Editor's Daily Blog

All Over The World

New thinking for educational challenges

Back in Monday's editor's blog, I pointed over to Cay's blog about the College Board dropping the Advanced Placement Computer Science AB course and some of the trends behind it. This development has a lot of people talking (take a look at Monday's comments for some interesting thoughts), including a couple of our own bloggers.

java.net intern / Sun engineer / middle school teacher Sonya Barry asks What do we do about Computer Science education? Her Master's thesis project was an intro to Java programming for eighth graders, so she knows this field well. She writes:

In the past few weeks I've met with someone from Sun's Global Citizenship Initiative. He's working on proposals to get a volunteer program set up so Sun's engineers can go out with the company's support and teach a CS curriculum either as part of a class or an after school program. He wanted to get some opinions from me about it, since I'm actually teaching it, and he also came in to my classroom on Monday morning to observe.

So what would I do if I had all the time and money to do this? My suggestions were to come up with some kind of portable classroom and to have a fairly rigorous mentor program for teaching engineers how to teach.

Why a portable classroom? Why mentoring? She's got a good case for each, so go check out the details.

Meanwhile, Juan Carlos Herrera discusses the use of Java in international education, in Project "Hello Buddy/Hola Amigo":

The project "Hello Buddy/Hola Amigo" is a Sun Microsystems' volunteers' initiative to reduce the digital divide. The digital divide is the gap between people that has resources and knowledge to get access to digital and information technology from people who don't. The source of digital divide came from social, economical, and cultural issues. Some technology (specially if come from the open-source world) can help to overcome the digital divide since open-source software does not have cost for using and also can be distributed freely, countries with with broader digital can use for free.

...

The project itself is based on Wonderland, a Sun's open-source project to create virtual 3D world. Wonderland gives us the platform to build a live virtual and 3D classroom where children of different countries can meet and share in a virtual space for fun...and learn. At the same time we can take advantage of this tool to teach and educate children, if we have technology that provides a broadband connection, audio, and publishing tools, we can develop and attend classes closer to a real world. Finally the project will have a children driven approach, in fact both English and Spanish speakers will teach each other their native language.

Also in today's Weblogs, Jean-Francois Arcand details the latest Grizzly release, in New monster unleashed: Grizzly 1.7.3 is out! "Every month the bear is growing....1.7.3 is now out with a flurry of new features and performance improvements."

Why does Java 6 expose the javac compiler through a programmatic interface? It's not just for building IDEs. In our Feature Article, Source Code Analysis Using Java 6 APIs Deepa Sobhana and Seema Richard show off practical applications of Java 6's programmatic access to javac, using the new feature for static code analysis, with an example that verifies that classes overriding Object.equals() also implement the required override of Object.hashcode().

In Java Today, the JFugue Music NotePad project has announced its first binary release by means of an introductory Javalobby article, 1st Binary Release of Java Music Composer. "The aim of this open source project is to provide a simple standalone application for composing music and generating MIDI files. The underlying functionality provided by this application comes from its reliance on the JFugue API. The JFugue API provides a simple yet powerful set of classes for playing and saving MIDI files. The user interface that is built on top of this API is based on the NetBeans Platform."

InfoQ takes a deep look at JSR 303 in Initial Draft of the Bean Validation Specification Released. "Led by Hibernate Validator lead developer Emmanuel Bernard, JSR-303 aims to standardize the constraints metadata model for Java EE 6. An early draft of the specification has been released and the expert group are keen to solicit feedback. As part of this a forum has been set up, and Bernard has begun to publish a series of articles (part 1, part 2) on the Hibernate blog describing how the API works."

In the NetBeans.tv screencast NetBeans, Ruby and AppleScript, Mac Developer Tips blogger John Muchow describes how to use NetBeans and rb-appscript (a bridge to connect Ruby to the Apple Event Manager) to control scriptable applications on a Mac. This introduction shows how you can get started using Ruby as an alternative to AppleScript for scripting applications on Mac OS X.

In today's Forums, SwingX contributor rturnbull announces the check-in of a JXTable with Java 1.6 sorting/filtering. "I have uploaded to the incubator modified versions of JXTable and JXTableHeader enabled for Java 1.6 sorting/filtering. I have java version 1.6.0_03. I have removed all references to sorting/filtering from both classes, except for shift-click to remove sorting from a column, and double-click to pack a column. The only additional reference to sorting now in JXTable is a convenience method setSortOrder(), which builds a SortKey and resets the RowSorter. Most of the 'sort' methods in the current JXTable are now available via the RowSorter. Convenience methods could be written for them, but I don't know how many would actually be used."

The subject says SwingXSet3 ..., but Kleopatra is just teasing with that subject line, continuing: "... not yet. But just some days ago I stumbled across the fact that SwingSet3 is formally a sub-project of SwingLabs (unbelievable that it lived there for 14 months without anybody noticing) And it's really cute. One cool part of it is a package named CodeView: it allows to view the code files _and_ highlight pre-tagged labelled snippets _and_ navigate across those. We might consider to switch swinglabs-demos over to use that. Didn't explore yet how much work that would be (nor the legal ramifications, licence looks okay to my naive eyes)."

derdoc80 wonders about JDIC's approach on the Mac in [Mac OS X] Drawing directly to NSView. "After reading the source of the native .jnilib of JDIC for mac os x, I asked myself why it shouldnt be possible to draw directly into an NSView from Java since it seems to me that the "painters model" is the same. Just have a proxy class in java as subclass of Component or whatever, proxy code inside a jnilib that passes all calls to a native subclass of NSView. Shouldnt that be fairly easy?"

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• April 8-11 - JAX India 2008
• April 8-11 - Struts Training Philippines
• April 12 - JUG.RU meeting
• 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 5 - CommunityOne 2008
• May 6-9 - JavaOne 2008
• 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

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our 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 java.net Archive.

Comments

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.