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Posted by editor on August 11, 2005 at 4:07 AM PDT

From web link to double-clickable

Ten years ago, it would have been hard to imagine that Java would be a huge success without Java desktop applications gaining significant traction. Working with the AWT and (later) JavaBeans, it seemed like we'd be writing cross-platform GUI's, replacing the platform-dependent applications that required expensive and difficult ports (or, more often, just writing apps for one platform).

The reasons for this situation are varied -- the rise of the web application, the particulars of the various GUI toolkits, etc. -- but one significant blocker has been the lack of a rich deployment model. From day one, the designated way to launch a Java SE application has been some variant of java ClassName as a command-line argument. Aside from implying that all platforms have command lines (the "classic" Mac OS didn't!), that says nothing about double-clickability, icons, versioning, document association, etc., to say nothing about figuring out whether Java is even available on the machine, and how to install it if it isn't.

One option to provide some of this is Java Web Start. As columnist Joshua Marinacci writes in our Feature Article, Java Sketchbook: Getting Started with Java Web Start:

Java Web Start (JWS) is a technology that lets you deploy a desktop Java application directly from a web page. It provides security, safety, and automatic updates when you roll out new versions. It will even give your program an icon on the desktop. In short, Java Web Start gives you the power of a desktop app with the ease of deployment users expect from a web app.

In part one of his Web Start series, he shows the basics of providing an application via JWS. Part two will cover security, optimization, and polish.

Richard Bair has an update on SwingLabs - Direction and Status in today's Weblogs:

"I often get asked about SwingLabs -- what is it? When will it be stable? How do I get the sources? Who's contributing? What will it contain? In this entry I give a brief overview and attempt to describe our direction and status as a project."

Kohsuke Kawaguchi says We deserve a better proxy support!: "Nowadays many Java tools need to access HTTP resources, yet their support for proxies are pathetic. We the Java developers deserve better!"

In Open Source for Capitalists, Part 1 - Free prize inside Daniel Brookshier writes: "How do you make money from open source? Daniel Brookshier starts a journey to answer this question with an idea called: Free Prize Inside."

In Projects and
Communities,
the Java Specification Requests Community notes that JSR 121: Application Isolation API Specification has reached Final Draft stage. "This is an API for initiating and controlling computations isolated from each other to varying degrees. Some API semantics are similar to those of ThreadGroup.

The Mac Java Community notes the article What Is NeoOffice/J (and Can It Replace MS Office), which introduces this Mac variant of OpenOffice.org that uses Java to handle its UI. The article also includes an interview with lead developer Patrick Luby, who discusses the effects of Apple's Intel migration and the end of Cocoa-Java.

In Also in
Java Today ,
the Work Manager API offers a solution for performing parallel processing directly within a managed environment. You can leverage this new offering to implement parallel processing within a J2EE container. In The Work Manager API: Parallel Processing Within a J2EE Container, Rahul Tyagi, writes "with the Work Manager API, developers can design robust applications for executing tasks in parallel, listen to work lifecycle events, and add the dependency of task completion to other tasks."

In a blog entry on Artima, Bruce Eckel asks What Is Consulting? "Lots of people that call themselves consultants do things that I would not personally consider consulting. I think consulting is when you have some kind of special expertise -- come by through hard struggle and learning -- that you transfer to a group of people, in a relatively short period of time, and in a way that is unique for that group. I also think that consulting involves addressing particular issues faced by that group." As he notes, though, this is not necessarily how consulting is defined or practiced by many in the industry

In today's Forums, linuxhippy is concerned about
Fast (applet) startup time
On my windows-box applets that start up with Tiger in 11s take more than 23s on Mustang which is a total regression (both are warm starts) which is than twice as long. I hope this will become better in future - although I understand that for mustang the goals are for now different than providing fast startup I hope this will at least not get worse than Tiger.

Meanwhile, wahjava notes problems with
Support for Unicode in Mustang:
"I've pointed out some of the Unicode problems in J2SE 6.0 (downloaded around February 2005). We can't pass Unicode (Wide Character) command-line arguments to the java launcher. We can't pass Unicode (Wide Character) command-line arguments to the processes launched by java (e.g. through java.lang.ProcessBuilder class). Actually, the problem is due to the portability layer created for Unix/Windows stuff. e.g. In Unix (esp. Linux), Unicode command line arguments are passed as UTF-8 whereas in Windows, passed as UTF-16 characters."

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