri Maximovich, since it meant that BMT beans couldn't suspend and resume transactions. Or can they? In Bean-Managed Transaction Suspension in J2EE, he shows how different J2EE servers expose the Java Transaction API's TransactionManager, which offers suspend and resume functionality to your EJB's. Many developers need to capture transaction times for high-volume transactional systems, but have avoided using Java's System.currentTimeMillis() due to rumors of poor performance. In Bring Java's System.currentTimeMillis() Back into the Fold for Transaction Monitoring Javid Jamae shows why currentTimeMillis() has gotten a bad rap. In Projects and Communities, the Portlets Community home page is hosting an online excerpt (PDF, 828 KB) from the book Building Portals with the Java Portlet API by Jeff Linwood and Dave Minter, including complete chapters introducing the portlet API, portlet life cycles, and portlet packaging and deployment descriptors. Bruce Boyes' weblog entry Real Soon Now: mesh network standards reports on the mesh network standardization process, which will allow "practical distributed control and communication applications utilizing standardized wireless communications." 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. What Do You Want from Life?Posted by invalidname on July 22, 2005 at 04:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)The many motivations of Java One of the obvious yet seldom-appreciated facets of dealing with other members in the Java community is that we're not all in this for the same reasons. When open-source can be as passionate as an evangelical crusade or as mundane as a day-job -- and may literally be both -- it's not a safe bet that you're coding Java applications in the same way and for the same reasons as the next guy or gal over. Did you get started because you wanted to write apps for Windows users without actually writing Windows apps per se? Did you join in because there was so much activity in the Java community? Or was it an online job advertisement (or a hundred of them) that called your attention to Java? Wrapping up in the form of a big question: why are we doing this? Of course, when we stumble over big questions in our editorial chats, we often interject "that should be a poll!" So, today's java.net poll asks "What do you like most about being a Java developer?" Cast your voice on the front page, then visit the results page to join in the discussion. In today's Weblogs. Scott Ellsworth argues Generics considered keen: "Ken Arnold makes a good case for generics being poorly thought out. I take issue, though, with the claim that we should avoid them." Malcolm Davis's JavaOne postmortem notes that "The pdf's for JavaOne technical sessions are now available for download. However, there is more to JavaOne than technical sessions, including the BOF, Pavilion, and people." Some ideas on Cleaning up an MBean when its resource dies from Eamonn McManus: "A frequent way of using MBeans is to connect an MBean to another Java object that represents the resource being managed. When that resource goes away, we want the MBean to go away too. One way to achieve that is to create a "weak" MBean that detects when the resource is no longer referenced. That's not necessarily the best way." In Also in Java Today, with a tip of the hat to Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky", Hacknot's Beware The GUI Builder considers, and ultimately rejects, the appeal of graphic applications to help build GUI's: "Attempting to use them in the prescribed manner is generally a bad idea. They shield the programmer from coding details that they must eventually conquer anyway, introduce an unnecessary tool dependency into the development cycle, and discourage re-use." DOM, SAX, StAX? Don't entirely care? Chances are you already know about JAXP, the Java API for XML Processing. Rahul Srivastava says "JAXP is a lightweight API to process XML documents by being agnostic of the underlying XML processor, which are pluggable," and in the XML.com article The Evolution of JAXP, he shows off the many tasks to which JAXP can be applied. In Projects and Communities, Will Iverson's weblog entry Comments on Ajax and Web Frameworks, collects comments from developers using web frameworks and/or AJAX to build their applications. The feedback includes requests for an AJAX/JavaScript abstraction, and an appropriate component framework. A success story from the JXTA Community: In a post to the JXTA dev list, Stephen Montgomery describes the success of the Chinook platform. Chinook is an open-source, peer-to-peer platform for bioinformatics analysis. The platform was recently featured in Nature Methods, a journal for life sciences and chemistry.
