Skip to main content

The World I Know

Posted by editor on February 9, 2007 at 10:42 AM PST


About writing feature articles

Something I've long planned to do is to put the basic materials for writing feature articles up in a public place. Until now, I've just sent them to authors either when they e-mail asking how to write a feature article, or when their proposal is approved. In the last week though, I've had repeated problems trying to get this .zip file of HTML documents past over-zealous mail providers (yes, I'm talking to to you, GMail), who have a dubious belief that the zip format is inherently not to be trusted... see Zip Considered Harmful for my previous rant on this.

So, in launching the trivial jn-editorial project and hosting the writer's guides in its web space, I had an opportunity to do a little bit of a refresh on some of the guidance, clearing up dated or inaccurate material, trimming guidance from other O'Reilly sites that doesn't apply to java.net, etc.

I made a lot of changes to the "wish list" of topics we're interested in. As we internally discuss the goals and guidance of the site, one thing I've settled on is a real desire to make the feature articles not just a general interest item, but to really focus them on the java.net projects and the site. Considering we now host reference implementations of ME, SE, and EE, not to mention NetBeans and over 3,600 community projects, it seems to me like we ought to be able to use the features to enhance knowledge about all the things going on here at java.net. We probably couldn't have done when the site launched three and a half years ago, but times have changed. This is a large, successful community, and frankly, I'd much rather read a proposal about the core platforms or your cool project than see a proposal about projects that don't have anything to do with java.net.

If you're interested in writing a feature, have a look at the guides, and send me an e-mail if you have any questions, or if you're ready to make a 5-10 line proposal. Thanks.

The Java Today section kicks off today with a little history. "Eight years ago, a team of developers set out to forge the free tool that today is the Swiss army knife of software development." The video High-level Introduction to NetBeans IDE and the Community "gives you an overview of the NetBeans IDE and the enthusiatic community that made this project come alive."

An SDN interview gets an update on Java SE 6 monitoring in Managing Applications With Java SE 6: A Conversation With Vasanthan Dasan: "Java SE 6 now enables developers to attach command-line utility diagnostic tools such as jstat, jmap, jhat, and jstack to any application without requiring startup in a special mode. In addition, JConsole, with enhanced plug-in support and dynamic attach capability, is much improved."

2007 will go down in history as the year Sun Microsystems gave up the reins of the Java platform, releasing it under an open source license to the Java developer community. In the article Java 2007: The year in preview, Elliotte Rusty Harold predicts new directions for the Java platform, in everything from scripting to bug fixing to new syntax.

Tips abound in today's Weblogs.
Tim Boudreau shows how to
Generate a NetBeans module for your library or JavaBeans in one Ant task:
"A while back I wrote a wizard that would take any library JAR file and generate a NetBeans module that added the library to the list of libraries you can use from your projects (a handy way to bundle source and Javadoc all together so people can debug). It also would add any JavaBeans in the JAR to the Matisse (Swing GUI Designer) component palette."

In
Normalization: Canonical Decomposition, John O'Conner writes:
"Java SE 6 provides a new normalization API that implements the Unicode standard for normalization. The canonical decomposition form (NFD) is just one normalization form."

Finally, Tom White offers
Testing for errant network connections,
also described as, "Why's my application connecting to that site?!"

The latest java.net Poll asks "Which open-source license would you be most likely to write Java applications under?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for current tallies and discussion.

terrencebarr has a somewhat surprising point about phoneME performance in today's Forums. In Re: Do you know how to accelerate the phoneME cldc vm's performance?, he writes:
"Generally speaking phoneME Feature MR1 performs about 5 to 20 times faster on real-world Java ME applications running on embedded platforms compared to Sun's CLDC RI. phoneME Feature MR2 should even be slightly faster than that since it has additional optimizations over MR1."

ritzmann has some guidance for sorting out
JAX-WS 2.1 and WSIT:
"The JAX-WS bundle does not contain WSIT. I understand why you got confused. WSIT pointing at the JAX-WS download folder makes it very easy to grab the wrong version. It's probably best you take this promoted version for now."

And more guidance, this time from vbkraemer, on messed up deployment directories, in the GlassFish forum message
Re: Can't Undeploy war file??
"Sometimes the best approach may be to create a new unpolluted environment rather than attempt to clean up one. Consider using asadmin's create-domain to create a new domain, that hasn't had application deployed into it. Once the new domain is created, it will not have any of the bits of kruft that may have accumulated in domain1. Note: if you want the new domain to use the same ports as domain1, be sure to shutdown domain1 first."

Current and upcoming Java
Events :

Registered users can submit event listings for the href="http://www.java.net/events">java.net Events Page using our href="http://today.java.net/cs/user/create/e">events submission form.
All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the
site.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as
the Java
Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the
front page of java.net it will be
archived along with other past issues in the href="http://today.java.net/today/archive/">java.net Archive.

About writing feature articles

Blog Links >>