Sarah Nassauer reports that Walt Disney's ESPN360 requires ISPs to pay for the right to offer their service. "Verizon Communications Inc. and Charter Communications Inc. -- have signed up to offer ESPN360. The biggest Internet providers, such as cable operators Comcast Corp., Cox Communications Inc. and Time Warner Inc., are refusing." "Adelphia Communications had carried ESPN360, but the company is being carved up by Time Warner and Comcast."

I'm all for people being able to charge whatever the market will bear for their services, and the referenced WSJ article is a subscription service that I pay for.

I really don't like paying for a top bandwidth ISP so I can visit web sites that I'm interested in, and have a little tax tagged on there by ESPN, just like they've been doing to my cable bill for years and years.

Bundling of services (where you get what you want, but you have to take a heap of crap with it and pay more) is eventually doomed because of the power of our first choice as I discussed in my previous blog entry on net neutrality. See a hilarious video where Ask Ninja explains net neutrality and while you're there, you're not watching ESPN. :)

Daniel pours out his heart about life, love and loss in his blog dearelena.wordpress.com.

It's an opportunity for early adopters to use the material and offer feedback to the author and editor.

The books are priced reasonably for online access, with an option to purchase the print version when it is released.

Of the initial four titles, "Ajax Hacks: Rough Cuts Version" is probably the most interesting to Java programmers. The other titles released at this time are "Flickr Hacks", "Ruby Cookbook", "Ruby on Rails: Up and Running".

Check out the new service at: O'Reilly Rough Cuts.

(Disclosure: O'Reilly manages java.net, but I'm not financially associated with them.)

There's no way Bellsouth's tiered speeds is gonna work for them long term.

The reason is, whatever content they offer at high speeds will not be the content subscribers want to view.

I'll give you an example:

I met some people on the net who perform puppet shows, and broadcast shows to each other on streaming video 3 times a week. 2 hours a weeknight, and FOUR hours on Sunday.

There are people all over the internet doing activities in millions of niches like this.

If Bellsouth degrades that service, those people will view it as an outage, and seek service elsewhere. They will switch to the provider with the fastest low tier.

The power of the FIRST CHOICE is here, and anyone who bundles a bunch of things you don't want is doomed.

Java developer, you can be sure java.net, apache.org and your other favorite sites won't be in the top tier.

In this MP3, Economics of the Long Tail Chris Anderson of Wired talks about the power of the first choice.

Sun has now released the 2005 and 2004 technical sessions with slides synchronized to the speaker's audio and including a full-text transcript of the speeches.

Viewing the sessions requires a free membership in Sun's Developer Network (SDN), and a browser with Flash player.

The general sessions had previously been released in video (RealVideo) here.

Also, eclipse.org has been redesigned, and your feedback is welcomed.

Check out my previous blog entry that got lost in the site update... EclipseCon 2006 adopts open and transparent call for participation.

All submissions are being handled via a modified Bugzilla system known as Eclipsezilla.

"Anyone in the community (including you) is welcome to review the submissions, ask for more information, provide comments and critiques, and even vote on which ones you'd like to see at the conference - just as anyone in (the) community is invited and encouraged to do for Eclipse bugs and features via Bugzilla."

It's going to be interesting to watch this process work.

public class Publisher {
	private String publisherID;
	private String name;
    // getters and setters...
    }
    
    Becomes:

<Publisher> 

    <publisherID>lorenz</publisherID> 

    <name>Lorenz Corporation</name> 

</Publisher> 

Using two lines of code (although you can customize lots of things if needed.)

