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Hearing Aid

Posted by editor on June 9, 2006 at 8:19 AM PDT


The numbers are in for the JavaOne podcasts

The other day, one of Marla's assistants crunched the download numbers for download.java.net for May, which gave us our first look at the results of our experiment in podcasting the community corner minitalks.

Here are the top ten episodes downloaded during Java one and through the end of May, with links to their announcement pages in the java.net podcasting project:

  1. Pre-J1-2K6: Joshua Marinacci on SwingX, Swing Hacks, and Mac Java
  2. j1-2k6-mtH16: Paulo Silveira and Evandro Machodo on Mouse Gestures Plugin for NetBeans
  3. j1-2k6-mtH08: David Walend on Missing Pieces in Generics
  4. j1-2k6-mtW02: Panel discussion with non-Sun JDK contributors Brian Harry, Jesse Sterr, and Andy Tripp
  5. j1-2k6-mtT13: Garret Rooney and Dan Rall on Subversion
  6. j1-2k6-mtW08: David Herron on JDK Packaging for Linux
  7. J1-2K6: Gregg Wonderly on the Jini Community
  8. Pre-J1-2K6: Marla Parker live from the under-construction Community Corner
  9. j1-2k6-mtW14: Chris Adamson on Lloyd Extends QuickTime for Java
  10. j1-2k6-mtW11: Fernando Lozano on the State of F/OSS Java VM's

One thing we noted internally is that most of these speak to broad topics and not to individual projects, which explains their popularity -- a talk on Generics or Subversion is potentially of interest to all Java developers. There were good talks about individual projects, communities, JUG's, etc., but they'll tend to have a lower hit count because they're so focused. Fortunately, it's not like we're selling ads or particularly care about hit count, and we're glad to give everyone a turn at the mic.

One surprise is the high ranking of the nifty talk on NetBeans gestures. That seems to the only one in the top 10 that didn't get featured on the main page during JavaOne week, and I don't see it in my iTunes feed, which makes me think I may have botched the hand-edited XML when putting it on the feed. And that brings up a question: where, other than the podcast page itself, are people finding this talk? Surely something on netbeans.org is linking in.

Speaking of the feed, if you look at the URL -- https://jnpodcasts.dev.java.net/javaone/2006/feed.xml -- you'll notice it's specific to JavaOne 2006. We'll have a different feed for future java.net events, obviously including JavaOne 2007, but perhaps some events we're participating in before then. I'd love to get sound from the Jini Community Meeting; I'm just not sure how to do it without my butt and microphone being in Brussels. Anyways, those will have different URL's, and we'll announce them on the front page so you can find them.

We've also talked about having a general-purpose java.net podcast feed. We'd use this to feature interviews with community leaders, prominent project owners, other java.net people, and other java.net-related audio content in general. Maybe we'll roll out the "best of the minitalks" over the course of a few months. Plans are still evolving in this space -- it might just be some irregular thing we do when people are available in person or on Skype, so you wouldn't get a weekly show, just a new episode every time we get one done. Maybe a new episode will be one of our "feature articles" for the week... we haven't really figured it all out yet. But we know that we're very pleased with our first efforts in the podcasting space, that there's an audience that enjoys it, and that we like doing it. So expect more in the future, and tell us what you'd like to hear from our podcasts.

John Catherino says Take that .NET! in today's Weblogs.
"As an outspoken advocate of Java distributed computing, I was recently confronted by a group of .NET enthusiasts. They felt compelled go on about how much more "advanced" .NET remoting is; no need for a registry, syntactic transparency, things they said were "impossible" with Java. They said that to the wrong guy..."

In Google spreadsheets in trouble - and Java DB can help, David Van Couvering writes,
"the new Google spreadsheet is not getting the best press in the world. A major concern: privacy and security. Here's where Java DB and Local AJAX can help."

Finally, Kohsuke Kawaguchi announces the
JAXB RI 2.0.1 release: "I just posted JAXB RI 2.0.1, a bug fix release to JAXB RI 2.0."

Speaking of weblogs, the new java.net Poll asks "What style of java.net blog do you most enjoy reading?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for results and discussion.

In Projects and
Communities,
the 10th Jini Community Meeting has been announced with a Call for Papers. Session proposals will be accepted through June 28, and speakers can request a 20, 30, or 50 minute talk, or a slot in the five-minute "lightning round". The event will be held in Brussels, Belgium on September 13 and 14. To learn more about Jini Community Meetings, check out the archive of previous meetings.

The Key Indicator Data Systems (KIDS) is "a GIS software framework that provides the ability to implement thematic information systems that collect, reference, visualize, exchange and disseminate statistical, survey and indicator data." The system has been developed by the World Agriculture Information Centre (WAICENT) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

In Also in
Java Today,

Tim Bray has updated his classic On the Goodness of Binary Search in response to Josh Bloch's revelatory Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken, which pointed out that the classic implementation was prone to integer overflows for large data sets. A new bit of right shifting in Bray's code, probe = (low + high) >>> 1;, catches this potential problem.

"Java technology programmers often use the javax.swing.JList component to provide list views of similar data, whether it be a phone contact list or a grocery list. Despite the convenience of this user interface (UI) component, a JList doesn't sort its elements. It displays them in the same order provided by its underlying javax.swing.ListModel interface. Neither the ListModel interface nor the javax.swing.DefaultListModel class provides sorted data. Instead, the default model provides its content in the same order as you enter it." John O'Conner's Creating a Sorted JList Component offers a way to provide this missing feature through use of a decorator pattern that employs a second model to track the model items in their sorted order.

In today's Forums,
ylzhao seeks to understand more about
Java2D/JOGL Interoperability:
"Hi,I read the article Java2D/JOGL Interoperability by Chris Campbell [...] I use Mustang b86 on Windows XP. Because Mustang uses DirectX for hardware acceleration on Windows, if use JOGL's GLJPanel on Windows, will the DirectX pipeline conflict with the OpenGL pipeline? Does the efficiency of the OpenGL pipeline become slower?"

In an announcement from SwingLabs, rbair says
DataSet gets Promoted, Databinding is set free:
"With the advent of JSR 295, it's time to (oh dear, managment buzzword coming) 'realign' (there, it's over now) the databinding project within SwingLabs. First, I'm going to create a new project for the DataSet. I'll remove the DataSet code from DataBinding and move it into DataSet. Patrick and Dave (if he wants it!) will be the project owners for DataSet. Also, I'll be moving the code from the 'binding' branches to the databinding project. I'll then reassign project ownership for databinding to Patrick, Dave (if he wants it!) and Ray (if he wants it!). In the next day or two databinding will be removed as a subproject of SwingLabs and become a normal toplevel project."

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The numbers are in for the JavaOne podcasts

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