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Closer To Fine

Posted by editor on October 8, 2007 at 8:21 AM PDT


Open governance updates from NetBeans and OpenJDK

One of the things that didn't get a great deal of attention alongside the GPL'ing of Sun's Java implementation (in the form of the OpenJDK project), was the formation of a governance board of two Sun employees and three outsiders, who were charged with drafting a constitution for the OpenJDK community. This formal process is backed up with a charter that enables the GB to act in the interests of OpenJDK until the constitution is finished and ratified, which should happen by May 8, 2008 (as that's the date that the interim board is due to be dismissed).

You might remember the announcement at JavaOne of the GB members: Mark Reinhold and Simon Phipps from Sun, Dalibor Topic of Kaffe.org, Fabiane Bizinella Nardon of ZILICS, the JavaTools Community, and the Java Champions, and Doug Lea of SUNY and JSR 166. But you might wonder what they've been up to and how they're doing.

Mark Reinhold's blog, Constitutional conversations commence recaps the initial activities of the board. He writes, "the OpenJDK Governance Board held its first two meetings this past July. The minutes have just been posted (for 2007/7/12 and 2007/7/17); herewith the highlights. The primary mission of the current GB is to write a Constitution for the OpenJDK Community. These initial meetings served to set the stage, both procedurally and philosophically, for that work." In his blog, you'll find an overview of the initial agreements on process and philosophy. For more details, you can check out the minutes for the July 12 and July 17 meetings.

Also on the topic of governance, it's worth a reminder that this is the second and final week for the ratification portion of the 2007 JCP elections. Nominations for elected seats begin next week.

Continuing the governance theme in the Java Today section, the Autumn 2007 NetBeans Governance Board Elections have ended. All of the votes have been counted and the board members have been announced: the community representatives in the new NetBeans Governance Board are Wade Chandler and Tom Wheeler . The third member and Sun Microsystems appointee to the Governance Board is Brian Leonard. The election organizers offer "congratulations to Wade, Tom, Brian and all of our respected fine nominees!"

Stephen Colebourne's Weblog has an entry about JSR-310 and Java 7 language changes with examples of what he considers Java limitations. "Part of the difficulty I'm finding with designing JSR-310 (Dates and Times) is that I constantly come across gaps in the language of Java. My concern is that these gaps will shape the API to be less than it should be." Among these are concerns about using BigDecimal to represent durations, and a lack of immutable classes. He also makes a case for self-types and operator overloading being appropriate for JSR-310's purposes.

This week's Spotlight is on the first ever Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days Conference,
January 22-24, 2008, at the Sun Santa Clara Campus Auditorium, California, USA. Hosted by the Mobile & Embedded Community, the conference is devoted solely to the technologies of mobile and embedded Java platforms and is targeted for application developers of intermediate and advanced skill levels, platform developers, and technical personnel at tool vendors, OEMs and carriers. Planning is underway for a series of technical sessions, lightning talks, hands on labs, and poster sessions. The Call for Papers is now open, and you can get even more information from the Developer Days Wiki and a Developer Days-focused episode of the Mobile & Embedded Podcast.

Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein takes a look at Sun's new syncrhonized security updates policy in today's Weblogs. "Beginning with 1.4.2_16 + 1.5.0u13 + 1.6.0u3, Sun is moving to a new policy of releasing synchronized security updates of all supported versions of Java SE."

Santiago Pericas-Geertsen rhetorically asks
What's New in Japex 1.1.4?
"More users usually translates into more requests for features. A few more developers have picked up Japex in the last month, and a couple have asked me to provide additional features for their benchmarks. I'll use this blog to introduce a couple of new features in Japex version 1.1.4."

Finally, Mohamed Abdelaziz takes a look at
Dynamic Scalable Clustering.
"In today's information technology world, fault tolerance has become an expected system characteristic, as demands on such systems, not only requires the availability of data, but also the efficiency of such systems."

terrencebarr has several posts in today's Forums to direct readers to the Call for Papers: Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days Conference.
"We want this to be a community-driven conference. We are looking forward to your involvement in making this an interesting and interactive event. The Call for Papers opened on October 2, 2007 and will end October 31, 2007 Registration is expected to be open November 1, 2007. For more information about the conference and how to submit papers please see https://developerdays.dev.java.net."

The message
Re: Resource injection in servlet (JMS) points out that
"if you do not want the resource mapping to be done in the bean-code itself via mappedName, sun-web.xml is the alternative to tie the local JNDI reference to the global JNDI resource, but this would result in one-additional endor-specific deployment descriptor [sun-web.xml] to be added to your deployment archive."

Web Start user posborne wonders about
Downloading an application permanently.
"I haven't used Java Web Start in a while but I seem to remember that it offered the user a choice of downloading an application permanently if they'd downloaded the same app more than once. I have recently built and deployed an application using Java Web Start but the option to make a local copy is not there. Can anyone tell me whether this is something that I need to configure or a feature that isn't available any more (or even just a problem with my memory!)?"

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Open governance updates from NetBeans and OpenJDK

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