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 Editor's Daily BlogApril 2008 ArchivesThe Fragile ArmyPosted by invalidname on April 30, 2008 at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)Java 6 (finally) for Mac... now what? Long after its Sun-developed debut on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, Java SE 6 is finally available for the Mac. As I posted to the Mac Java Community's features feed:
So... what to make of this? There's been a whole lot of unhappy with the long delays getting Java 6 to the Mac. It's somewhat inexplicable, considering that back in 2006, Apple had actually been tracking the JDK 6 betas pretty closely with developer previews of their own, but after JDK 6 went final in late 2006, the updates stopped. Many assumed that JDK 6 would be in Leopard, but then that OS update slipped from early 2007 to late 2007 because of iPhone demands, and then to everyone's surprise, Leopard shipped without JDK 6, a year after a more or less complete JDK 6 b88 was offered to developers. Conspriacy theorists, Apple kremlinologists, and ticked-off ranters have had a field day over the last six months, but now that JDK 6 final is out -- to say nothing of the very encouraging work being done on the open-source Soy Latte Java runtime for Mac OS X -- it's all water under the bridge, right? Well, apparently not. Apple's new JRE runs only on Mac OS X 10.5.2 or higher (sorry, Tiger users), and only on 64-bit Intel hardware. PowerPC and 32-bit Intel machines aren't supported. Fabrizio Giudici notes the problems with this in his blog Apple's Java 6 on Mac OS X available:
There's also a number of pretty heated comments already posted to Fabrizio's blog, with one saying that Apple's focus on the desktop and Java's problems there make it "surprising that Apple still ships Java at all." One reply says that if the author wants to see NetBeans fly on the Mac, he or she should install Linux on the box instead. It's a pretty safe bet that this debate is going to continue through the day. But let's take note of one other interesting thing. In previous years, Apple has often offered an announcement or major release during JavaOne week, like how they posted their first PPC-compatible Java 6 previews during their 2006 JavaOne BoF. So, they could surely have held this release another week and put it out next week during JavaOne, right? Except that, from looking at the JavaOne Conference Guide and Schedule Builder, Apple is neither sponsoring, exhibiting, nor presenting at this year's conference. Oh yeah, that's gonna kick off a few more blogs... In Java Today, the JCP has announced the nominees for the 2008 JCP Program Awards. The program recognizes excellence in six categories: JCP Member of the Year, JCP Participant of the Year, Most Innovative JSR for Java SE/EE, Most Innovative JSR for Java ME, Most Outstanding Spec Lead for Java SE/EE, and Most Outstanding Spec Lead for Java ME. Winners will be announced next week at JavaOne.
The SDN's latest Core Java Technology Tip is John Zukowski's Using Generics With Wildcards and Extends. "Most people don't fully understand the use of the In today's Weblogs, Frederic Barachant offers some thanks in Achievement and a look back. "I recently deployed a new application to a customer's facility. Now that everything is fine there, i took a look back and watched what i did last year. One thing is sure, i could not have done it completely alone. To resume, i love you all. Yeah, i mean it." In Java Secrets Revealed #1, Ethan Nicholas offers "the first of hopefully many articles detailing little-known facts about the inner workings of the JRE. In this episode: Java Plug-In vs. Java Web Start; Class Data Sharing."
In today's Forums,
Scott Oaks has a question about Cookies, load balancers, and Internet Explorer. "I have a HW loadbalancer sitting in front of my glassfish cluster. When I visit the loadbalancer (http://lb.my.local.domain.com), it forwards the request to one of the instances (http://inst1.my.local.domain.com), which sends back the response including a JSESSIONID cookie. Then the next request goes to the loadbalancer, which presumably will use the cookie to send the request to the appropriate instance. Which all works flawlessly with Firefox and Opera. IE, however, decides not to send the cookie back."
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. We CrawlPosted by invalidname on April 29, 2008 at 06:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Power up your robots for JavaOne One of the reasons we needed a bigger booth for JavaOne this year was so that the Trackbots would have room to roam. And they could be roaming with your code... The RoboHACC Programming Un-Contest is designed to challenge your coding skills in Java using the Greenfoot Framework/IDE to direct a Sun SPOT equipped TrackBot through an Arena with various obstacles. You can use existing code examples or start from scratch. Collaboration is highly encouraged; so find some fellow coders and get hacking. The RoboHACC Un-Contest begins now, but will really take off at JavaOne where you'll interact with other participants. Having Greenfoot preconfigured to work with the trackbots should make it easier, and if you take a look at the mini-talk schedule, you'll see that Shawn Silverman is offering a Trackbot programming mini-talk each day, and will be in the booth much of the day, giving you a chance to get answers to your Greenfoot/Trackbot programming questions during the show. So, if you've wanted to play with SunSPOTs, Trackbots, or just want a change of pace, visit the uncontest page, download Greenfoot, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week. Also in Java Today, the OpenJDK project has approved two new sub-projects. The NIO project's "mission is to produce the implementation of the (New) New I/O APIs being defined by JSR 203 as well as related work in the JDK." Meanwhile, the XRender Graphic Pipeline project is working on a "new Java2D graphics pipeline based upon the X11 XRender extension", and is part of the OpenJDK Community Innovators' Challenge. Kohsuke Kawaguchi reports that GlassFish v3 just got embeddable. "I can now run Hudson in this embedded GFv3. Here's how it works — GlassFish v3 can be run as an OSGi application as Sahoo reported earlier, but in fact it can also be run without any kind of classloader isolation system at all. Sure, you won't get the isolations, but this means you can just drop a bunch of GFv3 jars in your classpath and run it like that." The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobility Podcast 43: Mobile Distillery's porting tool Celsius, in which Razmig Sarkissian from Mobile Distillery talks to Terrence about Celsius, a software solution for porting and optimizing Java ME applications across over 800 phones. In today's Weblogs, Mandy Chung provides more details about Supporting OSGi Bundles in the Java Module System. "A draft specification for supporting OSGi bundles in the Java Module System is made available to the JSR 277 Expert Group to continue the OSGi interoperability discussion." Giovani Salvador shares an interesting anecdote about Refactoring for Performance. "Sometimes small modifications help applications to improve performance. Here an example on how a small modification helped a critical application to improve its performance without big refactorings." Finally, David Herron previews his JavaOne presentations On hacking the OpenJDK. "I'm giving a session at JavaOne this year titled "Hacking the OpenJDK" and it's been very interesting sitting with this topic these last few months. Much of the presentation is an overview of the developer guide, source repositories and other infrastructure on openjdk.java.net which anybody 'hacking' the OpenJDK will need to get started."
In today's Forums,
Rajiv Mordani announces a new mailing list and forum in webtier@glassfish.dev.java.net created. "In an effort to consolidate the user mailing lists for webtier technologies, we have created a mailing list and forum dedicated for webtier users - webtier@glassfish.dev.java.net. This forum is intended for discussing the webtier technologies including Servlets, JSP, JSF, JSTL, Grizzly and scripting support in GlassFish and build a community that focuses on webtier of the Java EE platform. Please note that this list will be (not yet done but should happen soon) cross-posted to the webtier forums, so you can either email the list directly, or post to the forums."
