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Telegraph Road

Posted by editor on February 6, 2006 at 8:18 AM PST


Help light up java.net

I caught the last quarter of the Super Bowl yesterday -- having kids who know how to work the remote has cut deeply into my TV viewing -- and in a helicopter shot of my former hometown of Detroit, I could point out which towers of the Renaissance Center I'd worked in on summer jobs in high school and college, and how I'd drive down Jefferson Ave., under Cobo Hall, to get there.

I could also point out numerous towers just west of the financial district that were entirely dark. The fact remains that Detroit has lost so much population and so much economic vitality so fast, that there are full-blown towers on the city skyline that are completely vacant and abandoned. In fact, in its promotional effort to get the Super Bowl in Detroit for this year, organizers infamously photoshopped lights into these abandoned towers on skyline pictures, presumably hoping to make the city look more vital than it is.

I bring this up by way of analogy. I'd be ignoring a coal pile in a ballroom to say that we don't have a few vacancies of our own on java.net. There are some community pages that might as well be blank, given that they haven't been updated in ages. The thing is, are these really abandoned communities, or abandoned pages? Some of them have active projects that could probably benefit from some visibility.

So, instead of faking it, help us find the activity that's really out there. If you have a project you want featured on the front page's Projects and
Communities or Spotlight sections, send me an e-mail (cadamson [at] oreilly.com), or visit the Publicize Your Project page. After all, it's more useful to shine a light than curse the darkness. Thanks.

In Projects and
Communities,
the Web Services and XML Community home page is featuring the latest "XML Annoyances" column from Micah Dubinko: The Power of No. "XML itself is based on the Power of No: XML imposes a level of structure beyond plain text. The vast majority of random strings of characters won't qualify as XML. This ties in with basic definitions of information, uncertainty, and entropy."

The research paper Class Loading Issues in Java RMI and Jini Network Technology takes an in-depth look at the advantages and hazards of class loading as it relates to distributed technologies like RMI and Jini. It notes that while providing code mobility over the network, the model also leads to "run-time errors and programmer confusion."

James Gosling praises NetBeans5 & Creator2 in today's Weblogs:
"It's been an amazing week for the tools engineering teams. Creator 2 FCSed last week, and NetBeans 5 went out the door this morning. In my role as kibbitzer and tinkerer, I've had a lot of fun playing with both of them."

In
GlassFish Tech Tips page and Q&A session, Carla Mott writes:
"We're trying to make is easier for you to get detailed information about how to use the latest features in GlassFish."

Ben Galbraith says "After months of dormancy, I resurrect my Java.net blog", in
Lazarus, Ajax, and San Francisco.

In this week's Spotlight, "Sun is seeking regression reports in the Mustang Regressions Challenge. Every verified regression submitted before March 31 wins a t-shirt, and the best five (as judged by Sun engineering and QA) win a new Ultra 20 workstation. There's more information in the FAQ, a forum for discussing the challenge, and a blog about its goals in Announcing the Mustang regressions challenge."

In today's Forums,
grandall asks of Java3D
Is there "software rendering", and with multiple viewers?
"Q1: Is there a "software rendering" (to use the Quake 2 term) component that can be used with Java3d? Q2: Does the "normal" (hardware accelerated) Java3d cope with, say, 50 separate Viewers all rendering different views of the same scene graph? (Presumably software rendering would have no artificial restrictions.)"

An anonymous poster on the Java Desktop mailing lists asks for a
[JAI] Roadmap:
"Is there a roadmap for JAI somewhere? What I am looking for is information about when the different releases are expected to go final. Specifically I am looking into when the 1.1.3-beta is expected to go gold. Of course I am not looking for an exact date, but I was hoping there was some information about the release plan somewhere and some estimated dates."

In Also in
Java Today,
the Enterprise Java Tech Tip Developing Web Services Using JAX-WS introduces the Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0 (JSR 224). This follow-on release to JAX-RPC, "simplifies the task of developing web services using Java technology... [by] providing support for multiple protocols such as SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, XML, and by providing a facility for supporting additional protocols along with HTTP." The Tech Tip shows a simple example of building a JSR-224 web service and deploying it in GlassFish.

Sunil Patil digs more deeply into Portlet technology in What Is a Portlet, Part 2. In this installment, he introduces a new administrative GUI for portlets provided by the Apache Pluto portlet container, shows how to support EDIT mode in portlets, and moves the HTML from the Java code to a JSP. He also looks at the portlet life cycle, and wraps up with a quick overview of portlet tag libraries, persistent preferences support, and portlet caching.

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