In today's Forums,
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. Strung Out on StringsPosted by invalidname on July 21, 2005 at 07:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Rethinking how to teach programming
For some time, it's been clear that Java is not the most straightforward thing to teach. Specifically, how can you stress object orientation and then tell students the first thing they have to write is the procedural One of these environments is the subject of today's Feature Article. In Java Tech: The Sweet Song of the BlueJ, Part 1, Jeff Friesen takes an initial look at BlueJ, an educational development environment. He says: BlueJ is easy to use; students can begin working with BlueJ without needing a lengthy introduction to the environment. BlueJ lets students visually and interactively create classes and interconnect them. Students can then instantiate objects from those classes, invoke methods, specify arguments to those methods via dialogs, view return values via dialogs, and visually inspect object state. This product is freely available, a benefit to students who cannot afford costly licenses (BlueJ cannot be sold for profit). Joshua Marinacci is wowed by Fold N' Drop in today's Weblogs: "This has to be one of the coolest frame hacks I've run across. I also think this is a great use of a gestural interface techniques. The idea is that you can fold windows down to access what is behind them." Brian Leonard asks Are there GlassFish in Prague, and can you buy them on eBay?, explaining: "I'm talking about Project GlassFish. It has relevance to Prague because it was during our team trip there in May that I worked feverishly to ensure the project didn't go live without tools support - a necessity to any successful project, right? " Bob Lee has a question about Package Scoping And Unit Testing: Why don't more programmers use package-private scope? Package scoping can ease testing without cluttering your public API." In Also in Java Today, Artima blogger Eric Armstrong writes: "Now that I've gotten myself onto the Groovy mailing list, I'm getting involved in language discussions again. I love those. The axe I generally grind in those discussions is readability. To me, that is an overlooked strength of the Java language that goes a long way towards explaining its popularity as a vehicle for production applications and for teaching. A recent discussion reminded me of a trick I use to make method calls more readable in Java--which can become something of a problem when the list of parameters contains booleans and numeric primitives." In Readable Method Calls in Java, he shows how this trick works. Thanks to JDBC, it's possible to bridge OpenOffice.org to a database. In Hooking OOo to MySQL, Rob Reilly writes: "by combining the power of these two open source applications you can do things like generating personalized sales letters from the customer data stored on your servers. Let's walk through the process using OOo's database wizard." In Projects and
Communities,
the Mac Java Community home page is linking to Apple The JavaDesktop page is publicizing a "Swing Sighting": Kinabaloo Software makes a standalone javadoc viewer called Java Guru, which is also available as part of their TJI IDE. Kinabaloo folks say: "Java Guru provides a fast and versatile way to access the Java API and API documentation... suitable for beginners and advanced users alike."
In today's Forums,
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. Piece by PiecePosted by invalidname on July 20, 2005 at 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)The building blocks of Mustang First off, your eyes / glasses / contact lenses are not fooling you: the colors on java.net have changed. The new look is meant to help distinguish java.net as an independent site, which it is, as well as be attractive in its own right. Let us know what you think in the talkbacks below. Mustang isn't due until the third quarter of next year, but it's decision time for what's going into this next rev of the Java Standard Edition. Surely everyone has his or her own set of longed-for JSR's (oh, wherefore art thou, JSR 80: Java USB API?), while keeping in mind the point, often made on the forums, that Java SE is already very big and adding more API's to it has a significant cost. Today's big news from the JDK Community is that the set of component JSR's to appear in Java SE 6 (Mustang) has been selected. They're listed in Mark Reinhold's weblog entry Mustang Component JSR's, which has links to each of the JSR's selected by the expert group, along with a brief discussion of how this list differs from early proposals. These changes show why some web services API's made the cut, and the Smart Card I/O API (JSR 268) didn't. Also in Projects and Communities, Slides are now available (in PDF) for presentations offered at the Jini(TM) Technology: An SOA Delivering Java Dynamic Networking event, co-sponsored by Sun and the NYJavaSIG. Topics include Jini marketing, JavaSpaces, the Jini Community, and Jini as an SOA architecture. In today's Weblogs. David Herron talks about Accessibility for test automation: "I've spent more than a few brain cycles thinking about GUI test automation. It's been so much that at times I've been worried about my sanity - how many people do you know daydream about the minute details of GUI interactions, looking for ways to drive the interaction by a program?" Vikram Goyal blogs on MIDP + DoJa = Mojo for Sun?: "NTT DoCoMo and Sun combine to update NTT's DoJa Java platform. Why, you may ask. Why not upgrade DoJa to MIDP 2.0 instead, rather than creating a separate breed of the J2ME platform? Figuring out Native XML support in Dolphin is the topic of Kirill Grouchnikov's latest blog entry: "One of the big changes tentatively proposed for Dolphin is native XML support in the language. What do we have now, what can we expect and what would you like to see?" In Also in Java Today, JUnit is great, but it has its limits for distributed programming. Specifically, it's meant to run in one JVM on one machine--not the best thing for verifying behavior of complex systems on multiple machines, or for automating testing across several platforms. However, the Pisces project improves this situation by creating a distributed environment for JUnit testing. In Taking JUnit Out of the Box, Amir Shevat introduces Pisces and shows how to put it to work for you. "Read almost any software developer journal or website and we're told that responsible developers write test cases. If those developers are Java developers then, most likely, they use JUnit for those test cases. JUnit is probably the oldest and certainly the most popular Java-based testing framework around. However, other frameworks have been built to address various faults and deficiencies with JUnit." Justin Lee's Test Framework Comparison introduces and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of JUnit 3.x, JTiger, and TestNG.
