If you work on or closely follow any java.net projects, you've probably noticed the banner that has been displayed on project pages for the past couple days:

java.net will migrating to a new CMS platform this weekend and will begin the shutdown at 5pm Pacific Time on Friday August 21st. The site will be inaccessible until early morning Pacific Time, Monday August 24th. Please plan your work accordingly.

Sonya Barry provides more details in her latest blog post, Big changes under the hood for java.net.

java.net has been around for a while now -- for quite a few years, actually. For example, the first java.net article was published on June 10, 2003. Now, as we all know, technology changes quite a lot in any six year period. In the 2003-2009 period, one of the big changes in online technology is what Tim O'Reilly has called Web 2.0.

So, does "big changes" mean that following this weekend java.net is going to look like Facebook for JVM developers? Well.. not quite! A few things might look a little different, but the main objective for this initial transition is to move from a fairly rigid CMS infrastructure that was hand-crafted by O'Reilly engineers to meet a need starting in 2003, to a more modern infrastructure that brings with it opportunities for enhancement and expansion of the capabilities java.net can offer its user community going forward.

In my opinion (I've participated in most of the transition meetings in the past month or so) the Number 1 objective of the initial transition is: don't lose functionality. It's a big change, a big jump, from the old O'Reilly platform to the new platform. Enormous amounts of content must be migrated from the old custom-built O'Reilly data archives to the new platform. That's a big enough step that only a few actual enhancements are being put into place in this initial conversion.

What are the enhancements? For one, captchas for comments in many areas of java.net. If you're a regular java.net visitor, I'm sure you're as tired as I am of seeing (and dealing with, in my case) spam comments. Implementing captchas in the old system was a development task. With the new infrastructure it's a setting, a switch. Right there, you can see why moving to a modernized infrastructure makes sense.

Sonya summarizes the most important changes project owners and community leaders will see:

Project owners will see a couple of new things - they'll have access to the data contained on their project's node page, and we've also implemented a few things to make communication between owners and their community leaders easier and more automated as new projects get up and running.

Finally, the biggest changes will be for the Community Leaders. For a long time we've had a pretty horrifying system that required our leads to make duplicate entries about project status and location in the community hierarchy between two different databases. It was not a user friendly process and led to a lot of delays and miscommunications when new projects were created. Some of those tasks have been automated now and email templates have been created making it easier for leaders to maintain communication with new project owners.

So, starting next week, if you're actively involved in a java.net project or community, you'll see some changes. Otherwise, you might wonder "what's all the fuss about?" Well, once we have a modern infrastructure in place, it becomes much easier to add new features and enhancements that will enable java.net to evolve with the times. That was pretty difficult in the past. I mean, O'Reilly was ahead of the times in coming up with the original CMS that has supported java.net all these years. But O'Reilly is not fundamentally a software development company. Our core business is publishing, editorial services, and researching emerging technology and technology trends.

Sonya sums up the benefits of going to the new infrastructure well:

With this new system in place we'll be moving to the permanent beta model for improving the site at large. We'll start rolling out improvements and adding new modules on a regular basis which we think will be a major improvement for every user. These improvements will include personal profile pages, organic groups (which should be great for JUGs), and a better social model overall.

So, the schedule is that java.net will not be available in its normal operational mode starting on Friday at around 5:00 PM U.S. Pacific time (that's Midnight GMT Saturday morning, if I'm not mistaken). We're hoping to be again fully functional on Monday.

In Java Today, java.net Community Manager Sonya Barry announces Big changes under the hood for java.net: "We'll be down this weekend, and when we come back Monday things might look a bit different around here. So what are we doing? A few months ago we engaged Cognisync to build out a new, Drupal-based content management system for us, to replace the one that has historically been hosted and maintained by O'Reilly. Why this? Why now? While O'Reilly will continue to provide editorial services (by Kevin Farnham who maintains our front page among other things) they wanted out of the hosting business. We've also been looking for years for ways to modernize the site. This is the first big step in the that direction. So what's in it for the community? ..."

Adam Bien writes about Value Object vs. Data Transfer Object (VO vs DTO) in his latest post: "The pattern which is known today as Data Transfer Object was mistakenly (see this definition) called Value Object in the first version of the Core J2EE Patterns. The name was corrected in the second edition of the Core J2EE Patterns book, but the name "Value Object" became very popular and is still used as an alias for the actual DTOs. There is, however, a real difference between both patterns..."