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. Light To FollowPosted by invalidname on April 28, 2008 at 05:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)NetBeans 6.1 makes an early debut Now this is a good idea. Rather than risk getting lost in all the news and hype of JavaOne week, when everyone and their brother seems to be making a major release announcement, the NetBeans team has surprised us by releasing NetBeans 6.1 final today, a week ahead of JavaOne. Go ahead and kick off the download, then keep reading. OK, so actually, it wasn't a surprise to everyone. I did get an e-mail from the NetBeans team in Prague telling me they were planning on a release Monday morning at noon their time, which is 6 AM here in the Eastern US (and therefore perfect for putting together the morning java.net page), and 3 AM out in the Pacific Time Zone, home to Sun, O'Reilly, and many of the world's techies. They'll be waking up in a few hours to the surprise. Of course, if you've been watching the front page for the last few months, you've seen NetBeans 6.1 coming together, with bloggers pointing out its great new features (particularly Ruby/JRuby/Rails support), and the community giving overwhelming approval last week to greenlighting the release. So now, NetBeans can enjoy the spotlight for a week, and by the time JavaOne hits next week, attendees should already have had a chance to download and install 6.1, and check out NetBeans-related sessions with an up-to-date perspective. In light of the significance of the news, we've set aside the entire Java Today section for the NetBeans 6.1 announcement: "NetBeans IDE 6.1 supports a wide range of open source scripting technologies and offers improved performance. This release extends language support beyond Java technology by providing a rich set of features for C/C++, JavaScript and the Ruby language, including Ruby on Rails. One of the downloads available is an Early Access preview of support for PHP. Advance versions of new modules, such as JavaScript debugger, support of ClearCase, AXIS, and Hibernate are available as separate plugins. NetBeans IDE 6.1 also contains all of the improvements made in 6.0 including: the new smarter editor, next generation of the ground-breaking GUI builder (formerly known as Project Matisse), visual mobile designer, integrated profiler, and Java EE 5 support. For more information about NetBeans IDE 6.1 features visit the NetBeans IDE 6.1 Release Page." This week's Spotlight is on java.net at JavaOne 2008. After all, JavaOne 2008 begins next week, and as always, java.net will be a big part of the event, as captured by our JavaOne wiki page. On Saturday, May 3, we're holding a Community Leaders Weekend, an unconference in which community leaders can discuss the online community and help shape the future of the site. Then, of course, the Community Corner on the Pavilion floor will be your place to meet up with fellow community members, see demos, and check out 20-minute mini-talks from java.net project owners and community members. The mini-talks will be recorded as podcasts, sent out during and after the show; you can subscribe to the feed at the podcast's home page, or via the iTunes link. Finally, if you're presenting a technical session, hands-on session, or BoF based on your java.net project, please be sure to add it to the list of java.net sessions on the wiki. We've also added a second spotlight to announce that there's still room in the The JavaOne 2008 Student Program. This is a five-day program to attend the CommunityOne and JavaOne conferences in San Francisco next week, for free. Participants will have full access to the conference, including general sessions, technical sessions, birds-of-a-feather sessions (BoFs), specially developed Java University classes, a coupon for a free Java Certification Class, access to the JavaOne pavilion, t-shirts, lunches, the AfterDark party with Smashmouth, and more. Interested students should download and fax back the registration PDF as soon as possible, as space is limited. Elsewhere, in today's Weblogs. Bruno Ghisi explains what he means by Marging a FX Tetris at JavaOne! "Project Marge got a mini talk in Community Corner! If you want to get introduced in Bluetooth, JSR 82 and Project Marge, that is the place! Also, if you just want to see some cool demos, including a mobile controller for a compiled JavaFX Script game, come there too!" As for conferences just concluded, Alexandre Gomes takes a look back at Mobile & Embedded Community in FISL 9.0. "The Mobile & Embedded Community was greatly represented at the International Free Software Conference, held in Porto Alegre, south Brazil. Look what was showed." And finally, Eamonn McManus previews a A query language for the JMX API. "The JMX API is being updated by JSR 255. That JSR is currently planned to be part of Java SE 7, and some of the API changes it defines have started to appear in JDK 7. So far, the main one is a Query Language. Here's what that is and what it's for."
Today's Forums start with kirillcool asks for more information about when to use and not use anti-aliasing in Java SE 6 Update 10, in
Re: [JAVA2D] Performance regression in 6u10 b22.
"The advice on not setting AA mode prior to using operations that don't care about it (such as filling a rectangle, shape or gradient) is a very valuable one. Is this mentioned anywhere in the tutorials / javadoc? Is this implementation detail for Sun VM? Can this be handled in the core by ignoring the AA mode on operations that produce exactly the same results with or without AA turned on?"
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. History Never RepeatsPosted by invalidname on April 25, 2008 at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Wave goodbye to languages without garbage collection It's not news to us -- we noted Java displacing C++ as the top language on Sourceforge a couple years ago, to say nothing of thousands of projects here on java.net. But Slashdot took the hint yesterday, asking Are C and C++ Losing Ground? They link to a Dr. Dobb's interview with TIOBE's Paul Jansen about the Programming Community Index, which "measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence." This also shows Java on top, trailed by C, Basic / Visual Basic (which is trending upwards), PHP, and the falling C++. Paul says the story behind the overall trends is that one of Java's defining traits, automated memory management, is increasingly being considered a neccessity:
It wasn't all that long ago that Java's use of garbage collection was considered a ridiculous liability, a sop to bad programmers that would destroy performance and render Java totally non-competitive. It hasn't quite turned out like the critics say, and even if some naysayers still won't embrace Java, you don't exactly see Ruby or Python making developers
And come to think of it, could you go without garbage collection at this point? I was poking around in C the other day, and found myself unwilling to even attempt to figure out where to match my So, on the topic of garbage collection, the latest java.net Poll asks "Could you work with a non-garbage-collected language?" Cast your vote on the front page, then check the results page for current tallies and discussion. In Java Today, Joe Darcy continues a recent run of blogs discussing the specifics of what it means for changes to be "compatible" with a case study: Compatibly Evolving BigDecimal. "Back in JDK 5, JSR 13 added true floating-point arithmetic to BigDecimal, which involved many new methods and constructors along with new supporting classes in the java.math package. I was actively involved in the JSR 13 expert group and integrated the code into the JDK. These changes had some surprising compatibility impacts which can be classified according to their source, binary, and behavioral effects." The article New Features in EJB 3.1, Part 3 is the latest installment of an ongoing series on TheServerSide by Reza Rahman, who writes, " In this third article, I'll cover two more features that have been discussed in detail--asynchronous Session Bean invocation and EJB Lite. Remember, none of this has been finalized yet. All of this is really just a peek into the inner workings of the JCP so that you have a chance to provide feedback." JavaWorld takes an in-depth look at the Wizard project in Open source Java projects: The Wizard API. "If you're faced with creating a Swing-based wizard from scratch, you'll want to know about Tim Boudreau's Wizard project. This installment of Jeff Friesen's Open source Java projects series gets you started with the Wizard API and concludes with a hands-on installation wizard that is sure to please users and impress the boss." We've updated this week's Spotlight on Collabnet's tutorial and Q&A for new java.net project owners. The tutorial, held on Thursday, is now available as an WebEx recording. To learn more about setting up and managing java.net projects (including branding of left nav, project membership, roles and permissions, setting up mailing lists, etc.), check out the stream or download the entire session. ME for Windows Mobile? Still there, as Terrence Barr reports in today's Weblogs. In Alive and kickin': Java on Windows Mobile, he writes, "recently on the Java Champions alias some people were surprised to learn that Java has been available on WIndows Mobile for some time now. Obviously we aren't publicizing that fact enough, so here we go..." In GlassFish Vee(gri)zzly(v3): Unofficial benchmarks results, Jean-Francois Arcand writes, "we are still working hard on GlassFish v3 and soon we will release a new technology preview. We have a lot to do but still, I did some basic benchmarks to see where we are right now." David Herron's OpenJDK 6, tastes great, less filling! discusses progress made in clearing the last encumbrances from OpenJDK. "I just think that with the opportunity now for any open source operating system to pick up the OpenJDK, that Java has a bright future in the open source world."
In today's Forums,
Vladimir Sizikov clarifies questions about JTHarness dependencies, in Re: Questions related to JTHarness & cqME framework for OSGi & eRCP/eSWT apps.. "There is no hard dependencies on NetBeans or any other IDE in either JTHarness or ME Framework. Both projects are buildable via stand-alone ant, completely independent from the IDE. And they don't use any IDE specific code at runtime too. JTHarness is a generic test harness/infrastructure (originally created when there were no Java IDEs at all, to test the Java SE itself), and ME Framework is an extension of JTHarness to Java ME world."
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. What's The Matter With YouPosted by invalidname on April 24, 2008 at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Looking at and modifying classes as they're loaded A few years ago while editing ONJava, we published a number of articles on fairly exotic techniques -- mostly involving bytecode manipulation and aspect-oriented programming -- to modify and transform existing Java code. There were plausible use cases, but to pull these things off, you often had to use a different virtual machine for AOP, or do some spectactularly heavy lifting for bytecode manipulation. Each approach had its adherents, but both remained pretty fringey, surely due in part to the non-standard, high-difficulty details of using them. So, if there were something built into Java SE that allowed you to inspect and modify existing classes, without recompilation and without having to wrangle JVM opcodes yourself, would that be worth further investigation? Well... In our Feature Article, Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen looks at how to Add Logging at Class Load Time with Java Instrumentation. Java Instrumentation, introduced in Java SE 5, offers an interesting ability to manipulate class bytecode as its loaded by the classloader. In this article, Thorbjørn offers a simple example of this feature by adding logging statements to the beginning and end of all methods of an arbitrary class. It's actually a surprisingly short article (only about 1,200 words, not counting code), and not an unreasonable API to get the hang of. Thorbjørn combines Instrumentation with the JBoss javassist library to do the tricky parts of modifying the bytecode. Take a look and see if this is something that might be a useful addition to your own toolkit. If you read today's blog in the next few hours (before 8:00 AM PDT, 15:00 GMT), you may want to check out the CEE Tutorial and Q&A: Tutorial For New Project Owners. Collabnet is hosting this tutorial and Q&A for new java.net project owners. You can join the online meeting with WebEx, or just the teleconference by phone. Check out the info page for specific instructions, technical requirements, and assistance. In Java Today, Pramod Gopinath and Rick Palkovic have posted a new SDN artcile on Using MySQL and Memcached on the GlassFish Application Server. "Many developers use memcached and MySQL to cache content as part of their web application. This article presents a simple example application that uses MySQL and accesses a memcached server. The application is deployed on the GlassFish application server." The newly-unveiled Trackbotcode project provides runtime libs, example and test code for Systronix TrackBots. It's a "PC-based application which connects to TrackBot through a DCE serial adapter and enables testing and characterization of all eight IR sensors on the TrackBot platform. It includes a screen-based text/graphical display of sensor response in all three sensitivity settings. Command line parameters include which pair of the eight sensors to test at a time. The code reports any errors and timeouts, and has been very useful in analyzing PC serial port performance." TheServerSide has posted sample chapter from David Heffelfinger's book, Java EE 5 Development using Glassfish. In Chapter 8, the author covers how to secure Java EE applications by taking advantage of GlassFish's built-in security features. Topic include security realms, the specifics of the admin, file, certificate, and JDBC realms, creating self-signed security certificates, and building custom realms. In today's Weblogs, John O'Conner has posted his list of the Top 10 Desktop Sessions at JavaOne 2008. "Here are the top 10, must-see Java Desktop sessions at JavaOne 2008, the Desktop sessions that will influence you the most in the coming year." In Hudson plugin for WAR/EAR deployment / Cargo support in GlassFish, Kohsuke Kawaguchi announces "a new plugin Hudson to deploy a war to app servers, and a call for help for GlassFish support in Cargo." The latest in Arun Gupta's tips series is TOTD #31: CRUD Application using Grails - Hosted on GlassFish and MySQL. "TOTD #30 explained how to create CRUD application using Grails and hosted using in-built Jetty servlet engine and in-memory HSQLDB database. Jetty and HSQLDB are good for development environment. However a robust environment such as GlassFish and MySQL are required for production environment. This blog entry walks you through the steps of deploying a Grails application on GlassFish and MySQL."