In today's Forums,
Support for named code blocks is an idea advocated by 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. Only the Strong SurvivePosted by invalidname on July 19, 2005 at 07:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Where is AI leading us? In his previous series, "The Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper" (parts 1, 2, and 3), Max Goff looked at two professions of the old world, one of which has perished while the other flourished. Now he's taking a look to the future of Artificial Intelligence in the form of two new personalities, the creative and intrinsically human "artisan", and the superior artificial intelligence that humanity seems destined to create, the "artilect". The latter could the end-product of what he sees as a new era in AI: What makes this phase "new?" Two characteristics epitomize the new phase in AI; the two terms in question also happen to serve as the juxtaposed entities in the title of this series: the artisan and the artilect. The artisan-like characteristics of this new phase in AI represent the unique semiotic skills of humanity, which form the basis for our claim to intelligence itself. It is the "engineering is the art of the possible" school of craftsmanship, which has taken raw learning and turned it into commerce. Indeed, all commercial instantiations of AI in the past decade have been enabled by the artisan component of the human complex. To now seed AI itself with the creative essence of homo sapiens clearly marks the beginning of a remarkable new phase. In today's Feature Article, The Artisan and the Artilect, Part 1 he examines the argument that mankind is compelled to create an intelligence greater than its own, where this may lead, and whether we'll have a place in our own future. In today's Weblogs, James Gosling looks at what happens when Moore's Law meets Pricing: "There's a great article in the Economist this month about the current mess that's happening in software pricing. Moore's law's predictions about the number of transistors on a chip look like they'll continue to hold for quite a while, but we're quickly losing the ability to translate that into clock rate." In STR-Crazier: Performance Improvements in Mustang, Chris Campbell says "Performance of the OpenGL-based Java2D pipeline has improved considerably in recent Mustang builds... And there's still room for improvement. (Pretty chart included...)" Jim Driscoll explains Open Sourcing the Rest of App Server: "As you know, we've open sourced Sun's AS PE. Recently, some people have taken us to task on not doing the rest of it too. Leaving aside the 'geez, are we ever going to not get flack' factor, I thought I'd post this..." In Also in Java Today, the JavaSpaces technology is a high-level tool for building distributed applications, and it can also be used as a coordination tool. A marked departure from classic distributed models that rely on message passing or RMI, the JavaSpaces model views a distributed application as a collection of processes that cooperate through the flow of objects into and out of one or more spaces. In Getting Started With JavaSpaces Technology, you'll learn how JavaSpaces programming differs from other kinds of distributed application development, and how to get started developing JavaSpaces applications. Despite its name, the Web browser is good for more than just browsing the Web. More and more projects use the browser as a secondary or, in many cases, primary means of communicating with the program. The main drawback of this approach is that it requires the user to configure and maintain his own Web server, or else requires the program to come bundled with a Web server. Jetty, a small open source Web server written entirely in Java, is simple for both programmers and users, making it a good choice for bundled Web server. The NewsForge article Jetty and the future of browser-based applications offers a simple introduction to writing Java or XML code to serve up content. In Projects and Communities, The Java Games Community project JInput offers a pure-Java, platform-independent API for game controller discovery and polled input. It can handle arbitrary controllers and returns both human and machine understandable descriptions of the inputs available. A recent weblog by Marina Sum, Worth a look: AJAX technology, discusses a recent article on using AJAX with portals, and an interview which talks about adapting Sun Java Studio Creator to support AJAX.
