Adam Bien points us to some interesting Kenai projects in his latest blog. While our recent poll on Kenai seemed to indicate that Project Kenai is not yet well-known, Kenai clearly is attracting the attention of some highly accomplished Java developers. So, I've decided to take a closer look at Project Kenai myself, starting with the projects Adam points out.

The first Kenai project Adam highlights is BetterBeansBinding. Adam describes this project as:

a fork of the BeansBinding project, which is the RI for JSR-295. With Fabrizio's Guidici experience - it could take-off.

Yep, as soon as any of us see the "F" word ("fork"), we instantly think: "But why?" BetterBeansBinding project founder Fabrizio Giudici (who blogs frequently on java.net) clearly anticipated this question, and the BetterBeansBinding FAQ's first item, posted near the top of the project's home page, is "Why a fork?" Here's Fabrizio's answer:

As per March 2009, the latest known release for BeansBinding is 1.2.1, published in November 2007; at the beginning of 2009 the only developer of the original library has left Sun and there have been no replacements; the JSR-295 specification itself is marked as inactive. BeansBinding works well for many users, not for others using some of the more advanced features; there are pending issues that nobody is working on. Thus, some people think that a fork of the project is needed to keep the features alive.

So, in fact, it's almost unrealistic to call BetterBeansBinding a "fork." What's really happening is an older project that became idle has been picked up by a new development team. Yet, BetterBeansBinding is technically a fork, because the original BeansBinding project continues to exist, as a java.net open source project, with project owners, a license (LGPL), etc.

The second item in the BetterBeansBinding FAQ talks about the relationship between BetterBeansBinding and the original BeansBinding project, and JSR 295:

In the preliminary discussions about the fork, many people expressed the desire for enhancing the library with new features. BBB is open to innovation; nevertheless, we will keep it compatible with JSR-295, so it will be possible to use it as a drop-in replacement for the original BeansBinding project. Of course, pending bugs will be fixed in function of the availability of the new committers.

The BetterBeansProject has five mailing lists, including commits, dev, issues, and users (there's also a Continuous Integration list, but it has no posts thus far). There's a News and Announcements page. The latest news is about the BetterBeansBinding Version 1.2.2 release. This release is actually the starting point for BetterBeansBinding. Fabrizio says:

There are no code changes from the last snapshot of BeansBinding; this release will be used to report issues against. With the exception of the Cobertura issue with Hudson, the software factory is ready and we can declare that the project has been started.

You can see additional notes about this initial BetterBeansBinding version in Fabrizio's java.net blog post. He does not recommend using the 1.2.2 release for production, "since I don't know in which state the last commit was done (and the current test coverage is 18%)."

The BetterBeansBinding Issues page shows 30 open issues, 5 in progress, 7 resolved, and 8 closed. So, even though there hasn't yet been a BetterBeansBinding release that differs from the last BetterBeans code snapshot, the project is clearly working toward a new release (which is scheduled to be Version 1.3.0).

In Java Today, Alexismp announces a New GlassFish Podcast episode: Antonio Goncalves: "It's been a while since the last GlassFish Podcast episode and even longer since the last interview, so here it goes - episode #36 an interview with Antonio Goncalves..."

Adam Bien has discovered Some Interesting #Kenai Projects - From 3D Simulation to REST-Cloud: " * betterbeansbinding: its a fork of the BeansBinding project, which is the RI for JSR-295. With Fabrizio's Guidici experience - it could take-off. * openjfx-compiler: the official repo of the javafx compiler. You can file bugs, issues and RFEs directly from Netbeans. * alice: 3d animation and (kids) teaching application. Really cool - even with Sims characters. See the 5min screencast..."

And John Smart announces that The second Java Power Tools Newsletter is out!: "The second Java Power Tools Newsletter is out! This time, the topic under discussion is Java Web Frameworks: Automated web tests are a great way to automate smoke and regression tests, and can also be effectively used in a TDD or BDD approach to designing your overall screen behaviour and screen flow. In this issue..."

In today's Weblogs, Carol McDonald demonstrates a Java EE 6 Pet Catalog with GlassFish v3 preview and MySQL: "This Pet Catalog app explains a web application that uses Java EE 6 with GlassFish and MySQL..."

Andrei Dmitriev points out JavaOne demo for JavaFX and SunSpot: "An interesting video with Denis Magda (a far east Russian ambassador) presenting a way to "listen" for SunSpot events and forward them to JavaFX application..."

And John Ferguson Smart writes about Getting the most out of the Maven settings.xml file: "If you have ever used Maven to any extent, you will probably know about the settings.xml file. The settings.xml file contains environment-specific details such as proxy configurations, repositories, server usernames and passwords, and so on. An example of what typically..."

In the Forums, mmaki is dealing with a performance issue -- Huge JXTreeTable deadly slow (only with Windows L&F): "Hi. Got a strange performance issue here with a JXTreeTable. With (default) Metal L&F, all works fine. When setting to Windows L&F, the JXTreeTable becomes deadly slow (scrolling and column-resizing). A plain JTree works in booth cases perfectly. It must be something with JXTreeTable and Windows L&F... Any idea? Or maybe a workaround for this?..."

johanvos asks how to deploy ear in GFv3: "I am a bit confused with how deployment of an ear is handled by GFv3(b58). I have a project Foo with foo-ejb.jar and foo.war. Inside foo-ejb.jar, a persistence unit is declared (in persistence.xml) and used. Inside the war, jndi lookups are performed for calling methods on the stateless session beans in the foo-ejb.jar. Deploying this ear in Netbeans works fine. Deploying it with asadmin deploy Foo.ear however gives an error: Could not resolve a persistence unit corresponding to the persistence-context-ref-name [someFoo/em] in the scope of the module called [Foo/foo.war]..."

And chrislam99 is seeing an Lwuit v1.2: Error - ButtonGroup.clearSelection() method is broken?: "Hi there. This is my 1st post, as I didn't find anything in this forum or the issue tracker query. So, am not sure if anyone else have noticed this error - I've recently moved up from LWUIT release 20081222 to 1.2 and noticed that the clearSelection() method in ButtonGroup is now broken in release 1.2. It was working fine in release 20081222. The visual symptom observed in release 1.2 - After a radiobutton is selected in a buttongroup which is contained inside a tab, the selected radiobutton remains selected instead of being cleared..."

The current Spotlight is Mario Fusco on the Lambdaj Project: "Jim Wright interviews Mario Fusco, creator of the Lambdaj Project, in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne: "Lambdaj is a library that makes easier to manipulate collections in a pseudo-functional and statically typed way. In our experience to iterate over collection, especially in nested loops, is often error prone and makes the code less readable. The purpose of this library is to alleviate these problems..."

This week's java.net Poll asks "Which feature phone platform offers developers the greatest capability?". Voting will be open through Thursday.

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

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