In today's Forums,
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. Another Great DividePosted by invalidname on April 23, 2008 at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)OpenJDK to add closures sub-project As I've noted in blogs over the last few months, all the major closure proposals are backed up with implementations, so it's possible for interested developers to take each out for a spin. In fact, to save you a few minutes of Googling, here are links to blog entries introducing each implementation:
Interestingly, Stephen and Mark acknowledge that their implementations are based off the OpenJDK project's emerging Java 7 codebase, while Neal's instead requires that you have JDK 6 versions of And the coupling to OpenJDK brings us to an interesting item in today's news, the announcement of an official project to bring the BGGA implementation to OpenJDK. Following a unanimous vote by members of the Compiler Group, the OpenJDK project has approved a closures project. The project was proposed by and will be led by Neal. Its stated goal is "to produce a feature-complete prototype of the Java bytecode compiler (javac) for the draft BGGA Closures specification", and will serve as the workspace for the closures effort in the OpenJDK Community Innovators' Challenge. So does this give BGGA a sort of incumbency advantage over the other proposals, given its status as an official part of OpenJDK? Let's not jump to conclusions: the others have implementations already based on OpenJDK, after all, and we won't know which (if any) are in Java 7 until the JCP takes up the issue of a Java 7 contents JSR, which is still a ways off. Also in Java Today, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart has posted some Updated GlassFish Roadmaps. "Anybody that has been in the software industry for any time knows that roadmaps are always "work in progress". With that caveat, here are the latest news:
GFv3 TP2 is a "Technology Preview" release; we will provide a sneak peek at CommunityOne and will be demoed at JavaOne. The latest edition, issue 166, of the JavaTools Community Newsletter is out, with a note about the recently-concluded FISL conference, tool-related news from around the web, news from projects, announcements of new projects in the community, and a Tool Tip on facilitating access to your open source projects at java.net. In today's Weblogs, Eltjo Boersma has posted a SailFin address and port configuration overview. "SailFin adds SIP to the JEE equation, SIP takes a slight different, more elaborate, approach on address and ports than HTTP does. Here I will provide an overview how the configuration model for SailFin looks like and how you can configure it to your needs." Chet Haase reports that he's Not Dead Yet. "Join Romain and I for another Filthy Rich Clients session at JavaOne this year." Finally, John O'Conner returns to the topic of character encoding gotchas in Encoding URIs and their components. "The JavaScript layer has its own lossy character conversion points. One of those is the escape function."
In today's Forums,
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. One Step AheadPosted by invalidname on April 22, 2008 at 07:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Keeping up with the pre-JavaOne crunch Yesterday, Joshua Marinacci blogged that JavaOne's approach is like the preparation crunch that precedes a big holiday like Christmas. In the comments, I asked if he really meant by his metaphor that he'd literally been working on JavaOne stuff for weeks, or months. He writes, "by the time JavaOne gets here, I will have spent almost two full months getting ready. Since I came back from Sydney March 11th." True dat. Over here on the editorial side, this week started with a torrent of JavaOne-related meetings, which continues today, along with the at-deadline writing of the crossword puzzles for the JavaOne Today newspaper. Throw in secret announcements, guest appearances, and an inbox that went from empty to 40 overnight, and it's clear that the crunch is on. Presumably working their own crunch to pull off a JavaOne-week release, NetBeans QA is announcing that the NetBeans Community has approved NetBeans 6.1 for FCS. "We are pleased to announce the results of the NetBeans IDE 6.1 Community Acceptance Survey that ended April 16th: 91% of respondents agree that NetBeans 6.1 is stable enough to move into FCS! (A few respondents recommended that we fix some more issues, and we will try to deliver the fixes via the Update Center as soon as possible.)" Also in Java Today, the latest SDN Mobility Tech Tip is about Using Filters With the Java ME Device Matrix. "Let's say you have a design for a mobile application, and you know what technology (JSR) is required by the platform. You then want to know: What handsets will support your design? The SDN Device Matrix is a table that lists information on hundreds of devices that run Java ME technology." The JBrowser project hopes to implement a modern web browser using java swing, with a goal of being "fully compatible with current mainstream browsers", learning from other browsers how to deal with broken web pages. Ultimately, the project owners hope to evolve the project into an RIA platform along the lines of Flex. For now, check out an early snapshot build, with initial CSS/HTML/XHTML, JavaScript, and (J)applet support. Today's Weblogs begin with some advice from Tom Ball about Testing Your Documentation. "Java developers often assume that javadoc is the only way you can automate project documentation. Writing your manual so it can be manipulated programmatically allows many projects to test that what they write, works." Returning to recent discussions about CS education, Sonya Barry asks Once we have a room full of kids, what should we teach them? "If we're able to get an after school program set up to take to middle and high school campuses, which kids should we be aiming for, and what should we teach them?" Finally, Alexander Saint Croix explores the tense relationship between JPA, enums and generics. "There is a triad of tradeoffs between enums, generics, and the current JPA specification that can lead to a lot of development headache. What are some ways to negotiate these hurdles?"
In today's Forums,
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. Hard Act To FollowPosted by invalidname on April 21, 2008 at 08:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)The conferences and unconferences of JavaOne week There's the JavaOne conference, the topic-specific subconferences (NetBeans Day, etc.) that make up CommunityOne, and then there are the "unconferences" of J1 week. Chances are you've heard about unconferences, either in general or in the form of its best known examples: FOO Camp, the Java Posse Roundup, etc. The unconference format inverts the interaction concepts of the gathering: rather than a primarily one-way communication from speaker to audience, the unconference attendees talk amongst themselves, setting their own agenda and moving from session to session as their interest level dictates (see the "rule of two feet"). CommunityOne, on Monday, May 5, had already set aside one of its tracks for an unconference, hosted by analysts from RedMonk. A day earlier, the GlassFish community will have an opportunity to do the same. The Aquarium is announcing a pre-JavaOne GlassFish Unconference. "If you have never attended an Unconference, this is your opportunity! We are hosting one for the GlassFish community the Sunday before JavaOne, at the Moscone (map). The topics and speakers in an unconference are decided by the attendees themselves (see the Open Space principles). The only thing you need to do now is to go to the Wiki page and record your intent to attend and your topics of interest; we already have 26 people." Also in Java Today, Kelly O' Hair discusses using a Mercurial "forest" of repositories and how changesets come out of that process in his new blog OpenJDK: Dude, Where's My Changeset? "Sometimes it's hard to find a changeset. Somewhat independent of the changesets flowing into the various team areas, the Release Engineering Team will use the Master area and attempt to create a promoted build, and if successful will create tags in the Master repositories to record what changesets were included in a promotion. Some people will find this whole process frustrating, but there are some big advantages. " JT Harness, the general-purpose testing harness, has announced its 4.1.3 milestone release. This release supports JUnit tests and test suites, and includes numerous bug fixes. "JT Harness 4.1.3 provides complete backwards compatibility with previous releases of JT Harness, and JT Harness users will be able to easily migrate to this release. Additionally, the JT Harness 4.1.3 release (and subsequent releases) are covered under the GPL 2 license plus Classpath Exception." More details are available in the 4.1.3 README. This week's Spotlight announces a tutorial and Q&A for new java.net project owners, hosted by Collabnet on Thursday, April 24 at 8:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time (15:00 GMT). You can join the online meeting with WebEx, or just the teleconference by phone. Check out the info page for specific instructions, technical requirements, and assistance Carol McDonald announces a Metro Web Services Hands-on Lab at JavaOne 2008 in today's Weblogs. "Fabian Ritzman, Martin Grebac and I have developed a hands-on lab on Metro Web Services for JavaOne 2008. At JavaOne hands-on labs, you bring your own laptop, this allows you to easily take home and reuse the stuff you learn in the lab." Speaking of the upcoming mega-conference, Joshua Marinacci says JavaOne is like Christmas. "I do not mean 'like Christmas' in the kid sense of 'waking up and going downstairs to open presents'. Well, it is, but that's for you guys who watch or attend JavaOne. I mean JavaOne is 'like Christmas' in the sense of rushing around for two months before the big day. " Finally, Mandy Chung is taking a first-hand look at JSR 277 and OSGi interoperability. "I recently take on a new challenge and am working on the JSR 277 and OSGi interoperability..." The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobility Podcast 42: Dalibor Topic joins Sun, in which Dalibor Topic talks about his first couple of days at Sun as the Java Free Open Software Ambassador.
