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You Can't Always Get What You Want

Posted by editor on August 9, 2005 at 3:49 AM PDT

But if you try an alternate spelling sometime...

Some of the nicest and most natural elements of a human-computer interface can be quite hard to pull off. Consider the now-common example of the search engine's "Did you mean" feature, which catches a misspelling (or just a noticably low number/quality of hits), and proposes an alternate spelling that may generate more search results.

On the one hand, this is perfectly natural. If you send me an e-mail wanting to write an article about "Jave", I'm going to assume you mean "Java" (though I'll probably run a Google search for "Jave" anyways, just in case that's a new term I'm not familiar with). From the search engine's point of view, it needs to know not only what's in the search index, but also how to move around parts of search terms to maximize the number of results and maximize the relevance of those results. It's one of those things that comes naturally to the human mind, and is curiously tricky to get right in code.

Fortunately, there's help. In today's
Feature Article, Tom White asks
Did You Mean: Lucene?. He shows how to use the Lucene search engine and an expansion spell-checker API to offer "did you mean" functionality with a surprisingly compact amount of powerful code.

In today's Weblogs.

Tim Boudreau reveals some NetBeans tweaks you've probably never heard of: "In its rich history, NetBeans has grown various command-line options that affect how some things work or look. I thought I'd share some useful ones..."

Bhakti Mehta notes that
JAXB 2.0 and JAX-WS 2.0 are a part of Mustang (JDK 6.0):
"To enable reasonable support for ease of development for the web services stack, JAXB 2.0 and JAX-WS 2.0 are now a part of the JSE 6.0 platform."

Starbucks and JavaServer Faces offers an analogy from Jacob Hookom:
"I just got back from a trip out to Boston. Being away from home and our cappuccino maker, I found myself standing in line at Starbucks far too many times-- listening to all kinds of orders for 'coffee'."

In Also in
Java Today ,
"Mock objects have been a key technique for enabling automated unit testing of object-oriented software. However, when we expand the scope of testing into the realm of distributed systems, unique problems arise from the increased complexity." In Mock Objects and Distributed Testing, Brian Gilstrap reviews mock objects and discusses some of the problems that arise when extending the use of mock objects to distributed systems. He also offers some approaches that can help in managing the complexity.

Ready to take a Java enabled device out for a spin? "Siemens VDO Automotive, in conjunction with BMW, has enabled the BMW 7, 6, and 5 series of cars with its Top Level Architecture (TLA), a Java technology-based software platform that provides for the seamless addition and integration of location-based services, web services, and multimedia functionality throughout the vehicle's entire life cycle." The article The Network on Wheels -- Java Developers, Start Your Programming Engines! looks at the architecture of this Java platform and what kinds of applications can run on it.

In Projects and
Communities,
the Java Web Services & XML Community project XHTML Transcoder quickly converts broken HTML into spec-compliant XHTML. Among the fixes it applies are lower-casing tags and attributes, correcting tag nesting order, terminating unclosed elements, and terminating empty tags... while maintaining other languages in the code like JSP.

Public API's are a big part of the web's future... and so are good tools. In Running the Amazon Web Services Sample Application In NetBeans, Brian Leonard shows how to take an Amazon-provided sample application use it with NetBeans. Along with setting up NetBeans and building the application, he also shows how to use the debugger to step through problematic code.

In today's Forums, marcomanno is concerned about
Single Threaded Rendering and D3D, Windows Vista and OpenGL:
"After reading about OpenGL being slower and limited to version 1.4 and being implemented using DirectX in Windows Vista I'm a bit worried about the usefullness of Single Threaded Rendering using OGL under Windows. I think it is essential to implement it using D3D as soon as possible. When do you plan to implement STR for D3D."

biehl has
Questions about silliness(?) in the Java API's:
"Why (oh why), is there a TimeUnit.SECOND.sleep(500), and not Thread.sleep(TimeUnit.SECOND, 500) - or even better Thread.getCurrentThread().sleep(TimeUnit.SECOND, 500) Why (oh, why), is InetAddress.getByAddress on byte's (and not on shorts - or anything else for which >127 is a valid value) and why is it not a vararg - InetAddress.getByAddress(Short... bytes)"

In today's java.net
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But if you try an alternate spelling sometime...

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