XStream xstream = new XStream();
String xml = xstream.toXML(obj);

If you don't want it to include the fully qualified class name:

<com.choralmusic.db.Publisher>

Add one line:

xstream.alias("Publisher", Publisher.class);

Collections look great, for example, this ArrayList of Listing objects:

    <listings>
      <Listing>
        <pageRef>church_christmas</pageRef>
        <includeCover>false</includeCover>
      </Listing>
      <Listing>
        <pageRef>school_winter</pageRef>
        <includeCover>false</includeCover>
      </Listing>
    </listings>

Restoring the object is two lines (with optional aliases):

XStream xstream = new XStream();
// If you don't have fully qualified names, add one or more aliases:
xstream.alias("CatalogItem", CatalogItem.class);
catalogItems = (ArrayList) xstream.fromXML(theXMLString);

The XML suitable for editing by hand for configuration or if persisted to a file. It would be very easy to manipulate via XSLT or XQUERY. It makes a nice readable toString() for debugging.

License: BSD derived, commercial friendly.

Dependencies: none (!), XML Pull Parser optional to improve performance.

Limitations

When using the Sun 1.4 (and 1.5) JVM, XStream can reinstantiate classes that do not have a default constructor. (Cool rule-breaking magic.) Other JVMs require a default constructor.

Check out XStream and the two minute tutorial.

XStream has worked very well for me. Thanks to Malcolm Davis for pointing out this terrific library.

Phil Windley reports on David Heinemeier Hansson's (Google/O'Reilly best hacker of the year) Ruby on Rails presentation.

UPDATE: Matt Raible's report on the same Ruby on Rails presentation.

For more OSCON 2005 goodness, see the O'Reilly news page.

Gosling jokingly said the most amazing thing about JavaOne was that the audience didn't try to kill Dennis Miller. Miller had indicated that he supports some of the president's recent actions (but also indicated that he was a social libertarian.) I didn't see any protest signs last night... the entire audience might not share Gosling's views just because they program in his language.

UPDATE: Some friends suggested that people were offended because of Miller's politically incorrect statements. That's always his entire act, and should be no surprise. I saw some people leave. And return with more drinks. We now return you to matters of interest to Java developers.

The Moscone Center and their corporate insurers did not have faith enough in real-time Java to allow the 40 pound vehicle to fly around the hall, but you could enjoy looking at it mounted on a stick. (click pictures for larger sizes)

Some developers prefer to watch the keynote on a giant TV, sitting on comfy beanbag chairs.

Yes, that's the itty bitty "real" Gosling in the lower left.

John Gage of Sun showed the ability to drag running Java applications from a Windows PC to a Mac and back, without interrupting the processes. He said this will be useful for mobile devices to transfer their processes to the network for more computing power.

Goodbye JavaOne 2005, it's been fun.

(click on the pictures for larger sizes)

Alex Rodriguez, "Duce" paints a giant Java 10th Birthday Card.

Have a cupcake..

See, Java IS cool.

Keep bag away from duke.

JavaOne Online (mentorware.net) has posted this announcement:

Announcement

The 2005 JavaOne conference multimedia technical sessions, will be available
for free to Sun Developer Network (SDN) members. Membership to SDN is free
to all developers. Multimedia sessions from the 2005 conference will be available 
on the Sun Developer Network web site in late August. PDFs of the conference 
content will continue to be freely avaiable to all web site visitors. 
Current subscribers will be contacted with more details in mid-July.

There is an updated release schedule page that now lists each Eclipse project and the anticipated release date of 3.1 compatible plugins. This information is useful and was very hard to piece together before.

The availability announced is:

Eclipse 3.1 - Now
Test and Performance Tools - Soon
Web Tools Platform - week of July 25
Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools - week of July 29
Visual Editor Project - Soon
Eclipse Modeling Framework - week of July 4
Graphical Editing Framework - Soon
UML2 - week of July 4
AspectJ 5.0 - Soon

Behold... Java (tm). The larger rooms have styrofoam 3D logos, most of them lit from two sides with two different colors. Our programming language deserves such splendor!

Feeding the 5,000! The waiter (see larger sizes) is somehow totally unimpressed with Java.

Jason Hunter demonstrates why XQuery is better than an enormous dead tree.

Did you know that Java is 10 years old?

Bake once, eat anywhere!

For more info: https://jugs.dev.java.net

The Brazilian Java users group has over 7,000 members! Go Brasil!