In today's Forums,
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. It's A DreamPosted by invalidname on April 18, 2008 at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Do "big thought" blogs suggest what we'll see at JavaOne? So, with JavaOne just a few weeks away, thoughts naturally turn to wondering what's going to be announced. Last year, nobody could have seen JavaFX coming, so maybe there will be another surprise. But more likely, many attendees are going to be keen on an update on Java 7. It's obvious that the release date has slipped: a Danny Coward presentation (PDF), linked from a December 2006 blog, shows Java 7 coming out in mid-2008. Obviously not happening. Chris Maki posted a summary blog of Danny's Java SE road-map at JavaOne 2007, and wrote "Java SE 7 may be available just before 2009." Let's give that a qualified maybe... prior experience tells us that Java has a long beta cycle, so we'd presumably need to see a first beta announced at this year's JavaOne for an early 2009 release to be plausible. But this is all speculation. Still, it's fun, so let's speculate further. Specifically, what's going into Java SE 7 that demands a new release? After all, the dramatic changes of Java SE 6 Update 10 -- the Java Kernel, Java Deployment Toolkit, Java Auto-Updater -- didn't require API changes, so these profound changes to the VM and Java end-user experience could be made as a point update to the existing release. So what big stuff, big enough to hold for a major release of the platform (or, put another way, big enough to make a major release worth doing), are on tap? Closures has long been the big one, and that debate seems far from settled. We can also read the tea leaves of what some of the major thought leaders on the platform are posting. Two of these are featured on the front page of java.net today -- one on a design to support dynamic languages on the JVM, the other clarifying just what "compatibility" means in a Java context. On the one hand, you could look at these and say they're just talking about the big ideas, not announcing a JSR or anything more concrete, so for this stuff to make it into Java 7, that implies that Java 7 must be a long ways off. Maybe. On the other hand, you can see in these blogs that the authors have worked through the big ideas to their satisfaction, and are sharing the results for other to see. And that might indicate that big questions are getting resolved in this pre-JavaOne timeframe. The first of these deep-thought blogs in the Java Today section is John Rose's Method Handles in a Nutshell, which proposes a design for "method handles" to better support dynamic languages. "One of the biggest puzzles for dynamic language implementors on the JVM, and therefore for the JSR 292 (invokedynamic) Expert Group, is how to represent bits of code as small but composible units of behavior. The JVM makes it easy to compose objects according to fixed APIs, but it is surprisingly hard to do this from the back end of a compiler, when (potentially) each call site is a little different from its neighbors, and none of them match some fixed API." What does it mean for changes to be "backwards compatible" with previous versions of Java? Joe Darcy clarifies common misperceptions in the blog Kinds of Compatibility: Source, Binary, and Behavioral. "When evolving the JDK, compatibility concerns are taken very seriously. However, different standards are applied to evolving various aspects of the platform. From a certain point of view, it is true that any observable difference could potentially cause some unknown application to break. [...] Since not making any changes at all is clearly not viable for evolving the platform, changes need to be evaluated against and managed according to a variety of compatibility contracts." The latest SDN Enterprise Tech Tips looks at Working with jMaki Events. Author Carla Mott writes, "the following tip expands the discussion of the event mechanism in jMaki. You'll learn more about the concepts that underlie the jMaki event mechanism and how to take advantage of it to easily interact with widgets. " The latest java.net Poll asks "Do you participate in Sun's Java Bug Database (aka, "Java Bug Parade")?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for current tallies and discussion. In today's Weblogs, Simon Morris wonders if Google App Engine isn't an example of Anti-Social Networking. "We all have light bulb moments from time to time, ideas for new software which scream "code me". Google's new App Engine promises to get your ideas up and running without the traditional hassle, leaving you to focus on your code... but are there consequences further down the line?" Carla Mott offers some answers about Loading data into jMaki widgets. "I've gotten a few questions about how to get data into jMaki widgets. This blog describes the different ways in jMaki to load data into widgets."Finally, in Object Only Programming (and Modelling) Considered Silly, John Reynolds writes, "every so often I come across a blog entry that makes my own attempts to put my thoughts in writing seem pathetically inadequate. Stevey's Blog Rant: Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns is one such entry."
In today's Forums,
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. Rockin' In The Free WorldPosted by invalidname on April 17, 2008 at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)java.net projects at FISL 9.0 FISL 9.0 starts today in Porto Alegre, south Brazil (hey, next year someone please submit it to our events page), and it's interesting to note just how prominent java.net projects and communities are at this conference. Alexandre Gomes has the rundown in his blog FISL 9.0 - Time to discuss the past, present and future of F/OSS. He's posted a list of talks, and while the titles alternate between English and Portugese, it's easy for speakers of either to find project names like OpenJDK, JEDI, OFBiz, NetBeans, Mobile & Embedded, Grizzly, and, in an appropriately Brazilian twist, Projeto Marge Alexandre adds: "If you have ever been there, you know what I'm talking about. It's 3 energized days to meet people, aggregate communities, discuss technologies and talk about business and politics regarding F/OSS." Sounds like a great time, and who wouldn't want do a tech conference in Porto Alegre? Also in today's Weblogs, David Herron puts out a call to dig into the "Consumer JRE" in 6u10beta is available.. please test it..! "There is a lot of exciting stuff in 6u10 (formerly known as 6uN) .. there is a lot more here than the typical update release. Unlike most update releases where the work is limited to critical fixes, for 6u10 the changes are pretty dramatic, will be affecting a lot of things, which leaves us wanting to hear about regressions or other kinds of bugs we may have created along the path of getting to 6u10." Finally, Brian Leonard takes a look into Autovalidation with Rails. "A common question following my Ruby on Rails lectures is how to validate against a database. In this blog entry I do just that, but with the added bonus of incorporating Ajax to avoid the page submit."
In Java Today,
a new article by John Zukowski shows how to Spice up collections with generics and concurrency. "This article shows you how to work with collections while taking advantage of enhancements made to the framework in Java SE 6. You can go far beyond The Pulsar project is a Java-based peer-to-peer streaming client that allows the distribution of audio and video in the Internet, both live and on-demand. As viewers help forward the content, there is no need for strong servers. With the release of version 0.6 Pulsar has now become open-source and is hosted on java.net. Various subprojects, like the media player or its peer-to-peer protocols also work independently from Pulsar and can be reused for other projects. The SDN article From the Trenches at Sun Identity, Part 3: Federated Access Management Simplified is the latest in a series involving OpenDS and OpenSSO. In this installment, Sun senior product line manager Daniel Raskin discusses the background for merging two of Sun's access and federation management products and the new capabilities that focus on simplicity, ease of use, efficiency, and convenience.
