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Learning long-distance collaboration early

With distributed development so much the norm nowadays, doesn't it make sense that there are good and bad ways to do it? And if so, is there any way to learn best practices other than through bitter memories of outsource projects gone bad? Is remote development something that can, and should, be learned in school?

The latest JavaOne Community Corner Podcast is about taking exactly this approach. In the mini-talk j1-2k8-mtT03: Effective Teamwork Assessment Using java.net, Dragutin Petkovic presents the results of a software engineering class jointly taught for the last three years between San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the University of Applied Sciences, Fulda University, Germany. In his talk, you'll learn about how they arranged students in each class into teams and let them learned how to sink or swim together, as distributed teams, collaborating across two continents.

It's a useful experience to have, so why not get it early?

Today's Weblogs start to get away from JavaOne wrapups and on to new topics inspired by the conference, starting with John Ferguson Smart's A short primer on Java enums - part 1. "In his JavaOne talk this year, Josh Bloch gave some very useful tips about using enums in Java. Here is my take on enums, and how to use them to represent simple value lists which would otherwise be stored in code tables."

Rajiv Mordani looks ahead to the next version of the servlet API in JSR 315 Needs YOU: Response to Greg's blog, describing "the other side of the coin to Greg Wilkins blog describing the pluggability / auto-scanning feature in servlet 3.0."

Pulling together more of her material from last week, video blogger Rachel Hill and Josh Marinacci have put together a Rich Internet Applications Pavilion Floor Debate. "Josh and Rachel again hit the pavilion floor and get caught up in a debate over rich internet applications, their purpose, their usefulness, and, once again, what exactly they are."

In today's Forums, blackfrancis007 seems to have a touch-screen mobile device, and wants to know How to implement drag & drop with J2ME CDC. "I would like to use drag & drop in a PDA application. I would be using J2ME CDC, and I don't find on the J2ME javadoc the interfaces used on J2SE to implement the drag & drop (DragGestureListener, DropTargetListenner,...). My question is : is there any way to implement the drag & drop using J2ME CDC, and if not how is implemented the drag & drop on the PDA applications (because it seems to me that it's a basic concept of the PDA programmation)?"

psychostud is looking for a Swingx RoadMap. "We are planning to use swingx in our upcoming swing project... we would like to have an idea about the future roadmap and a relase schedule of swingx components."

Finally, mipe is wondering about JavaFX drawing performance. "I am trying to develop a simple hand drawing tool as my first JavaFX application. The Polyline class seemed to be the handy solution to for the task. I realized that the code quoted below gets pretty slow when the number of points in Polyline grows beyond some hundreds. On my PC (1200MHz Athlon) it is about 200 points where the drawing slows down. I guess it slows down because of the frequent repainting calls of all the points (lines) of Polyline. My question is whether JavaFX programming/scripting language and its ready made classes could provide better performance to support a hand drawing tool or any vector graphic like application? Or shall I dig deeper and implement my own canvas class or similar which does fast painting of the content when drawing on it?"

The Java Today section catches up with results from JavaOne-timed competitions and awards. First, the NetBeans Community has announced its Blogging Contest Winners. "We would like to thank everyone who participated in the NetBeans IDE Blogging Contest! We had nearly 300 entries. The top 10 entrants will receive a $500 American Express gift certificate. The top 100 entrants will receive a NetBeans T-shirt. All winners will be contacted via email in the next two weeks (by May 23) to confirm mailing address."

At JavaOne, the Java Community Process program office announced the winners of the 6th annual JCP awards. The Apache Software Foundation was named member of the year, and Patrick Curran the participant of the year. In the SE/EE track, JSR 294 (Improved Modularity Support in the Java Programming Language) was named Most Innovative JSR, with JSR 286's Stefan Hepper the Most Outstanding Spec Lead. In ME, JSR 290 (Java Language and XML User Interface Markup Integration) got the Most Innovative JSR award, with JSR 293's Jaana Majakangas named Most Outstanding Spec Lead.

The lastest edition, issue 168 of the JavaTools Community Newsletter is out, with impressions from JavaOne, tool-related news from around the web, a new project in the community, and a Tool Tip on Groovy SQL, DataSources and transaction management.

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• May 12-15 - Java Power Tools Bootcamp
• May 16-18 - Greater Atlanta Software Symposium 2008
• May 16-18 - Greater Oklahoma Software Symposium
• May 19-23 - Daring Java Conference: Java to Celebrate Its 13th Birthday at Bangalore
• May 19-23 - Great Indian Developer Summit 2008 Features Co-located Conferences on Java, Rich Web and .NET
• May 19-23 - J2EE Training Philippines
• June 6-8 - Lone Star Software Symposium 2008: Dallas Edition
• June 18-20 - TheServerSide Java Symposium-Europe
• June 20-22 - Research Triangle Software Symposium 2008
• June 23-26 - Jazoon'08

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