Eitan Suez's Blog

July 2003 Archives

Reporting from Texas - Our July JUG Meeting

The Austin JUG held its July meeting two days ago. The topic was "JavaOne 2003 Recap." We had a great turnout (close to 100 people crammed into our meeting location) and the level of interest was high. Five members who attended JavaOne gave a short talk on their experience at the conference and participated in the discussion panel that ensued. What I particularly enjoyed was how complementary each of the speakers' talks were to one another. It was coincidental but it worked out great.

First up was Doug Bateman who attended JavaOne as part of the ServerSide.com press team covering the conference. He discussed one of the main themes of the conference: the new features that are planned for J2SE 1.5 (generics, autoboxing, foreach loops, and more). This talk was nice and technical and to the point.

Next Lynn Sheen focused on what's new with J2EE and specifically EJB. Lynn attends every JavaOne and is a hardcore disciple of the platform. The talk was by no means restricted to the technical. Lynn relayed how the experience of the conference is just as strong a driver. And she didn't fail to end her talk with a re-enactment of the now traditional T-shirt toss (only with a single T-shirt though).

Third up was Albert Leigh, who works for Sun MicroSystems in Austin, Texas. Albert gave a great overall perspective of the conference and its main message of "Java Everywhere." Albert had also participated in setting up and running the hands-on labs at JavaOne and showed us pictures of the lab rooms and the activities that took place.

Rob Sartin spoke next. Rob spoke at JavaOne; he presented the technical session: TS-3055, "Extremely Accessible Servlets." What I particularly liked about Rob's talk was his ability to put his experience into perspective. He started by recalling a debate at another conference a long time ago (back in 1996) between C++ developers and persons who had already envisioned how Java would grow to become a mainstream programming language.

Michael Yuan spoke next. He delivered a BOF at JavaOne. Michael is quite active in the community. He frequently writes or co-authors articles for JavaWorld and various magazines such as Dr. Dobbs' Journal. He also has a book coming out on J2ME. Michael's talk blended much humour. He pretty much had the whole room laughing the entire time. One of Michael's most important messages was not to overlook the J2ME platform and the important role that handheld devices are going to play in the coming years. Furthermore, skills in programming J2SE readily transfers to programming in J2ME.

The final Discussion Panel included all the speakers, plus me. The format was quite simple: have the audience fire questions to the panelists to discuss and answer. What I really like about JUG meetings is how much the events include attendees. Alex Moffat who had also attended the conference didn't hesitate to relate his experiences in the guise of a question to the panel. That was great! I took the opportunity to talk about java.net and some of my participation with blogging on java.net.

Overall, the meeting was a great success and generated much interest. This interest was reflected in the increase in posts to our discussions list, which in the previous weeks had seen relatively little traffic.

One item I failed to mention is a tradition was have at our JUG to hold a preliminary, short talk ahead of the main event. Our board member Damon Clinkscales came up with the idea. We call this short talk 'the technotizer' (as in the analogy to appetizers before the main meal). Our technotizer for July was given by Jeff Gaer, a veteran programmer, about a Java-based rules engine API called Mandarax.

I'm glad that through this blog I am able to share some of the happenings in my corner of the woods, Austin, Texas.

Impressions of "Mac OS X for Java Geeks"

I recently read Will Iverson's "Mac OS X for Java Geeks" and thought I'd contribute my impressions of this recently published book.

In summary:

• a quick read
• a good book
• nice diversity of topics
• well-balanced selection of topics

This is one of these topics where you know it's a hot topic but you can't quite define it. Maybe it's because Mac OS X and Java are fairly orthogonal.

On the one hand, there exist Apple extensions to Java which allow you to do cool things but that sort of defeats the very purpose of Java. On the other hand, anything pure Java has nothing to do with OS X.

Nevertheless I believe the author did a good job with this book in terms of its structure, and covering various Mac OS X'ish things related to Java from bundling a Java desktop application for the Mac OS X platform, to Apple-specific APIs such as the spelling framework, quicktime, and speech. Other topics covered pertain to installing popular Java apps such as Tomcat or Jboss on OS X. There's also the prerequisite how to set up mysql and postgresql for Mac OS X. Lastly, I enjoyed the last topic on Web Services and the sample AppleScript clients that call the java web services developed in that chapter.

The main dilemma with a book on this topic is that Apple has been moving fairly fast with upgrades and redid a lot of things with the release of J2SE 1.4.1 for OS X, including how apps are bundled. The Jar bundler is now the main utility for bundling apps (and no longer the MRJ AppBuilder).

An easy read, doesn't assume much (if any) a priori knowledge of various Java APIs, Mac OS X, or databases.

Excited about new O'Reilly book on Tomcat

Don't ask me why but I ordered my copy of the O'Reilly Tomcat book online instead of picking it up at the bookstore at JavaOne. My copy just came in the mail.

It's nice to see how Tomcat has matured and that we now have access to a bound reference on this popular server which has become an industry workhorse.

Thanks to the authors, the contributors, and to O'Reilly for a very needed and very apt new book in their Java series.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/tomcat/

For Mac fans: Welcome improvements to Eclipse on MacOSX

I recently downloaded the M1 release of Eclipse for Mac OS X and I'm really pleased with the improvements over the previous release.

The biggest change by far appears to be improvements to the underlying SWT implementation for OS X. These improvements are quite noticeable in the application's performance, stability, and general interaction with the IDE. The editor feels speedier. Things generally work. This may be picky but the arrangement of the various panels making up a perspective could not be moved prior to this release.

For the first time I feel Eclipse on MacOSX is now more at par with distros for other platforms. I still complain about the fact that default editor shortcuts are not more in line with the native editors on OS X. Option-Right normally takes me to the next word. Having to remember to type Command-Right in Eclipse is disappointing..but easily changed. Rather than complain, I should revise the bindings and submit them as recommended default bindings for a future release.

I've been using a Mac for a good six months now and I finally feel that the java IDE's are getting there in terms of stability and performance.

I'm also glad to see that Apple is adding code completion to its IDE (renamed XCode), which i await with anticipation. NetBeans works great on OS X with the caveat of losing focus on the Find dialog box, which I use so often that this issue has become major for me. I have not yet ascertained whether this is a general problem or whether it is specific to my configuration. I was pleased to see that redefining the key bindings in NetBeans was easy and fast. I feel I must also mention jEdit which has impressed me in both its design and how combined with a set of plugins becomes an IDE at par with the others. Its abbreviations and code collapsing features are really nice.

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