In today's Forums,
Finally, Vladimir Sizikov explains CDC testing methodology in Re: How to use ME Framework1.2 properly for CDC Environment? "The CDC test execution is very different from MIDP one. On CDC, you don't use 'autotest' functionality and you don't download the test bundles in a loop. Instead, the agent is being started once, and then connects to the JavaTest harness on Java SE side via communication channel (TCP/IP, UDP, Serial, etc), and obtains the classes and resources via that link. Essentialy, the test agent on CDC side just creates a custom class loader to load the classes via remote link." Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. Out On The WeekendPosted by invalidname on April 16, 2008 at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)Getting Java ME running on the iPhone Some people use the weekend for lounging around the house, watching sports on TV, or at most, doing chores like mowing the lawn. Others are a little more productive. Hinkmond Wong reports that one of his colleagues spent the weekend on an important little project: getting Java ME running on the iPhone. To show it off, Hinkmond has posted a blog apparently showing Java ME running on the iPhone SDK. Along with a screenshot of the iPhone emulator showing a Java ME version string and "Hello World" output, he writes, "Here's something I'm working on with Chris Plummer and Dean Long for JavaOne this year. Chris recently was able to build our Java ME CDC/Foundation Profile platform on Darwin OS x86 (hmmm... Darwin OS... I wonder what that means... ;-) ) last weekend. (I think he started on Friday afternoon and was ready with it on Saturday). Faster than you can say, "Java ME rules!"" Pretty impressive for a single weekend's work, wouldn't you say? Also in Java Today, the Substance project has released version 4.3 of the popular look-and-feel. New features include "decoration painters", "highlight painters", better layout of menus and menu items, autoscrolling, initial support for very large fonts, tab close button usability improvements, and more. Kirill Grouchnikov has further details and screenshots in his blog. Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart has posted an Overview of GlassFish Unconference and CommunityOne on The Aquarium. "I've updated the GlassFish Event Page with the latest information on the 2008 GlassFish Unconference and CommunityOne. I have linked to 18 sessions related to GlassFish, covering AppServer, MQ, Portal, Social Software, ESB, FAM, Scripting, Persistence and Web Tier. Some of the sessions are in the GF "track", others are listed elsewhere. This means you can't be in all the sessions you likely want to attend, so bring a friend and compare notes. CommunityOne is free but space is limited. Register Now to save your place." In today's Weblogs, Sahoo announces GlassFish V3 on OSGi - Part I. "We have put back initial code that enables GlassFish V3 to run on an *OSGi* R4 platform. This is in addition to it being able to run on its own runtime, i.e., HK2. Since I have been involved in this effort from the very beginning, I will be blogging about it in days to come. Today is just the start." In Benchmarks and surprises, Fabrizio Giudici writes, "I'm posting some results from my latest benchmarks on the Metadata facility of blueMarine - take them with half a pinch of salt, since I've checked them but not double-checked, sorry but I have just a little time in these days. They gave some little surprise to me." Finally, in a catch-up blog, Terrence Barr says Dalibor Topic, welcome to Sun! "Back from a 4 week hiatus (vacation, traveling, and various bouts of flu and colds) it's time to crank up the blogging again ... starting with a great bit of news: We're excited to announce that Dalibor Topic is joining Sun..."
In today's Forums,
Scene Graph user
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. Tell Me WhyPosted by invalidname on April 15, 2008 at 07:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)Announcements in the forums Once again, it's one of those mornings where I can't get the number of interesting forum posts down to three for the front page, so I just went ahead and posted four. Part of is is that two projects posted announcements of new versions to the forums, which is a great way to get the word out about your project to a subset of the java.net community that's interested in the same topics as you are. All java.net projects have an RSS announcement feed, of course, which is a good way to get the word out to people who already know about your project, while the forums offer a way to introduce your project to people who don't know about you. And the other posts on the front page? One's an important perspective piece on ME, and the other has kicked off a good JavaFX thread. Starting with those announcements in today's Forums,
Over in the communications forum,
Finally, Jo Voordeckers describes a needed API addition in Request JavaFX Timeline feature: seek. "I'm looking for a Timeline feature that apparently doesn't exist in the JavaFX API at the moment. I want to be able to start from or fast-forward/backward to a specific position in the timeline, be it by duration, key frame, or %, features that are present in movie players. A timeline based animations is essentially like a movie IMHO." In Java Today, NetBeans 6.1 Release Candidate 1 has been published, and NetBeans.org has posted a Community Acceptance Survey, available to registered netbeans.org users. "The purpose of this survey is to find out if the NetBeans community deems NetBeans 6.1 RC1 as ready for FCS--or not. Thus we are asking everyone who has used RC1 and has developed a solid opinion about it to login to netbeans.org and take the short survey, which will be available until Wednesday 4/16 midnight in the last time zone." "It appears that much of humanity is meeting and greeting the web through handhelds -- and Java ME. It's kind of thrilling to be the tiniest part of it, even if only as someone who reports on and promotes it." In Programming for Cool Devices Using the OpenSource Java ME phoneME Stack, Janice J. Heiss recounts a session session given by Terrence Barr at Tech Days, which included an update on Java ME.
In a recent episode of the Java Posse, Dick Wall and Carl Quinn interview James Gosling at JavaPolis '07 on a number of interesting and forward-looking topics, including the addition of new Java language features versus running entirely different languages on the JVM, trusting the VM's garbage collector, C's dirty little secret ( Speaking of James Gosling, he tops today's Weblogs with a blog about real-time Java, entitled Space Junk. "Today we got to put out one of the most weirdly cool press releases that we've done in quite a while. [...] Projects like this have quite a rigorous evaluation process to get to the start of deployment. One of the fun things about the realtime version of Java is that it gets us involved in all sorts of fascinating systems. It's not real engineering until megawatts are involved. :-) Today's customer visit involved folks in the gigawatt range..." For those fixing character encoding issues, John O'Conner shows how to find Character Conversion points. "You'd think this sort of problem would be resolved by now, but it's not. It's still almost impossible to quickly and easily migrate an application from the too common default Latin-1 to UTF-8 character set encoding." Finally, Arun Gupta wraps up a Rails-oriented series in Rails and Java EE integration - Native Rails on GlassFish v3. "The last part of this tri-series blog (Part 1, Part 2) will show how a Rails application can be deployed on GlassFish - without the need of Goldspike, Warbler or any other gem or plugin. Yes, that's a native Rails app deployment on GlassFish v3." Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. Everybody Knows This Is NowherePosted by invalidname on April 14, 2008 at 06:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)When the DSL provider's lights go out I was traveling last week, and when you get home from a long trip, there's always that sensation of "OK, how badly did the house degrade in my absence?" You know the deal: weeds popping up on the front lawn, four spots of cat barf in the basement, milk in the fridge that's gone bad (wish we'd remembered to throw it out before leaving), and a bunch of messages on the answering machine. Oh, and maybe the DSL isn't working. So, you bounce the router and/or the DSL modem, or assume it's just a short outage and figure it'll be back in the morning. That's where I was Saturday morning, still with no DSL. So I called the company, and got the "all circuits are busy" message. And again. And, in fact, the next five times I tried. And it started to occur to me that this might be a good old fashioned, dot-bomb-era ISP implosion. So I used the iPhone to Google my way over to the DSL Reports forum thread where everyone else was complaining, freaking out, reporting on alternative providers or, of course, sowing mischief by pretending to be representatives of the ISP.
So, it's Monday, and I'm waiting for a new provider to send me a new DSL modem (mine's an antique that I'm not sure I can configure for their network) and get set up. In the meantime, I'm borrowing the neighbors' wifi (with their permission), having turned my tower to point the antenna towards their house, getting my reception up from one bar to two. I'm still not sure I'd trust an And here I thought that was going to be an excuse for having a short blog today. In Java Today, Ethan Nicholas has posted a new SDN article Introducing Java 6 update 10. He writes, "don't be fooled by its unassuming name: the upcoming Java 6 update 10 is a very different animal than the updates that preceded it. Java 6u10 pushes the envelope by adding more new features and functionality than in any previous Java programming language update release, including many that have been a long time coming." The article covers 6u10's major features, including the Java Kernel, the new Java Plug-In, the Java Deployment Toolkit, Nimbus look-and-feel, patching improvements, and more. The Java User Groups Community is glad to promote JUG Events, a web application to handle community events for your JUG, created by the JUG Padova (Italy) and tested during the last months by several JUGs all around the world. JUG Events is also integrated with our international JUG Map, created by the Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG (USA). These are two great examples of collaboration and creativity; check them out! The latest edition of the JavaTools Community newsletter is out, with tool-related news from around the web, announcements of new projects and recent graduations (SigTest and Eval), and a Tool Tip on managing your application tests. This week's Spotlight reprises last Friday's announcement of the JavaOne 2008 Student Program. Are you a college student? Interested in Java? Want to get into JavaOne for free? The Student Program, hosted by Sun's Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos, is a five-day program to attend the CommunityOne and JavaOne conferences in San Francisco, May 5 - 9, 2008. Participants will have full access to the conference, including general sessions, technical sessions, birds-of-a-feather sessions (BoFs), specially developed Java University classes, a coupon for a free Java Certification Class, access to the JavaOne pavilion (come see us at the java.net Community Corner), t-shirts, lunches, the AfterDark party with Smashmouth, and more. Space for this program is limited, so interested students should download the registration PDF right away. In today's Weblogs, Bruno Ghisi has some ideas for Starting with Sun SPOT using NetBeans 6.1. "If you do not have a Sun SPOT, do not be bored, you can still have a lot of fun! In this entry, I gonna explain how to start programming the world using NetBeans 6.1!" In RepaintManager's side effect, Alexander Potochkin describes "a little-known side effect of setting a custom RepaintManager or using RepaintManager.setDoubleBufferingEnabled() method" Finally, Arun Gupta offers advice for Getting Started with Grails on GlassFish. "Starting today, I plan to start publishing content on Grails and talk about how GlassFish v3 is turning out to be a home for several scripting languages - Ruby/JRuby/Rails, JavaScript/Phobos, Groovy/Grails and more to be added."
