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Whenever You're Ready

Posted by editor on July 13, 2007 at 5:42 AM PDT


Beyond the comfort zone, what do you want to do next?

With its three distinct platforms (ME, SE, EE) and thousands of classes between them, it's perfectly reasonable to carve out a comfort zone and make a good career out of a specific subset of the Java platform. Enterprise Java developers typically pick-and-choose from relevant EE API's as needed for their projects, and leave the rest alone. Or, in some cases, they use enterprise-ready alternatives to EE, like Spring, Hibernate, etc., effectively setting themselves up as "Enterprise SE" specialists. Meanwhile, others have careers in the desktop part of SE, which has enough to keep you busy for a while. And then there's ME in its various forms: cellphone, interactive TV, or something else?

A question for you then... have you wanted to try something else with Java? If you're a desktop person, do you feel pressure to move into enterprise? If you're a server-sider, do you mess around with Swing when nobody's looking?

Your editor is a long-time desktop specialist, but I've been playing with ME more this Summer... partially because the Mobile & Embedded community has been so generous with information since it was formed late last year, partially because I have a moth-to-the-flame attraction to interactive TV technologies (MHP, BD-J, etc.), and partially because the long-time resistance to Mac-based ME development has been whittled down by third-party all-Java emulators and development environments (among them Mpowerplayer and XleTView). It'd be nice if the home team would get with the all-Java program, but that's a rant for another time (about four years in the past, to be specific).

So, since the thought of branching out and trying new things is in the air, latest java.net Poll asks "Which style of Java development would you like to learn more about?" Cast your vote on the front page, then check out the results page for current tallies and discussion. The results could be helpful in guiding the content mix on the site, as you can tell us what Java things you'd like to be doing more of.

In Java Today,
the JDK community home page has linked to a blog from Roman Kennke, who expresses his frustration at OpenJDK's contribution review time in Contributing to OpenJDK, no thanks: "It is such a ridiculous pain to get a patch into OpenJDK, I get the feeling that this is not the kind of project, I would feel comfortable with. Both of the above linked patches have been rather trivial. Davids patch even came with a testcase. And still it has to go through a week-long process before it can show up in the build. This will scare off most voluntary contributors quickly I guess."

"Kicking Butt with MIDP and MSA is the latest in a string of technology books from the accomplished technical writer and author Jonathan Knudsen. As the title implies, his latest (yet to be released) book addresses the API's for MIDP devices that are included in JSR 248, aka Mobile Services Architecture (MSA)." In the 360mobile.us interview Jonathan Knudsen is Kicking Butt, he talks about the books he's written, his current work on JavaFX Mobile, and his system for getting things done with small pockets of time.

Why are so many new API's still so bad? In the ACM Queue article API: Design Matters, Michi Henning says "there seems to be something elusive about API design that, despite many years of progress, we have yet to master." He digs into the challenges of writing good API's, what the proper responsibilities of API's are, and the prospect of developers being held responsible, perhaps through legal means, for the quality of their work.

Those of you anxiously awaiting Chet Haase and Romain Guy's Filthy Rich Clients book will be delighted with Chet's report in today's Weblogs that it's been Sent to Print!
"The book's been sent to the printers, so we're actually, finally done. We hope."

Brian O'Neill reveals the remarkable secrets of
How JBI can improve your love life. (JBI for Social Networking).
"The JBI specification is about rapid capabilities delivery and service composition. If employed in just the right manner, this can significantly improve your ability to network socially, which in turn can help out your love life. Check out this blog to see how you can use JBI to construct a social networking platform."

Finally, John O'Conner messes around with
Unicode support in JavaFX Script.
"I was pleasantly surprised with my first real interaction with JavaFX Script. Of course, I had to test at least one of its i18n features, so I picked something simple, Unicode text in the script."

In today's Forums,

whartung asks
What are the limitations in EJB interceptors and JPA listeners?
"Does anyone have a concise list of what you CAN'T do in an EJB interceptor or JPA listener? We've been having some REALLY strange JPA, JMS, and transaction problems (GFv2 beta 3), and they seem to be sourced in our Audting JPA Listener. At least, I should say, the problems go away when we comment out the "meaty" code called by the Listeners. Now, in the JPA spec, it mentions the things you CAN do in a Listener, such as calling JMS, JDBC, Enterprise Beans, etc. But it suggests you don't to anything to the Entities relationships or to the Entity Manager. So, does that include calling a Session Bean that uses the Entity Manager? What if it's in a seperate transaction (i.e. REQUIRES_NEW on the Session Bean)."

David Grace has an update on the JOAL sound mixer code, in the thread
RE: joalMixer's new version : a bug ?: Many sounds, Works ok now ... but always sound 1. Not the others.
"I have put the latest joalmixer.jar at http://www.duthie.net/joal . The only other option at the moment is to download the source by CVS and compile it yourself. Unfortunately there are no binaries on https://j3d-optional-utils.dev.java.net/ as yet. In the meantime I will keep the latest versions at http://www.duthie.net/joal"

redentis could use some help with an inexplicable EJB exception in
"Caller not authorized" calling a protected EJB method from a servlet
"I'm getting the following stack trace while attempting to call a protected EJB method from a servlet that has been marked with 'run-as'. I've search both these and the SUN forums and have seem similar problems, but unfortunately, no resolutions. The high-level process looks like this..."

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Beyond the comfort zone, what do you want to do next?

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