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Posted by editor on September 5, 2008 at 7:01 AM PDT


Wrapping up another year of mini-talks

JavaOne was back in May, and as we have for the past few years, we recorded all our Community Corner mini-talks on a digital recorder, feeding them out twice a week as the JavaOne Community Corner Podcast.

We've now reached the end of this year's talks with
j1-2k8-mtH10: Using Kepler's Orrery for teaching Planetary Science by Mae Linh Blake.
Kepler's Orrery is an interactive gravity simulator that composes and plays generative music while visually demonstrating the physics of gravitational attraction. Not only is Kepler's Orrery a pleasing simulation for the eye and the ear, but it can be used as a powerful tool to teach gravity and how delicate of a balance our solar system is in.

We've done the mini-talks the same way for a couple years, and it's worth taking stock of whether they're valuable to the community. We have a real problem when mini-talks are scheduled against technical sessions, as it leaves the speakers addressing a nearly empty audience section in the booth. Next year we might opt for some kind of change and only have mini-talks during the open parts of the schedule, perhaps doing something else with the tech session times, like recording one-on-one interviews with project owners for the podcast. But that would make the race for the few mini-talk slots even fiercer, so we're not sure that's the right thing to do. Anyways, next year's a long way off, and we haven't decided.

Still, it's worth asking if the mini-talk podcast is something the community values and appreciates. So the latest java.net Poll asks "How many of this year's java.net JavaOne mini-talk podcasts did you listen to?" Cast your vote on the front page, then go to the results page for current tallies and discussion.

In Java Today,

Roman Kennke reports on an experiment to implement Cacio Swing AWT peers for OpenJDK's portable GUI backends project. "The last couple of days, I was [...] writing some new interesting stuff for Caciocavallo. Inspired by the old Swing based AWT peers of GNU Classpath, and the X11 peers of OpenJDK, here comes the shiny new Swing based AWT peers of Caciocavallo and OpenJDK. The idea is this: implement a set of AWT widget peers, which are not backed up by Motif, Win32, GTK or Qt (the traditional implementations of (Open)JDK and GNU Classpath), but, as the names says, by Swing!"

The NetBeans/BlueJ team has uploaded a new multilingual version of the first full release of a BlueJ plugin for NetBeans IDE 6.1 onto the stable NetBeans Update Center. Therefore, there is now no longer a NetBeans BlueJ edition, but instead a plugin on the update center that installs into NetBeans IDE 6.1. For all the details, see Getting Started with the NetBeans BlueJ Plugin.

TheServerSide's Joseph Ottinger hopes to clarify discussions of enterprise Java by going back to a fundamental question: What is an App Server?
"Chances are good that the average reader thinks a Java application server basically provides an implementation of the servlet specification, probably an implementation of JavaServer Pages, and perhaps some more services like database connection pooling.1 An application server is more and less, at the same time: an application server provides an environment where applications can run, no matter what the applications are or what they do."

In today's Weblogs, Terrence Barr takes stock of
M&E Community Growth: 180 projects, almost 20,000 activities per month! "I've been wanting to post data on the growth of the M&E Community for some time now ... but somehow I always got distracted trying to pull together the stats. Turns out that compiling meaningful statistics is harder than you think and the web technology sometimes gets in the way, too. But here, finally, are some numbers - and they're loooooking goood."

Jean-Francois Arcand checks out Google's much-discussed new browser and asks
Google Chrome and Grizzly Comet: does it works? "The buzz around Google Chrome attacked me...just to make sure Chrome supports Comet, I did try using the monster implementation to see if sockets in Chrome works with Grizzly Comet (and Java). Guess what?"

Finally, Fabrizio Giudici reports he's Resuming work on jrawio. "jrawio is an ImageI/O plugin for "camera raw" image formats. I've started writing it a few years ago for my Nikon D100, and later extended it for working with a larger number of formats. As far as I know, it is currently the only 100% pure Java code able to read all the parts of a "camera raw" file, including the raster."

In today's Forums, mthornton explains Java design choices in
Re: Copy-on-write optimization for StringBuilder and StringBuffer. "If the StringBuffer's array is significantly bigger than the current length, then copy on write wastes a lot of memory (because that unused space becomes 'locked' by the String). A variety of strategies have been tried in the past but all created performance penalties for some types of code. The current approach is simple and has easily understood performance characteristics, albeit slower in some cases."

muzaffercoruh reports a
Java NIO on windows performance problem for high traffic. "I use java NIO and I m very happy for its performance in small time range. My usage is that, I have one server machine work on 64bit java (Windows 2003). 20 client applications(32bit) in the same and very huge machine (8CPU-16GB RAM-Windows 2008) and totally all clients have 500 request/recieve per second. Every client has its threaded structure and I make pooling these threads with thread's nio connection so for every client almost 40-60 connections alive. My server application works very well. But after my clients start, almost one hour later my client's CPU goes 90% and most of this is kernel process. After I stop my clients, 1-2 minutes overhead continues. I think there is some problem with NIO and Windows. Is it necessary to do some configuration on windows? Or something else?"

Paul Taylor says that Java SE 6 improvement won't help him with SwingX performance problems, as explained in Re: Bug or feature: JXTable repaint on cell update. "Slow vertical scrolling in my application is one of my biggest headaches, and this is exacerberated by having two synchronized tables (recno and main table) . Ive spent alot of time optimizing my cell renderers but it didnt make much difference, and I think the problem is the one you describe. So please provide a fix , it could be optional and disabled by default to preserve backwards compatibility. The majority of my customers are Mac users , and since Java 1.6 is only available on Mac OSX 10.5 AND on Intel machines only I'm not going to be able to drop Java 1.5 support anytime soon."

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Wrapping up another year of mini-talks

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