In today's Forums,
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. Oh My Golly!Posted by invalidname on April 11, 2008 at 04:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)One heck of a deal for college students Wow, you don't often see serious giftage like the announcement that Sun sent me yesterday. T-shirts? Books? DVDs? Lovely tote bags? Meh. If you're a college student, how does a free, all-you-can-eat pass to pretty much all of JavaOne sound? Yeah, I was pretty surprised too. But it's the real deal. The JavaOne 2008 Student Program, hosted by Sun's Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos, is a five-day program to attend the CommunityOne and JavaOne conferences in San Francisco, May 5 - 9, 2008. Participants will have full access to the conference, including general sessions, technical sessions, birds-of-a-feather sessions (BoFs), specially developed Java University classes, a coupon for a free Java Certification Class, access to the JavaOne pavilion, t-shirts, lunches, the AfterDark party with Smashmouth, and more. If you want to tally this up in monetary terms... this is the equivalent of a full conference pass (a US$1,595 value), plus it includes special Java University classes, so it's arguably worth even more than that. Space for this program is limited, so interested students should download and fax the registration PDF right away. Oh, and come see us at the java.net Community Corner while you're there. Also in Java Today, NetBeans.org has announced the availability of the NetBeans IDE 6.1 Release Candidate, which is now available for download. The final NetBeans IDE 6.1 release is scheduled for late April, and feedback is welcomed and encouraged on the mailing lists. Also you can win $500 USD by blogging about your experience with the NetBeans IDE 6.1; details are on the Blogging Contest page. The SigTest project is based on Sun Microsystems' signature testing and API conformance tool of the same name. The SigTest tool makes it possible to easily compare the signatures of two different implementations of the same API. It verifies that all of the members are present, reports when new members are added, and checks the specified behavior of each API member. Originally developed to help in the creation of TCK test suites, it has since evolved into a general purpose tool that can be used to compare any two implementations of an API to determine their differences. The SigTest project is being created in order to develop a community that will improve it, further its development, and use it to develop test suites. We encourage you to browse, download, contribute, and get involved. The latest java.net Poll makes the most of poll anonymity in asking the question "How far have you ever taken a dispute over code?" Arguing, yelling... fighting? Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for current tallies and discussion. In today's Weblogs, Van Riper calls for Java support in Google's new platform, in Google App Engine: Request Java Runtime. "Google App Engine sounds like a real sweet and free web application hosting environment. The problem is the only runtime supported initially is Python. Read the full post to find out how you can help get Java runtime support added." In Nexus - my next Maven repository manager, John Ferguson Smart reports "the lads at Sonatype have just released a new Maven Repository Manager, called Nexus. And it looks good!" Finally, Harold Carr announces a call for papers in CFP DOA 2008. "I'm on the program committee (my fourth time) for the Distributed Objects, Middleware, and Applications conference (DOA'08) being held in Monterrey, Mexico, Nov 10 - 12, 2008. Here is the Call For Papers. Submit something or plan on attending and discussing cutting edge middleware research." SwingX topics top today's Forums, starting with Amy Fowler's background story Re: SwingXSet3 ... "SwingLabs fans might be wondering why I rolled many of my own components instead of using those available in swingx (particularly ironic, since I had something to do with the creation of SwingLabs and swingx). I'll just come clean here. I started out thinking that since SwingSet3 would be an advertisement for what Swing offered out of the box, it should constrain itself to the confines of that box. Immediately I wrote my own rudimentary hyperlink and animating collapsible panels. And down the road when I realized I couldn't live without JXPanel, I realized the futility (and utter silliness) of this restraint." Meanwhile, Kleopatra talks about animation and window-sizing issues in Re: JXCollapsiblePane.CollapsiblePaneContainer question. "That's basically the RightThing (TM Kirill), in fact explicitly calling pack (or resizing to some previously stored size - users might have changed the dialog) is the only way to "visually validate" a top-level container. What happens here is that the animation interferes: the collapsed property change is fired before the animated size change is completed, so the pack is done on the old size. I remember that a couple of years ago I tried to use a collapsible for the details part of an ErrorPane and gave up (being impatient) Thingies could have changed since then - do we get a property at the end of the animation phase?"
Back on the server, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. All Over The WorldPosted by invalidname on April 10, 2008 at 04:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)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:
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":
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 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 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)."
Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. Here Comes Your ManPosted by invalidname on April 09, 2008 at 05:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)Dalibor gets even more involved with OpenJDK You might recognize the name Dalibor Topic from a number of times we've mentioned his blog entries in the editor's blog or in the Java Today section. Or maybe you know him as a member of the OpenJDK Governance Board, or lead developer of the F/OSS Kaffe VM. Or maybe you heard him interviewed a few months back on Java Posse, or seen him on the Posse's IRC channel. Yeah, busy guy. About to get busier too. He shows up twice in today's Java Today section, first as the author of the announcement that the OpenJDK Porters Group has approved a new project to port OpenJDK to the MIPS architecture. This Linux-based port aims to keep up-to-date with the OpenJDK base, provide client and server compilers, and generalize the port to all MIPS variants, while focusing primarily on MIPS32 and MIPS64 (currently, MIPS64 is the only implemented variant). Moreover, Dalibor has announced in his blog that he is joining Sun as a F/OSS Ambassador. He writes,:
Anyways, congratulations to Dalibor, as this is not the kind of thing that would have happened without the efforts of him and many others to nurture and grow the field of free and open source Java, both inside and outside Sun. Also in Java Today, the latest in the SDN's series of interviews with Java Champions is Better Programming With Java EE: A Conversation With Java Champion Adam Bien. In it, the self-employed consultant / lecturer / software architect / developer / author talks about the perceptions and real challenges of Java EE, the utility of EE patterns, hazards of large IT projects, the power of GlassFish, favorite features in Java SE 6, the traits and habits of effective developers, and more. In today's Weblogs, Marina Sum previews the Highlights of Java University at 2008 JavaOne. "Java University, which will begin on Monday, May 5, 2008 as part of 2008 JavaOne, is available for attendance by Conference Plus Pass and Java University Pass holders. Have a look at a synopsis of the sessions." John Ferguson Smart blogs about Cleaning up spurious SpringIDE warnings, in which he shows "how to eliminate spurious SpringIDE warnings when using multiple Spring configuration files." Finally, John O'Conner considers Another solution for non-UTF8 source files in NetBeans 6.1? "Recently I mentioned a potential problem when saving source files in a non-Unicode charset encoding. The potential data loss is significant for large projects. After thinking about the problem a little more, I have a potential solution, a solution that allows you to save to a non-Unicode encoding but also prevents data loss."
In today's Forums,
Sounds like
Finally Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. The HappeningPosted by invalidname on April 08, 2008 at 05:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Making Java's presence known at OSCON The O'Reilly Open Source Convention has published its list of sessions, including its Java track. I mentioned before that I was on the program committee again this year, and suggested that the committee was looking for talks other than the usual "state of / update on" kind of presentations (which could easily be whipped through in lightning talks). Since Java is one of several languages with its own track at the conference -- along with broader disciplines like security, desktop, and webapps -- it's important for the talks to reach out beyond the usual interests and biases of the Java audience, to appeal to people who might primarily work in other languages, or not even care about languages, per se. If your talk is right for JavaOne, it's probably wrong for OSCON. Fortunately, many of the would-be speakers got the message and proposed talks about how the open-source community has picked up the Java ball and run with it. This year's java.net-related talks include Dalibor Topic on ports and projects spun off of OpenJDK, Josh Marinacci on expanding the Java platform beyond programmers, and Roger Brinkley on extending, expanding, and porting Mobile & Embedded Community projects. There are also multiple Groovy talks -- a surprise to me, since I thought Groovy had one foot in the grave just 18 months ago -- and a ridiculously appealing talk on "Java Programming in a Multicore World", something I think would make a great article proposal (hint!) or perhaps even a book. In Java Today, NetBeans.org has announced that a new version of the Plugin Portal is now available. New features include a verification process for publishing plugins on Plugin Portal Update Center built in NetBeans IDE, comment notification via email, comment management, and more. Further information about the portal's new functionality is available in the full functional specification. Over on OEDN, a site for developers using OpenCable/OCAP/Tru2way to develop interactive television applications, Will Kreth asks Does Cable "Get It"? "It's a question that needs to be asked. Because, beyond the dichotomy of "Professionally Created Content" vs. "User Generated Content" (sometimes referred to as "UGC") -- we're rapidly moving into the territory of "User CONFIGURED Content." Content that is arranged, assembled and edited as drag-and-drop, click-to-install elements that represent the entertainment/social dashboards of their lives. The "Widget Nation" is here, and combined with the move to time-shifted video viewing, a powerful dynamic is at play." In today's Weblogs, Brian O'Neill asks What Ruby could learn from Java? (and a bit of the vice-versa), time for a Ruby Community Process? "Ruby works on a much different development cycle, that relies on the code itself for documentation, and the blogosphere for consensus. This works well for rapidly developed low-risk projects, but is it right for the enterprise?" Fabrizio Giudici digs into a Historic series of profiling data. "After fighting with some showstoppers in the NetBeans Profiler (involving RCP projects) and finding a decent workaround, I've started the tuning of the Metadata facility for blueMarine. I've already done tuning in the past, of course, but I have always had some frustration in how I easily lost the traceability of the thing." Finally, in Hudson's SCM is just converted from CVS to Subversion, Kohsuke Kawaguchi announces, "the source code repository of Hudson has been migrated from CVS to Subversion yesterday."
