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Don't Give Up

Posted by editor on November 9, 2006 at 2:55 PM EST

The struggle to do it with desktop Java

Seemingly the most commented-upon java.net blog in some time is Simon Morris' Blame Java!, whose description asks "when will Java applications 'just work' out-of-the-box on the desktop? I have projects crying out to be written in Java, so why do I find myself considering other technologies? Is 'Java' really a dirty word on the desktop?"

In his blog, Simon rues a recent project spec that he received, stating:

"The software language must not be Java, as in previous tests this has proved to be temperamental with types of hardware and various accessories."

He also talks about a proposal for an audio/video application... and again, Java seems not to be a plausible option:

"Now I've only limited experience of working directly with JMF, but my impression is of yet another desktop orientated technology which has suffered from neglect over the years. It's a shame, because were it not for the above niggles Java would be the ideal technology to meet this client's demands. A number of their requirements seem to fit hand-in-glove with the platform's strengths."

Now the thing that strikes me is that if desktop Java were a total failure, this blog wouldn't have made a ripple, since everybody would presumably have already walked away from Java GUI's. But the opposite has happened: this has already picked up 31 comments in a day and a half. Why? I think it's because there are a lot more people working with desktop Java than is widely understood. Consider last week's poll, which asked "What form does most of your Java development take?" A surprising 35.5% of respondents said "desktop Java applications", a strong second place to "web applications" at 41%. If this is anywhere close to accurate -- and the nature of a self-selected poll on a single website argues against taking the figures too strongly -- it suggests desktop Java should be getting a level of attention similar to that of server-side Java.

And maybe one reason so many people are commenting on the blog is that so many have wrestled with these same issues: the possible absence of the JVM on end-user machines, difficulties with Java Web Start, the condition of JMF, etc. What's worth taking away is how many people are working on desktop Java, and how important it is to them. If it were useless, this conversation would already be over. Instead, what you see is the frustration of being so close, but still hitting some painful road blocks.

JDK 7 feature planners, are you listening? The community is talking.

Also in today's Weblogs, Jean-Francois Arcand works through a server side hassle: One TCP port to rule them all "One thing I hate when I install an application server is the process of determining which and how many TCP ports the application is reserving. On a shared machine, It's even worse because you possibly need to manually change all the reserved ports to start the application server."

Finally, Gregg Sporar is Talking About Static Analysis: "We are fortunate that in the Java world, there are many high-quality static analysis tools available for free. I talked about a few of them the other night at a meeting Austin Java Users Group."

In Java Today, a recent SDN interview features James Gosling on Open Sourcing Sun's Java Platform Implementations. "James Gosling, widely regarded as the father of Java technology, has been hard at work helping Sun Microsystems with its efforts to open source Sun's Java SE (JDK) and Java ME implementations. The Java EE implementation has been open sourced for over a year as Project GlassFish. We caught up with Gosling recently to get his take on how things are going."

The JSR-142 Inventory API 1.1 Specifications are now available for download from the JSR-142 java.net project; the download contains the Java, JMS/XML and Web Service Profiles. The goal of JSR-142 is "to reduce the cost of integrating inventory products with other OSS components and allow traversal of information across the boundaries of inventory components." The API provides "J2EE/EJB based interfaces to create, remove, update and query inventory entities, entity templates and associations" and "metadata queries and allows clients to receive notifications of inventory events."

In a multimedia tech talk from TheServerSide, NetBeans Architect Pavel Buzek explains how Java EE 5 simplifies development and how NetBeans adds more ease of use with code completion for database mapping, wizards for building complete applications from existing data, and editing annotations.

In today's Forums, jlouvel has an Introduction of the Restlet project: I'd like to quickly introduce the Restlet project which is now federated with the Java WS & XML community. We are building a lightweight REST framework composed of a Restlet API, a reference implementation and a set of extensions. Since its launch at the end of 2005, it has received many feed-back and contributions which help us maturing quickly. We are now close to the final 1.0, but still looking for feed-back.

zmonster is upset about some dubious design choices in Re: Unwanted logging in JAX-WS 2.1: "You honestly think it is appropriate to log a server-side web service fault to the default log level when in fact faults can, and will, happen in the course of normal operation? I can't disagree with you more. The JAX-WS framework logging this situation by default is not only making it appear like my JUnit tests are failing (which they are not), but it also fills up the default log with useless garbage. A low-level framework should be hands-off most every non-Runtime exception, including catching and logging such situations."

Java SE 6's final release may be looming, but tdanecito is wondering if there's not some major javax.sound breakage in MIDI Broken in Mustang??: "I seem to see MIDI support broken in Mustang but I believe it is working in 1.4.x and maybe 1.5.x. Has anyone else seen this problem?"

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The struggle to do it with desktop Java
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