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Getting smarter about consumer/desktop Java

The old joke goes, "how can we miss you if you won't go away?" Popular java.net blogger and author Chet Haase has gone off to Adobe to work on Flex, but his involvement in and contributions to desktop Java remain in full view. He attended the Java Posse Roundup earlier this month, providing a well-informed perspective to discussions of Java beyond the server. And InfoQ got him to do a long video interview at their QCon San Francisco 2007, in which he touched on Sun's major new initiatives for desktop Java.

In the course of the 22 minutes, he touches on JavaFX, the new browser plug-in for applets, and the "consumer JRE" (currently called "JDK 6 update 10", but then called "update N"):

The drivers for the Update N release which we are working hard on and should be in beta sometime soon now is mainly in the deployment space. So it's the realization that if we want to be a player in the consumer world, we actually need to fix some of the longstanding issues which we have known about but which frankly weren't that critical in the enterprise space.

So, if you're interested in desktop Java and you have a few minutes for a blast from the recent past, take a look.

Also in Java Today, Arun Gupta and Rick Palkovic have published a new SDN article, Rails Powered by the GlassFish Application Server. "This article introduces JRuby, JRuby on Rails, and the GlassFish application server. It presents a traditional Ruby-on-Rails application deployment, describes an alternative using the GlassFish application server, and explains the various options for deploying JRuby applications on GlassFish."

In the on-demand webinar Rapidly Building Desktop Applications with the NetBeans Platform, Tim Boudreau, Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems, demonstrates how easy it is to get started with the platform. You'll learn to create applications and integrate existing code into a NetBeans Platform-based application with real-world code demos, understand the design principles of modular applications, and dscover how your software and development process can benefit from this powerful platform.

Our latest Feature Article, Extending OpenPTK, the User Provisioning Toolkit. Project Open Provisioning ToolKit (OpenPTK) is as an open source user provisioning toolkit exposing APIs, web services, HTML taglibs, and JSR-168 portlets with user self-service and administration examples. OpenPTK hides the implementation differences between different user stores, allowing developers to use multiple stores with a common API. In this article, Masoud Kalali shows how to use and extend the toolkit.

John Ferguson Smart announces his next talk in today's Weblogs. In Open Agility - Tools and techniques for productive Java development, he writes, "I will be giving a lunchtime talk in Wellington on the 8th of April on how Java development best practices can boost your productivity."

Phil Bender checks in with another announcement: OpenCable InterOp scheduled April 30 - May 2, 2008, saying that "CableLabs is seeking OpenCable application developers to attend the next OpenCable InterOp."

Finally, Vivek Pandey describes My first Jython web app on GlassFish v3. "I have been thinking of playing with Jython and GlassFish for quite some time. I thought of taking the first shot at it. So after looking around a bit I found out that I can simply use PyServlet to delegate the HTTP requests to my Jython servlet which can do whatever with the Python script and write it back to the Servlet output stream. Let us see how I did it."

In today's Forums, kschaefe announces a CellEditor Validation Framework for SwingX. "I have made an initial check in of a validation framework for CellEditors. I hope to accomplish the following goals: 1. Create highly reusable validation code. 2. Eliminate the need to create custom editors to perform validation. 3. Separate validation logic from presentation (editing) logic. 4. Provide instanteous feedback that the user has entered an invalid value (currently a simple red border)."

sfitzjava seeks an update from the meeting to create a "Mobile Dev Alliance" in the followup Re: What is the charter, and who is on-board? "Do you have an ETA on when we should anticipate information to be posted about this alliance group and what help it might bring to the suffering of JavaME developers? Since I first got involved using JavaME when it first came out as KSpot from the Sun labs research group, I have always seen great potential, and heard great promises for it's future. However the future when brought to fruition has never been as sweet as the promises. I am truly hopeful that this alliance will be able to help the situation before mobile development gets too splintered, and JavaME becomes just another footnote like the pico-java chip, like PJava, and the Zaurus PDA."

Finally, anand_amarsh is looking for some Java Reporting tools. "I am looking for an easy mechanism of putting reporting statements in my Java code. Is something similar to log4j is available for this. It should be as simple as putting a few imports and then calling myReport.put(blah) throughout the code. Any info would be of great help."

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• March 24-28 - J2EE Training Philippines
• March 26-28 - TheServerSide Java Symposium
• April 4-6 - New England Software Symposium 2008: Spring Edition
• April 4-6 - Greater Nebraska Software Symposium 2008
• April 8-11 - JAX India 2008
• April 8-11 - Struts Training Philippines
• April 18-20 - Great Lakes Software Symposium 2008: Spring Edition
• April 18-20 - Pacific Northwest Software Symposium 2008: Spring Edition
• April 21 - Triangle Java Users Group - Groovy
• April 25-27 - Northern Virginia Software Symposium 2008: Spring Edition
• May 2-4 - Rocky Mountain Software Symposium 2008: Spring Edition
• May 5-9 - Java Training Philippines
• May 12-15 - Java Power Tools Bootcamp
• May 19-23 - Daring Java Conference: Java to Celebrate Its 13th Birthday at Bangalore
• May 19-23 - Great Indian Developer Summit 2008 Features Co-located Conferences on Java, Rich Web and .NET
• May 19-23 - J2EE Training Philippines

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