In today's Forums,
Desktop Java developer
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. Weird At My SchoolPosted by invalidname on April 07, 2008 at 05:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)What's happening to computer science in education? In this week's first WTF moment, I looked at Slashdot last night (yeah, I know...) and was greeted with the headline College Board Kills AP Computer Science AB. For the benefit of non-US readers, Advanced Placement (AP) is a program of advanced classes in high schools, in which students who pass a rigorous standardized test can receive college credit for their coursework. Anyways, according to the Washington Post article cited by Slashdot, an AP spokesman said that the more advanced "AB" was among the four least-popular topics, along with Italian, Latin literature, and French literature. B-trees are as unpopular as Camus? That's news. Cay Horstmann, who works on the AP Computer Science courses' Development Committee, shares some insights in his blog Is Computer Science the New Latin? He shows a graph of the rapidly dropping enrollment in college CS programs -- particularly women, for whom CS is the choice of less than 0.5% of freshmen, the lowest rate on the 35-year chart -- and asks:
There's probably a counter-argument that there are plenty of effective programmers who don't come from an academic CS background, which is a big bag of glass shards that we really shouldn't open up on a Monday. At least for the moment, let's assume that genuine CS really is worth saving. So what do we do? Cay recommends duty now for the future:
Also in today's Weblogs, James Gosling crows about Hotspot performance. "I've had several run-ins in recent months with crusty C (and a few Fortran) programmers who say "you must be faking your benchmarks!". Nope. The HotSpot crew has done a truly great piece of work." Evan Summers continues his series on re-imagining Java in First Class Java: Thoughts on a dot notation, wondering "what notation for first-class references to methods, fields, properties and what-not?" In Java Today, Joe Darcy's blog has a catch-up announcement that the source for OpenJDK 6 b07 and b08 were released in late March. "The most notable fixes in b07 were resolving the last remaining JCK signature test failure (6636951), making window decorations appear (6586752), updating to the 1.1 version of the OpenJDK trademark notification, and enabling the out-of-the-box build to succeed without any binary plugs being present (6672710). If the plugs aren't used, neither the midi synthesizer nor SNMP will work at runtime." In a new video from NetBeans.tv, Sun Microsystems evangelist David Coldrick interviews Sun JavaFX developer Josh Marinacci during the Sun Tech Days in Sydney, Australia. They discuss JavaFX and the state of desktop Java, how improvements to client-side Java (like Java SE 6 update 10) will help JavaFX, his day-to-day work on JavaFX, the prospects of Java RIA versus Ajax, the JavaFX designer tool he's working on, and more. Josh has more details of his Sun Tech Days Australia presentations in his blog. The latest JavaTools Community Newsletter, issue 164 is out, with tool-related news from around the web, a reminder to check out the java.net Community Corner pod schedule, news from projects, and a Tool Tip on presenting your project at JavaOne. In this week's Spotlight, entries are now being accepted for the RoboSim Programming Contest. The contest "is designed to test an entrant's coding skills in Java using the Greenfoot Framework/IDE to direct a simulation of a Sun SPOT equipped TrackBot through a simulated maze. The winners will receive free passes to the JavaOne 2008 Pavilion." To participate, read the rules (PDF or HTML), and follow the instructions in the trackbots-greenfoot-contest-2008 project. The deadline for entries is April 14th.
In today's Forums,
In a similar vein,
Finally, Markus Karg asks about strategies for Web Service Events. "I am using JMS quite heavily in my application to be able to push events asynchronously from server to clients. This prevents a lot of polling. Now with the advent of WS-* support in GlassFish, I was wondering whether there is a WS-* based replacement for JMS. My idea is to just write some kind of annotation like "@WebServiceEventListener" to mark a client as beeing interested in getting asynchronous events. In the end, even a MDB could become WebService-triggered instead of JMS-triggered. Is something like that existing in GlassFish, or at least planned for the future?" Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. DisappearPosted by invalidname on April 04, 2008 at 01:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Just how obvious should Java be to the end-user?
There's a pretty heated thread going on this week in the Java Plug-In forum. The discussion System Tray Madness! started off with a complaint about multiple Java system tray icons on Windows, one for each running applet. Aside from that issue, participants are debating whether it makes sense for Java to have such prominence in the system tray at all.
After a follow-up agreeing that the icon and Java splash screen are too pushy,
While that conversation continues, a sidetrack points out that refreshing the page brings up a new system tray icon, meaning that 10 refreshes puts 10 icons on the tray. That's obviously inappropriate, and bug 6683047 has been filed to fix it. So some good has already come of this contentious thread. And if you have something to add to the debate over user experience and Java's visibility, by all means, take a look. Also in today's Forums,
The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobility Podcast 41: Down Under - Sydney Mobility Days Town Hall, in which Roger leads a developer question and answer session of Australian developers at Mobility Days in Sydney. In Java Today, the Aquarium points out that the OpenSSO project has released build 4. New features include an new OpenSSO configurator, WS-Trust Security Token Service (STS) (based on Metro) is available on Glassfish, Sun Application Server, Sun Web Server, Geronimo, Tomcat and WebSphere. We're working on support in Oracle Application Server, JBoss and WebLogic Server, simplified STS client sample, configuration and/or user store replication across multiple OpenSSO instances where the embedded instance of OpenDS is in use, and various fixes. Check out the release notes or download the current stable build. The SDN continues its series of profiles of Java Champions in Better Programming With Java EE: A Conversation With Java Champion Adam Bien. The self-employed consultant / lecturer / software architect / developer / author discusses Java EE fallacies and challenges, SE 6 features, writing javadocs, GlassFish, the process of writing code, and more. XML.com blogger Rick Jelliffe complains that Java's default handling of ZIP files has been broken for nine years, and asserts that it wouldn't have happened if Java had become an ISO-certified standard all those years ago. In Reaping what you sow: How a standard for Java would have made it better today, he writes, "Software maintenance and juggling issues on a budget are not easy. However I think it is more than plausible that had Sun gone ahead and submitted Java to ISO for standardization a decade ago, this issue would have been fixed long ago. Because ISO National Bodies give very high precedence to issues such as internationalization, accessibility, modularity, and conformance." Following this week's release of a beta version of the "Consumer JRE", the latest java.net Poll asks "Have you tried out the Java SE 6.0 Update 10 Beta?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for current tallies and discussion. In today's Weblogs, Arun Gupta talks about Merb on JRuby 1.1 RC3. "This blog provides how you can get started with Merb on JRuby 1.1 RC3. Merb is another MVC framework (just like Rails) but with a pluggable ORM, JavaScript library and Template language. Rails has built-in support for these using ActiveRecord, Script.aculo.us and ERB templates." John O'Conner passes on a Call for participation: Internationalization and Unicode Conference #32. "The Internationalization & Unicode Conference is the technical conference for software and web internationalization engineers. If you have a product that implements the Unicode standard or an idea that will help others work with this standard, share your knowledge." Scott Oaks checks back in with More on the simple vs. the complex. "Is the speed of an appserver on a single request indicative of how it will handle your traffic?" Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. New SensationPosted by invalidname on April 03, 2008 at 06:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)The consumer JRE goes beta Can desktop Java be revolutionized without adding a single API? We're about to find out. The so-called "Consumer JRE" is now in beta. Java SE 6 Update 10 is "an update release that introduces new features and enhancements aimed at providing an optimized consumer-end user experience." Announced at last year's JavaOne, JDK6u10 targets deployment as a unique and important pain point in the Java SE ecosystem, one that can be addressed effectively in the short term. It's a great idea: since the changes affect the Java VM and its interactions with its host environment, and don't introduce new APIs, it can go out as an update to the current JRE rather than waiting for JDK 7. And what changes they are. The monolithic JDK of the past gets replaced by the Java Kernel, which provides just enough class libraries to get started and downloads the rest on the fly. The Java Plug-In has been completely rewritten and no longer runs as part of the browser's process, meaning that in the absolute worst case, a JVM crash doesn't take out your browser too. The Java Deployment Toolkit allows applets and Java Web Start applications to discover the installed version(s) of the JRE, and fetch a newer one if necessary. Windows users get Direct3D-based hardware-accelerated graphics. And the "Java Quick Starter" preloads parts of the JRE into memory, making it faster to cold-launch Java apps. Rather than pick off one problem at a time, JDK6u10 goes for the whole enchilada, radically rethinking Desktop Java deployment. If you haven't tried it with your applets and web start apps, try downloading it and tell us what you think. Also in Java Today, a recent EE Tech Tip, Adding Voice to Java EE With SIP Servlets, shows off how to use Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a signaling protocol that is used to set up, modify, and terminate a session between two endpoints. SIP is used to set up a two-party call, a multi-party call, or even a multicast session for Internet calls, multimedia calls, and multimedia distribution. The Tech Tip covers some of the basic concepts underlying SIP and SIP servlets. It also presents a sample application that uses SIP servlets and HTTP servlets to provide VoIP phone service. Developing 3D games for mobile devices is full of challenges, but the rich, evolving toolset enables some stunning results. In the ACM Queue article Big Games, Small Screens, Mark Callow, Paul Beardow, and David Brittain step through the design and development of Java-based games for the small mobile device, including planning, designing for scalability and multiplayer, handling assets, working through the challenges and limitations inherent in small devices, testing, packaging, and distributing your game. So why bother with all that? Because "the mobile market has the largest potential games audience ever. More than 700 million new handsets ship each year, and the majority of those are enabled for gaming in some form. That is many times the console space and encompasses a much wider range of consumers and appetites for entertainment." In today's Weblogs, Claudio Miranda updates his NetBeans utility, in NetBeans startup settings, beta version. "A long time ago I developed a small plugin (but useful) for NetBeans 5, to configure startup settings (JVM parameter, user directory, JDK). Now I have updated it to works with NetBeans 6. It is not needed anymore to hand edit etc/netbeans.conf. See more information about this plugin and screenshots." Marc Hadley looks at JAX-RS Implementations. "The Restlet team just announced a new release. Amongst the new features is support for JAX-RS, see an example here. With the RI (Jersey), Apache CXF, and JBoss RESTeasy, that makes a total of four implementations currently underway." Finally, Bruno Ghisi shows off Building a Java ME Bluetooth chat in 12 minutes... "As it was announced before, Marge 0.5 is out. In this post, I am going to demonstrate an interesting new feature called AutoConnect."
