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Posted by editor on November 10, 2008 at 7:28 AM PST


Have concerns over Swing's future been overblown?

Last week, the discussion that started with the much-delayed news that SwingX hasn't been funded since July, and was followed up by Kirill Grouchnikov's conclusion that it marked the beginning of the end for Swing, got a lot of people concerned about the future of Swing, and speculating that Swing was being sacrificed in favor of JavaFX. There's also a significant discussion of Swing's future over on this week's java.net poll.

Have these concerns been overblown? In today's Weblogs, Fabrizio Giudici says Guys, don't panic - Swing is here to stay. Pointing out the difference between the Swing libraries and the SwingX project, he writes:

Sun stopped funding SwingX, not Swing. SwingX is however an open source project and if people like it, should just keep on supporting it. Pardon my frankness: Sun for sure makes a lot of communication errors, it must improve the interface with the community, but too many people saw Java open sourcing as a "Santa Claus moment": Sun speding lot of money and delivering free software to people. It's not the way opensource works. If you like SwingX and use it, and if it's strategic to you, consider funding the developers, Jeanette and the others. It's the way opensource works: let's not forget that it's still a market thing

As for the JavaFX side of this discussion, Richard Bair talks about Sun's commitment to Java(FX) Enterprise Development. "There's been a lot of rumor recently about enterprise Java development and where its headed, and what Sun's commitment is, particularly with regards to JavaFX. Here I talk about some of these issues. Questions welcome!"

Finally, James Gosling himself notes that
We've been cranking!
"Just in case you hadn't noticed, in the waves of election-mania, Sun has been cranking out a pile of great software releases recently."

In Java Today,
The Aquarium passes along a release announcement and an event listing: "the latest release of the
Seam Framework
(2.1) now formally
title="Chapter 39">Supports GlassFish.
Dan Allen will give a
Webinar
on November 20th on the topic
(you may want to add it to your calendar),
but another member of the Seam community,
Jay,
has written a
nice note
showing more examples."

Please join Sun's Arseniy Kuznetsov, director of NetBeans Engineering, Mark Dey (NetBeans 6.5 Release Boss), and John Jullion (NetBeans Web Tier Mgr) for a one hour technical call Wednesday, November 12th at 0800am Pacific; 11am US East Coast; 5pm Europe. There will be 30 min of slides and 30 min Q&A...we may go longer for the Q&A. The topic will be "Web Tier Programming in NetBeans 6.5 and Beyond". We'll look at some of the new and cool functionality in NetBeans 6.5, talk about the Project Woodstock status, and look at the future direction of web development in NetBeans. Call-in information and advance registration are available on the event's Eventbrite page.

In TheServerSide's latest technical article, Bahar Limaye introduces the concept of Intercepting JNDI Filters. "Suppose you have an existing J2EE application with EJB's, RMI objects, JMS destinations and other objects bound into a JNDI registry. During the course of the project schedule, you need to make significant changes to the underlying architecture, re-define business processes and/or need to identify transactional/performance problems. Without a proper framework in place, it can be difficult to make "non-intrusive" changes to an existing system without rippling side effects. This article presents a simple filtering framework to "intercept" JNDI operations and objects in a non-intrusive way (without code changes or the overhead of AOP systems). You can "peek-into the JNDI subsystem" and fully control the behavior of an application."

This week's Spotlight is on
the Election Ballot, which is now available for registered Java Community Process members to vote in the JCP 2008 Election. This year, there are two seats open on the SE/EE Executive Committee, and two seats available for the ME Executive Committee. Candidates for the SE/EE EC are Intel Corp., Werner Kiel, Matthew McCullough, and Shashank Tiwari. On the ME EC, the candidates are Aplix Corporation, Sean Sheedy, and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB. Each JCP member has two votes for each committee, which can be cast for two candidates, or for the same candidate twice (the member can also abstain from voting on either EC altogether). Balloting ends Monday, November 17.

In today's Forums,
vladbalan asks
How does an explicit lock() call prevent dirty reads in JPA? "I'm trying to understand the behaviour of the EntityManager.lock() call. The Sun documentation ( http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/api/javax/persistence/LockModeType.html) on this is a bit confusing for me and i will explain why. It says that if T1 calls EntityManager.lock() on an entity, then T2 couldn't make a dirty read. Also i read here (http://www.nabble.com/JPA-locking-td19525631.html) that " The lock() API acquires an optimistic lock, not a pessimistic lock. It means that the version will be checked, or updated on commit, it does not matter when it is called in the transaction, as the check occurs on commit." So it does not matter when the lock call is made. Ok, now let's imagine the following typical scenario of the dirty read in a time-point follow-up..."

onacit wonders if it's possible to do
JAXB without Annotations? "Is there any way to work with JAXB without annotations? I mean with some 'bind.xml' or somethin'... I'm working on some projects which each has to build out for both jdk1.1(client) and latest(server). I usually design with PURE Pojos (s1.3/t1.1) and build another artifact for jaxb annotations."

If you're interested in doing someone else's homework for them, blazinginferno plays the pity card in
Java assignment help. "Hi there, I have an assignment due in a couple of days and I need some help. I don't have time to read a Java books. Plus, my teacher is useless as he can't explain anything...and the TAs are worst. My error is in line 145 (scroll down) saying "illegal start of expression". I didn't have this error before I added the movement command. Any help is greatly appreciated."

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Have concerns over Swing's future been overblown?

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