In today's Forums,
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. C's A Beauty(?)Posted by invalidname on July 18, 2005 at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Re-appreciating Java style and conventions So I'm working on a project that will eventually be open-sourced here on java.net if I can get the time to get enough interesting code working... no, I don't want to give away too much yet... and it involves working with straight C, so I can expose some stuff to Java. Having worked only in Java for eight years, and having not done straight C since college, this is a heck of a wake up call. Everything that I'm used to doing right, doing the Java way, isn't there. For example: let's say you have several lines of code, each of which may fail for various reasons. In Java, the Yuck. And did I mention the concept of passing an empty pointer as a parameter to a function, and looking at the contents of that pointer after the call? Yep. After all, it can't return you a pointer -- the ability to return a value is already taken, by the error handling (see above). So you mix inputs and outputs in your parameter list, and if you're a Java programmer, you cringe a little bit. Anyways, this isn't to bash C -- it's fast, fast, fast, after all, and a lingua franca of code. But I'm going to be really happy when I only see these calls from the Java side of the bridge. This week's Spotlight is on the Java Tools Projects Directory, which "seeks to provide an easy way to discover the tools that belong to the Java Tools Community, providing the ability to search for tools by description keywords or related topics. Tools are also classified under various categories depending on status, topic, etc., and include a link through which you can check the RSS feeds of projects directly with your browser or other RSS client." In today's Weblogs. Kirill Grouchnikov wonders Porting small library from Java 5.0 to Java 1.4 - could it be any harder?: Last evening I set out to port one of my (rather small) libraries from Java 5.0 to Java 1.4. Twenty four hours later - a lot of frustration, a lot of uncontrolled eyebrow pluckings, and a day well spent. Jody Garnett has a Mad Metadata Plan: "The use of Extensible-Interface pattern for an origional take on the metadata problem plaguing the spatial world (see EOGEO for background). Thanks to those at OSG'05 for the inspiration. Now if only someone will pay me to solve this problem." A reply to Greg Murray in Simon Brown's I have Servlets: "In Got Servlets?, Greg is asking what we'd like to see in the next major revision of the Java Servlets specification. In no particular order, here are my initial thoughts." In Also in Java Today, Many web applications allow the user to upload a file from their local storage via a browser interface, but this common task isn't supported by default in JavaServer Faces. Fortunately, several add-ons like Apache Commons File Upload and Apache MyFaces provide this functionality to JSF developers. In Upload Files with JSF and MyFaces, Andrei Cioroianu demonstrates this with a JSF-based application that accepts and manipulates an uploaded file. In part five of an interview series with Artima's Bill Venners, Design Patterns co-author Erich Gamma talks about Eclipse's Culture of Shipping: "In software, having cool ideas is nice, but shipping them is what counts. For us it only counts if you have shipped the thing. That's really the mindset we have. And given that you focus on shipping, we never want to be in a mode of always being two years away from shipping. You need to have a short-term deliverable. You also plan, decide and act with this mindset. You are very risk- aware -- you know what you can do so you can still ship on time with quality." In Projects and Communities, Daniel Brookshier's blog entry New: 3D Math, Viet Nam eLearning, Vocabulary & Open Grade Book in Global Education & Learning Community highlights four new projects in the GELC, submitted from different parts of the world. The Web Services and XML Community project GT2WMS is an implementation of the Open GIS Consortium's Web Map Service (WMS) specification, implemented using GeoTools version 2. This allows web services to provide geographic maps in response to simple HTTP requests.
In today's Forums,
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. Oh Yeah!Posted by invalidname on July 15, 2005 at 05:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)Perl? Java? Yes! Perl and Java seem like unlikely bedfellows. If you measure lines of code, I think Java gets interesting right about the point that Perl stops being manageable. As always with these generalizations, your mileage may vary. Still, that's one of the reasons we have many different languages, each with their own sweet spots of functionality. But why not have the best of both worlds? Rather than using Java's rather ornate regular expressions package, sometimes you do just want to throw down one or two lines of Perl code and be done with it, and then be able to continue with your Java work. This is what led Raphael Mudge to create Sleep, a Perl-like language implemented in and with tight ties to Java. In the Feature Article, Perl on Java? An Introduction to the Sleep Language, he writes: "Perl is an incredibly powerful language for text and data processing. Perl excels at taking input, extracting stuff from it, chewing it up several hundred times, and finally, outputting the mess however the programmer would like. Perl is often referred to as the duct tape of the internet. This is due to its many uses as a "glue"-type language." He goes on to show how Sleep can provide this type of "glue" for disparate parts of your Java work. Jim Driscoll addresses the Newest Concern on Sun's Open Source Strategy in today's Weblogs. "OK, there's a new concern that a few people raised about Sun's Open Source strategy - the Joint Copyright assignment. I'll try to explain why its not a Sun Evil Plot(tm), and why we're doing what we're doing. I'll also give other examples in industry of folks who are doing the same thing, and explain why." Kohsuke Kawaguchi has some advice for Invoking XJC from command line: "The JAXB RI distribution ships with xjc.sh and xjc.bat for invoking XJC from a command prompt. JWSDP also has xjc.sh and xjc.bat, but their contents are different. I'm sure these files are there for a reason, but personally, I hate those scripts. There's easier way to invoke XJC from command-line." Raising interest in J2ME? Vikram Goyal says "it will only take one well thought, commercially successful, mainstream application that will help lift the J2ME market. I am sure that the day is not too far." In Also in Java Today , relational databases return rows, object databases return objects. But what if a database returned XML? Alexander Prokhorenko and Olexiy Prokhorenko write: "although XML-oriented databases are already on the market, they are not yet ubiquitous. Keeping in mind the popularity of XML, the developers of relational databases are moving forward by adding XML compatibility to their products." In the dev2dev feature XML as a Bridge between SQL and Web Applications, they show how this approach can be made to work, and the advantages of taking this XML and producing dynamic web pages by simply applying XSL to it. "Similarly to how XML became the well-known standard adapted by many software vendors for data exchange, Resource Description Framework (RDF) is going in the same direction for describing and interchanging metadata." The article Easily maintain RDF metadata models explains how to use custom utilities developed with the Jena RDF API for managing RDF models stored in either a relational database or a file. In Projects and Communities, the Open Language Tools are a set of translation tools that aim to make the task of translating software and documentation a lot easier. Initially, they comprise of a full-featured XLIFF Translation Editor and a set of XLIFF file-filters for a number of documentation and software file formats. One limitation of java.lang.reflect.Proxy is that it can only accept interfaces. The Dunamis framework uses a dynamic delegation pattern to provide Proxy-like behavior to abstract and concrete classes. This Patterns Community project is described further in an ONJava article.