NetBeans Dream Team member Chris Richardson announces that Cloud Foundry is now part of SpringSource: "I have some very exciting news to announce today.  Cloud Foundry has been acquired by SpringSource and is being launched as SpringSource Cloud Foundry.  As a result, I am now a SpringSource employee, and I couldn't be more pleased. Who would have guessed that my experiments two years ago with a then relatively obscure Amazon service called the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) would eventually lead to today's events?  Those early experiments that resulted in the Cloud Tools open-source project, then became the basis for my startup venture called Cloud Foundry...

In today's Weblogs, Fabrizio Giudici writes about ... and you have to CI your Jira too!: "I've just received a patch for jrawio from a user. Great stuff. But the user complained about the fact he could log in on my Jira (jrawio uses my own installation at Tidalwave), but he couldn't post comments or attach..."

Alexander Potochkin writes about SAF and JDK7: "SAF aka JSR-296 and JDK 7"

And Arun Gupta writes about ervlet 3.0 was used for displaying the results to...

In the Forums, ben0502 asks How to configure the JNLP file in netbeans ?: "Dear all, I have a EAR project which is developed on netbeans 6.5, all works fine and i can deploy to glassfish server v2. However, i want to change the port number from 3700 to 10000, but i cannot find a place to configure the files, can anyone tell me how to configure the JNLP files ? 1 more strange thing is that after i changed the port number (3700 -> 10000) at server, i found that my application needed long time before start up, but my application is only showiing a panel without accessing the server..."

seik wonders, is 1.2 slower?: "I changed my aplication list from the LWUIT_20081222 version to LWUIT1.2 and it started giving null point exception, because of the styles weren't set right, I edited all my components style, dividing them in groups of selected and unselected and set them on the components and the null point exception disapeared(^^ great) but as I was testing the program I noticed it got slower than before even crashed with out of memory error T_T no more background story, here is the questions: 1)Did LWUIT 1.2 got heavier? 2)Is there much diference betwin setting manually the Styles and using a Theme to set them automaticaly? and..."

And ljnelson has a question about about Lazy deployment of EJBs?: "Is there an easy way to tell Glassfish to deploy an .ear file in phases? I'd like, for example, to have the .war files within my .ear file deployed first, and have the EJBs deployed in the background, so that my .war files are available quickly. Obviously, if someone hits a given .war file and causes an EJB invocation, and if that EJB hasn't been deployed yet, then yeah, they're going to have to wait for potentially a long time until the EJB is deployed. That's fine. What I'd like to avoid (given the sheer number of EJBs the system I'm currently working on is likely to have) is having to wait for all the zillions of EJBs to come up in full deployment mode before anything can work..."

The current Spotlight is a video, Java Warehouse - Part 1 of 3 - How to Submit an Application - Registration: "Learn how to submit applications to the Java Warehouse. In this first segment Bernard Traversat, Director of Java Store Engineering, shows how easy it is for developers to register for the Java Warehouse Developer Portal."

The new java.net Poll asks "Do you plan to start using the Java Store and Java Warehouse?". This coming Thursday will be the last full day of voting.

Our Feature Articles include Jeff Friesen's article Introducing Custom Paints to JavaFX, which shows how you can leverage undocumented JavaFX capabilities to support custom paints in JavaFX Version 1.2. We're also featuring Biswajit Sarkar's Using the Payment API for Microcredit and Other Applications, which describes how to apply the Payment API (JSR 229) in JavaME applications.

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobility Podcast 84: Valderi Leithardt on using SunSpots for gesture recognition.: "An interview with Ph.D. candidate Valderi Leithardt in Brazil on using SunSpots for gesture recognition."

Current and upcoming Java Events :

• August 21-23: 2009 Central Florida Software Symposium
• August 28-30: 2009 Research Triangle Software Symposium
• August 29-30: WOWODC East 2009
• September 9-11: Java Power Tools - Canberra
• September 11-13: 2009 New England Software Symposium: Fall Edition
• September 14-16: The Ajax Experience
• September 16-19: 2009 JVM Language Summit, Santa Clara, CA
• September 18-20: 2009 Pacific Northwest Software Symposium
• October 5-9: Java Power Tools - Brisbane
• October 19-23: Java Power Tools - Sydney
• October 23: Strange Loop Conference - St. Louis
• October 24: Florida Linux Show 2009 Orlando
• December 11-12: 4th IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology, Pune, India

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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