Editor's Daily Blog

Wish Fulfillment

How would you like your 6u10 beta updates served up?

We got a request for this week's poll, which is something we're pretty hesitant about because the poll was never meant to be a particularly valid scientific survey, and functions more as a jumping off point for conversations. Last week's, about JavaOne reactions, spawned a heated debate about the merits of JavaFX and the future of Desktop Java.

So when asked to run a poll, the question was: "is this something a lot of people care about, and will want to talk about?" And the answer, this time, is yes. But what's the question? It has to do with Sun's policy for auto-updating the Java SE 6 Update 10 beta. It's easy to see several different sides to this. On the one hand, thorough testers may want access to previous versions to be able to study regressions, to know for sure that something used to work and doesn't now. But really, most of us aren't that rigorous, and maybe it's better to send us new builds as soon as possible, so we don't waste time filing bugs that have already been fixed. And there are probably other arguments: shouldn't testing the auto-update system be an important test in itself?

We think there's probably a lot to talk about here, so if you're working with Java SE 6 Update 10, then please participate in the new java.net Poll, which asks "When should Java SE 6u10 beta perform an auto-update?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for current tallies and discussion.

In Java Today, Barton George has posted a podcast on OpenJDK and IcedTea, A view from the Fedora side. " Last week, on the first day of JavaOne, I was serendipitously able to grab Tom Fitzsimmons, (the owner of Iced Tea) Patrick Macdonald (Tom's boss) and Karsten Wade (community contact for OpenJDK) from Red Hat for a podcast.  We sat down and talked about the journey to get OpenJDK into Fedora that began in earnest last JavaOne."

Over on The Aquarium Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart has an update on GlassFish's JSF/Ajax component-building project in Woodstock 4.2 released. "Woodstock 4.2 was released before JavaOne, aligned with NetBeans 6.1. You can download it through NetBeans or directly Here

Qusay Mahmoud, a Java Champion and ME Community Star, from the Centre for Mobile Education Research along with Research in Motion are hosting the Faculty Summit on Mobile Devices in CS Education at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario Canada. This event is for faculty members interested in integrating mobile devices into their courses and across the CS curriculum. The summit will provide a unique opportunity for CS educators at the college and university levels to learn about the potentials of integrating mobile devices in CS education. Attendees will enjoy a day of talks, tutorials, and demos from faculty members, industry speakers and students.

Jean-Francois Arcand talks up Grizzly's OSGi bundles in today's Weblogs. "Grizzly has OSGi bundles available for a while, but we haven't made any noise about it yet. Since OSGi is the current buzz, let's the monster enter the buzz circus..."

In Hudson@JavaOne, Rama Pulavarthi writes, "Kohsuke and I talked about "Improving the Engineering Process Through Automation by Hudson" at JavaOne last week."

Finally, in WAR-based Packaging and Deployment of Rails on GlassFish - Goldspike, RailServlet, Warbler, Rack, ..., Arun Gupta writes, "WAR-based packaging and dispatching of Rails application on Java Application Servers is going through third iteration based what is used for packaging and dispatching."

In today's Forums, mishela needs some guidance for Getting informations about JFX classes. "I have a small problem. Since the compiled version of JavaFX Script changed, I cannot find some informations about classes. The JavaFXPad has a code-completion, but it's old. And in Netbeans, when I make Ctrl + Left Click on a class (exactly the Color class), there is a NullPointerException. I need to find the constants in the class Color.fx. There is nothing about this in the JavaFX API. I tried to download this (look into trunk/src/javafx/javafx/ui/), but it's also old (8.10.2007). And I need informations about some other classes, too. Can somebody tell me where to find it please?"

andrewherron provides a little real-world perspective on applet behavior in Re: Lifecycle methods in new Plugin. "Weirdness with start/stop/destroy has been around for years, the team I work on just took to completely destroying our applet at the slightest sign of the browser closing it (also necessary due to memory leaks in FireFox2). Makes subsequent startup a bit longer but it's the only way to be consistent across browsers and platforms. Not to mention I've seen browsers that occasionally call componentHidden(), stop() and destroy() off the swing thread."

chaose71 explains possible causes of a transparency problem in Re: Transparency: I can see A through B, but not B through A. Why? "3D Transparency is always a tricky thing. To render transparent triangles, they have to be ordered according to their distance to the eye point (painter algorithm). Even that would be a bad solution, since it does not cover situations when two triangles intersect, but it is the best that can be done with current hardware. If your scene contains transparent and non-transparent objects, it gets even worse: the non-transparent triangles have to be rendered first (with z-buffer enabled) and the transparent triangles afterward - with zbuffer disabled. That is also the reason why it can happen that you see A through B but not vice versa if the triangles are not rendered in the correct order."

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• May 16-18 - Greater Atlanta Software Symposium 2008
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• May 19-23 - Daring Java Conference: Java to Celebrate Its 13th Birthday at Bangalore
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• May 19-23 - J2EE Training Philippines
• June 6-8 - Lone Star Software Symposium 2008: Dallas Edition
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