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So this is where Java 7 is going!

OK, so you've stayed with us through Mark Reinhold's blog build-up about the massive, monolithic JDK, the benefits of modularization, and the need to modularize the Java platform itself.

You might have seen where it's going, but not necessarily the implications. His concluding blog, Project Jigsaw, spells it all out. The JDK is to be modularized, via JSR 294 (now split out from JSR 277, the JAM module system, which is being back-burnered) with an OSGi-based module system that will depend on future enhancements to OSGi that allow it tighter integration with the Java language.

How big a deal is this? It's now the point of Java 7.

As a first step toward this brighter, modularized world, Sun's primary goal in the upcoming JDK 7 release will be to modularize the JDK. There will be other goals, to be sure--more on those later--but the modularization work will drive the release, which we hope to deliver early in 2010.

It will surely take a few days for the community to digest and debate the implications of all this -- do we really need a modular JDK? Does holding Java 7 until 2010 block needed changes? Is that enough time to get the closures debate settled too? An early InfoQ article also makes this interesting point that this work is apparently being done outside the JCP.

Take a look at Mark's blog, think about it, and let us know what you think.

In Java Today, Kirill Grouchnikov has managed to take an early peek at media support in JavaFX to see how it can be called from Swing applications. In Extended support for native video codecs in JMC, he writes "Remy Rakic (Twitter alias lqd) has left a link to the apparent release jars of JavaFX Desktop 1.0 in the comments on the previous entry. So i’ve decided to see whether there is anything new in the JMC department since the last time i’ve looked at it." He reports that use of the Windows JAR and DLLs allows him to play any QuickTime-supported content in Java, including H.264, MPEG-4, 3GPP and MPEG-2.

The new version (0.5) of the DTrace GUI Plugin is available for download from the NetBeans 6.5 Update Center. The new DTrace GUI has more than 30 new Chime displays that can be used to visualize the output of DTrace. You can use the new Chime displays to tune and debug applications that are written in Php, Ruby, Python, Javascripts, Java, C, and C++. languages on OpenSolaris. Basically, you can use the DTrace GUI to optimize the whole software/web stack on OpenSolaris.

Rajiv Mordani digs into the next release of Servlets in today's Weblogs. In Servlet 3.0 - from the source, he writes, "since the Early draft of the specification for Servlet 3.0 (JSR 315) the expert group has been working on refining and improving the specificaiton in a couple of areas - Ease of Development (EoD), pluggability and asynchronous support. Below is a description of things that are in the soon to be available public review to enable each of these features."

Cay Horstmann asks, Where is the source? "This semester, my software engineering class is working on a project to bring the San Jose Cinequest film festival catalog to the Blackberry. The devices are great, but developing for them is not. In this article, I argue that RIM could improve this situation by simply giving developers access to the source code."

Jean-Francois Arcand one-ups Twitter in Writing a Twitter like application using Grizzly Comet part 1: The Servlet. "Twitter is more and more popular and I've decided to write my own Twitter using Grizzly Comet. The result is amazing: 150 lines of Java code and an amazing grizzly transformed into a bird!"

In today's Forums, schaatser can't write to a local directory, in Webstart temp folder permissions problem a bug? "Webstart uses a temp folder to store the downloaded files. This folder is often not writable for our customers/users of our program. (e.g. A sysadmin installs java as administrator and the user can't write in the temp folder of the administrator off course). This results in "failed to load application". Can I consider this a bug in Javaws? It should prompt the user to select a folder if javaws cannot write to its cache/temp folder. To simply fail is not a good way to give confidence in our program."

We've followed the thread about Java versions in the wild for a while, and cowwoc wants participants to update their code. In Re: Tracking Java Versions using Google Analytics, he writes, "I just posted an improved script for detecting Java versions. Please take a look and report your new data: http://cowwoc.blogspot.com/2008/12/tracking-java-versions-using-google.html. Thank you."

nicoley hopes to get the attention of all Project Wonderland users in WonderBlog - Important 0.5 blog post. "I think some of us may have mistakenly assumed that everyone who is reading the Wonderland forum is also reading WonderBlog (http://blogs.sun.com/wonderland/). I would encourage everyone to subscribe to the blog, but in case you don't, those of us who are writing blog posts will try to be better about posting a sentence or two description of each blog post on this forum so you can check out the blog if you're interested in the topic. In case you missed it, please take a few moments to read yesterday's post by Jonathan Kaplan: Towards Wonderland 0.5 (http://blogs.sun.com/wonderland/entry/towards_wonderland_0_5) In this message, Jon explains the rationale behind the 0.5 release and the plan for the next several months."

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Comments

• modularising the JDK (and JRE I assume) would be a bad idea. It would lead to situations where it's impossible to know which parts of even the standard/core platform are available on a client machine, making distribution cumbersome (always ship a full set of everything you need just in case it's not there already) if not impossible.
  Instead effort should be put in getting rid of things that aren't needed as part of the core platform, like JavaDB, SOAP stacks, HTTP servers, XML parsers, and things like that which should be external to the core platform. I'd even go as far as to state that GUI libraries should be removed from the core platform (so AWT and Swing) and once again (as they were initially) distributed as optional components.
  If that's what you mean by "modularising", I'm all for it. If (as seems to be the case) it means taking the core libraries themselves and making it impossible to know whether they exist on a client machine, forget about it.

  Posted by: jwenting on December 04, 2008 at 10:59 AM

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