In today's Forums,
GlassFish user Gail Risdal announces a schedule update for GlassFish docs planning: GlassFish v3 Docs Meeting -- 4/03 3-4 PM PDT -- NEW TIME! "Please join us for the weekly GlassFish v3 docs planning meeting: Thurs 4/03 3-4 PM PDT **NOTE THE NEW TIME!** 866-651-9314 (US Toll-Free), 865-525-0765 (International-Caller Paid), Access code: 7538085#/. See http://wiki.glassfish.java.net/Wiki.jsp?page=GlassFishV3DocMeetings for details."
Finally, Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. What You NeedPosted by invalidname on April 02, 2008 at 05:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)More on Java web browsers Yesterday's blog about the JDIC Plus project's tight integration with the single-platform IE browser didn't kick off nearly the firestorm that one might have expected, although there was one pretty strong reaction over in the forums.
In
Re: JDICplus is ready!,
Some of the people who replied to the JDIC Plus story on JavaLobby also complained that the project might not even be necessary had Swing's HTML support been kept current and viable over the years. And there's another technology to consider: Sun announced at January's Mobile & Embedded Developer Days that they were adopting the open-source WebKit for JavaFX and JavaFX Mobile. As it turns out, they implicitly announced this last November, when they introduced their WebKit teams to
So, if WebKit can be integrated into JavaFX, will we pick up Java SE integration as part of the deal? It's an encouraging thought. After all, WebKit is fast, standards-compliant, and used by a number of popular browsers -- most obviously Safari, but Wikipedia lists others. In fact, I've been using the WebKit Nightly Builds as my browser of choice for a few months now. Getting it as a Java browser technology, one that already passes Acid3 and supports the HTML5 <video> tag, could be a real breakthrough.
Also in today's Forums,
The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobility Podcast 40: Navigon - navigation on your phone . In it, Terrence talks with Phillip Candal about their new Scabler product that has integrated mapping and GPS solution and how it was developed by J2ME Polish. In Java Today, Jim Connors shrinks the 88MB Linux JDK down to 31MB in Reduced Footprint Java SE: Bringing Java Standard Edition Down to Size. "A previous blog post demonstrated how you can, with minimal effort, lessen the disk footprint of a typical Java SE 5.0 runtime environment by about a third without violating the Java Standard Edition Licensing agreement. That post focused primarily on removing optional files and compressing class library jar files. It turns out that with a little more engineering, there is significant opportunity for further space optimization." Lucas Torri has announced the release of version 0.5 of the Marge project., just in time for the project's first anniversary. Marge is a framework to simplify development of Bluetooth applications in Java ME or SE, abstracting away some of the more complex parts of JSR 82. Check the releases page to see the 0.5 changeset. The SDN article NetBeans, Solaris, GlassFish: The Ruby's Red Slippers Fit, reports on how the Ruby landscape is turning into a gem, fueling the move to Web 2.0. "Ruby's growing popularity, as well as its support on the JVM through JRuby, plus the tooling support of the NetBeans IDE and Solaris OS support in Cool Stack, results in a complete Ruby developer environment, from tools and databases to servers and runtimes." In today's Weblogs, Scott Oaks asks What does it mean to be faster? "If a machine does a simple test faster than machine B, is machine A the faster machine for your needs?" In another JavaFX-related item, Tom Ball discusses a Divide and Conquer approach to fighting JavaOne deadlines. "Short on resources and time to deliver a solution? The JavaFX Script compiler team is, so we followed the Unix tool development rules to create a version of the javadoc tool for the language in record time." Finally, in Closure and groovy builder, Rémi Forax writes: "One think i really like in Groovy, it's its concept of Builder. It allows to simply create tree of objects like XML trees using a concise syntax. [...] Ok, so let's try to do the same in Java using the BGGA closure proposal." Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. The One ThingPosted by invalidname on April 01, 2008 at 08:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)JDIC Plus project takes a Windows-only approach The JDIC Plus project describes itself as a "a Java Win32-extension development kit, enabling developers to use extended Microsoft Windows API functionality." By implementing a semi-lightweight wrapper component around Microsoft Internet Explorer", it gives you the ability to embed functionality like a Google Maps interface or a Flash player. But, yeah, only on Windows. Kirill Grouchnikov linked to the project asking if it indicated new life for JDIC, and over on JavaLobby, Matthew Schmidt wrote, "it's good to see someone making use of the components to add enhanced integration with a key platform." Rick Ross followed up, saying "In the erea of mashups, there's little doubt that JDIC plays an important role if Java is to be a strong contender in the field of desktop applications. Just about every app I can think of these days has some need to integrate with its host OS or leverage the power of the system's default browser." However, the JavaLobby comments indicate some readers are highly dismayed by the Windows-only approach. "I have to say this project is VERY upsetting. We use Java because it is supposed to be a cross-platform tool." Pete Cox adds, "Perish the thought there's already an HTML component in Swing. If Sun had funded development of the HTMLEditorKit to be XHTML and Acid 3 compliant we wouldn't be in this mess of embedding IE/Webkit/Gecko." What it gets back to is a long-running argument of how much access to and visibility of the underlying OS Java should provide, and how much stuff Java can and should provide by itself. As functionality becomes OS-dependent, there's an obvious risk of losing the ability to run on multiple platforms. But is it practical to duplicate so much functionality that's already present on the underlying OS? And there's even a counterargument that with Windows so dominant on the desktop, how big a deal is being cross-platform anyways? OK, that's enough fuel for several fires. Have at it, y'all... Also in Java Today, the GlassFish team announces: "we have started GlassFish For Business, a news blog that will cover Deployment and Business Needs around GlassFish and will report on Sun's offerings like our Enterprise Support, Training and Partner programs. [...] I have a small backlog of relevant pieces, so there will be some catching up over the next few days. So far I've posted some overview content including: Intro to the Blog, an Overview of Enterprise Support for GF from Sun, and Yael's Screencast on Online Interactions." Citing Steve Yegge's Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns, Bruce Eckel asks Will Closures Make Java Less Verbose? Summarizing and extending Steve's argument, Bruce writes "his point is that Java has gone so overboard into "everything is an object" that it prevents simple and clear expressions of ideas. His very clever translation of Ben Franklin's poem "For want of a nail" into Java makes the point better than anything. So here's my question: if closures allow you to be slightly more verby and slightly less nouny (in Yegge's frame of thought), will it allow programmers to create programs that are easier to read?" In today's Weblogs, Kohsuke Kawaguchi takes a Deep dive into assembly code from Java. "One of the things I learned in The Server Side Java Symposium 2008 was a command-line option to print out the assembly code that JIT is producing. Since I've always been interested in seeing the final assembly code that gets produced from your Java code, I decided to give it a test drive." In NetBeans 6.1, UTF-8 encoded source files, and a tale of corruption, John O'Conner writes, "I'm always happy when a company or product adopts Unicode as its charset. I think it makes perfect sense to do so. There are lots of good reasons why standardizing on Unicode is the right thing." But with NetBeans, there can be problems, as he explains. Finally, Lucas Torri discusses ZFS, Indiana, VirtualBox and a bunch of memory sticks. "In the end of last year, I saw some slides from a presentation about ZFS from Sun, using a bunch of memory sticks to create a file system, and thought that very cool. Today, I found an article called "Playing with ZFS, USB memory disks and VMware Fusion" and decided to try it myself, but in a different way, using VirtualBox instead of VMware."
In today's Forums,
Current and upcoming Java Events :
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. | |
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