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You Can't Get What You Want ('Til You Know What You Want)

Posted by editor on September 9, 2005 at 8:46 AM PDT

EBay sniping, now with Java Desktop power

My theory is that one of the reasons desktop Java hasn't lived up to the lofty expectations is that web applciations stole a lot of their thunder. While the web app suffers from a far worse GUI (dicey AJAX gambits notwithstanding), it shares the advantage of being cross-platform, and can be installed an administered from a central location.

However, while the browser is fine for working with fairly static data, it's lousy at handling dynamic data. This may be an opportunity for Java: browsers are ill-suited for working with things like media, while Java can easily handle dynamic data and cross platforms easily.

Another form of dynamic data I hadn't considered is a live event, such as an eBay auction. But Roger Brinkley has, and he has a tale of success in his weblog JBidWatcher snipes. Roger describes himself as an eBay sniper: "Those ebay buyers that step in at the absolute last second and take the bid away from perspective bidders." He recently discovered a J2SE GUI application that offers far more power than just hitting the eBay web page:

Then I found JBidWatcher. JBidWatcher is a free open source project currently developed on Source Forge (sigh). As the JavaDesktp Community Leader it had immediate appeal. It was FREE, it was a Java client, I could run it on my own machine(s), it was FREE.

Read on for Roger's tales of success with JBidWatcher, and a follow-up comment from the author of the application.

Also in today's Weblogs.
Jacob Hookom has an
ADF RoaR:
"I've been reading a few blog entries about RoR presentations with all of the visual bells and whistles in relation to AJAX. I dug into the mechanics of it, asked around, and found a very large gem in the process."

In
Quick tabbedpane switching w/o sacrifying mnemonics, Joerg Plewe writes:
"Having JTabbedPanes with many tabs can be awkward concerning keyboard usage. Per-tab mnemonics are not really an option because they really limit the number of available mnemonics for the tabs own valuable content! The TabSwitcher utility can help!"

In Also in
Java Today,

"There are two challenges to making smart bug decisions: first,
understanding how to make good bug-fix decisions; and second, creating and
following a process that makes it easy to stick to those decisions when
the pressure is high." With this "survival kit," Scott Berkun hopes to
help you understand bug and RFE triage, in the article How to Decide What Bugs to Fix When, Part 1.

"Just as design patterns provide a way to communicate concisely about desired software practices, antipatterns provide the equivalent advantages for communicating undesirable practices." In An Introduction to Antipatterns in Java Applications, Puneet Sangal shows how some of these common bad practices manifest themselves in J2SE and J2EE code.

The latest java.net Poll asks "When do you think you'll write your last line of Java code?" Cast your vote on the front page, then check out the results page for discussion and commentary.

In Projects and
Communities,
the Java Enterprise Community home page is spotlighting tgcalendar, a project in the community's incubator. tgcalendar is a JSP tag library to display calendars on web pages. It supports month-by-month navigation, event links, multi-day events, multiple events on one day, CSS style customization, and more.

On Friday, Sept. 9, from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM PDT (1500-2300 UTC), the JXTA developer teams will hold an online chat devoted to the upcoming JXTA-C, JXME, and JXTA Java releases, including the recently-announced 2.3.5 beta. The chat will use MyJXTA2 which you can download or launch with Web Start.

In today's Forums,
amyroh has good news in
Re: Newbie question: How can I be authorised to download GlassFish?:
"Many folks encountered permission error (as fyang1024 did) although 'accept the CDDL' link was highlighted in yellow, etc. We were finally able to get rid of click-through license step so users can download/checkout binaries and sources without getting permission error. Hope this helps!"

In Re: FileSystemWatcher, mthornton writes:
"I notice that FAM only works one level deep. In other words you don't get notified of changes in subdirectories (if a file in an immediate subdirectory changes, you get a hint in that the subdirectory is notified as having changed). By contrast FileSystemWatcher can provide notification of changes in an entire directory tree."

In today's java.net
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EBay sniping, now with Java Desktop power

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