Editor's Daily Blog

American Boy

A brief holiday blog

It's the Independence Day holiday here in the U.S., so today's blog is going to be kind of short... I want to get the kids in the car and off to the Lake Winnie amusement park -- and for those of you who follow the link, is that not the most unusable website you've seen since the mid 90s? -- before the crowds get too big. After all, now that our son is big enough to go on roller coasters, and likes them, it's well worth the admission fee. Our daughter wants to go on the coaster too, but being only three years old, she'll have to stick to the kiddie rides just a bit longer.

However, we do have a fresh front page for you, packed full of interesting new Java goodness.

The latest JavaOne Community Corner Podcast is j1-2k8-mtW03: Comet and Bayeux by Kevin Nilson. Ajax has become quite popular as websites have become richer and richer. Ajax allows a page to periodically request data from the server. Comet, on the other hand, allows the server to push data to the client at any time. Comet applications are starting to redefine the capabilities of Web 2.0 applicaions. Bayeux, which is still in daft, is the first standard to define a comet based transport protocol. This talk will discuss the basics of Comet and Bayeux.

In Java Today, The Aquarium points us to More Project Fuji screencasts: "Keith Babo has released a new ten minute screencast on Project Fuji's interceptor feature which intercepts messages as they travel across the NMR (Normalized Message Router) to implement alerts, auditing, validation, security, routing, and many more useful scenarios in a very non-intrusive way. [...] Project Fuji was announced at this past JavaOne and is the next generation OpenESB architecture based on GlassFish v3, OSGi, and JBI."

In an e-mail to the OpenJDK "announce" list, Mark Reinhold has announced the approval of the Common VM Interface project. "The goal of this Project is to provide a documented VM interface for OpenJDK which will significantly lower the barrier for entry for both existing Classpath VMs and any other VMs that may wish to use OpenJDK in the future."

Sun's Brian Goetz continues a series on the use of wildcards in generics, in the article Going wild with generics, Part 2. "Wildcards can be very confusing when it comes to generics in the Java language, and one of the most common mistakes is to fail to use one of the two forms of bounded wildcards ("? super T" and "? extends T") when needed. You've made this mistake? Don't feel bad, even the experts have, and this month Brian Goetz shows you how to avoid it."

The latest java.net Poll asks "How much of your work time is spent maintaining / updating old code?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page for current tallies and discussion.

In today's Forums, terrencebarr offers ME performance tips that don't require magic VM improvements, in Re: How to reduce the loading time of a midlet? "Furthermore, we have found that poor start-up performance is often related to the MIDlet itself. General best design practices indicate that you should do late initialization in the MIDlet start-up, spread out time-consuming tasks, and pre-process resources (such as images) during build time, if possible. Observing such guidelines can reduce the perceived start-up up a MIDlet dramatically without any VM tweaks."

Speaking of performance, airwin wonders about performance and validation in JAXB. "The documentation mentions that a JAXBContext is expensive to create and designed to be thread safe, so as suggested I keep a Singleton version. However it also says that the Unmarshaller is not thread safe, yet I'd think it would be expensive to create due to the schemas that are required to be passed to it (I'm assuming it parses the schemas in prep for validation, please let me know if I'm wrong here). Is the normal design to create a new Unmarshaller for each call into the handler? Is this expensive?"

Hinkmond Wong reports on nasty challenges porting phoneME Advance to Palm in Re: Volunteer needed to port phoneME Advanced to Garnet OS / Palm. "It looks like using our already existing ANSI and POSIX porting layers in pMEA to hook into PalmOS is harder than expected. No stdio and pthreads is one thing (we could work around that), but no float.h, and no File I/O makes a bad situation even worse since it compounds the need for workarounds into many areas instead of just two. Ack!"

tjwolf asks Does anyone know if JDK 7 (or before)'s JTable will have a Column Control? "JXTable has a nice concept of a column control popup which the JDK's JTable lacks (as far as I know). Does anyone know whether there are any plans to enhance JTable with this feature? Since in the past year or so, there were some comments about various feature development on JXTable having been suspended, I want to move back to JTable if I can. This is the only feature holding me back."

In today's Weblogs, Jean-Francois Arcand looks at Extending the Grizzly HTTP Runtime. “Project Grizzly provides developers with a simple and consistent mechanism for extending the functionality of the Grizzly HTTP Runtime and for bridging existing http based technology like JRuby-on-Rail, Grail, Servlet, the Bayeux Protocol or any http based protocol."

In JavaFX Innovations: Inline Examples and Screenshots, Joshua Marinacci writes, "one of the innovations in the JavaFX toolchain is our new javafxdoc tool. Rather than producing a set of html files like regular 'javadoc' does, we produce a single large XML file representing the entire codebase's API. This lets us easily add extra processing steps, such as producing semantic wellformed XHTML as you see today."

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• July 11-13 - Lone Star Software Symposium 2008: Austin Edition
• July 18-19 - Salt Lake Software Symposium 2008
• July 21-25 - O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2008
• July 25-27 - Central Ohio Software Symposium 2008
• July 25-27 - Desert Southwest Software Symposium 2008
• August 25-28 - Dev Week India 2008

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.

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