In today's Forums,
The new java.net poll asks "Which Java platform are you personally most interested in?" Cast your vote on the front page, then join the discussion on the results page. 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. For Your PleasurePosted by invalidname on July 14, 2005 at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Wide-open feedback channels Not every feature request can be phrased as, well, a "feature request". If everything has to go through the SDN Bug Database, then it has to be condensed down to a specific report or request. Sometimes, what you know is the ultimate functionality you want, or a feel for what needs to be improved, and you as a requester shouldn't be responsible for phrasing just how it should be accomplished. It takes a while to get from "somehow reflection and deployment descriptors don't really do it for me" to something like the flexible annotation feature that appeared in J2SE 5.0. What's missing, I think, is an opportunity for discussion, a chance to throw out some ideas, build on the good parts, knock down the bad parts, etc. That's one place where java.net can help. The forums site has forums on Mustang (for discussing "major features, such as language enhancements, new packages, or modifications to existing ones"), and feedback forums for both Mustang snapshots and the JDK in general. Moreover, many of our bloggers work on Java and its various extensions, and have been generous with their time and accessibility. Two examples of that can be found in today's Weblogs. In Got Servlets?, Greg Murray lists some of the suggestions currently on the table (multipart support, improved security, self-registration, improved security, annotation support), and adds "As the Servlet specification lead I would also like to invite suggestions from the community at large. How are you using Servlets? Where do you want them to go?" Meanwhile, Eamonn McManus, technical lead of the JMX team, writes about JavaOne feedback about JMX technology: "I'm back from JavaOne, which was great. One of the reasons it was great was that I got a huge amount of feedback about what people would like to see in future versions of the JMX API." Also in today's Weblogs, James Gosling considers some of the catapult- and trebuchet-inspired devices used in this year's JavaOne t-shirt hurling contest and concludes Leonardo thought of it first... In Also in Java Today: Have you started enough projects to find yourself repeating the same steps in setting up Ant tasks for building/packaging/deploying your code/documentation/automated testing/etc.? Do you really need to invent the wheel again, and are you even reinventing it the best way? Maven offers a complete project-building environment to get you up and running faster, letting you code more and administer less. In the PDF excerpt Maven Jump-Start, the first chapter of "Maven: A Developer's Notebook," Vincent Massol and Timothy M. O'Brien show you how to install Maven, kick off your first build, and start customizing it to suit your needs. J2ME and PHP are both powerful technologies used to develop applications for mobile devices and Web applications, respectively. In Obtaining Wireless News with J2ME and PHP, Alessandro Lacava shows how to make them work together by developing a simple and useful application that retrieves the latest news from the Web and displays it on a mobile device. In Projects and Communities, Arun Gupta's weblog entry JWSDP 1.6 - doclit sample offers helpful guidance to members of the Java Web Services & XML Community by taking the HelloWorld example from JWSDP 1.6 and converting it from an rpc/encoded WSDL to doc/literal. If AWT, Swing, and SWT aren't enough, developers of Java GUI's for Linux have another option: working directly with GNOME. The article Developing GNOME Applications with Java shows you how to load GNOME libraries into Java and build GUI's with XML markup instead of code.
In today's Forums,
In today's java.net News Headlines : | |