fidzu : Java

Hi all,

There's a lot a great discussions going on at dev@usersguide.netbeans.org. Why don't you join it? It's the email alias for community members who want to:

1. Contribute documentation to the NetBeans Community.
2. Play a more active role in the NetBeans Community.
3. Provide input and feedback necessary to make important decisions regarding NetBeans documentation.
4. All of the above, of course.

Interested? It's easy to sign up. Just do the following:

1. Go to the NetBeans Mailing Lists Page and log on with your user name. (If you don't have one, just click Login. Then you can register for one.)
2. Scroll down to the dev@usersguide.netbeans.org mailing list. Click subscribe and a subscription request will be sent.
3. Within a few seconds, an email will arrive asking you to confirm the subscription. Just send an empty email back.

That's it! You're now a subscriber. Go ahead and start thinking of ways you can get involved.

Can't wait to see you there!

--James

04 Jan 2008 2:39pm GMT

Are you and Java going in the same direction? Also:

java.net Poll: What version of Java do you expect to be using at the end of 2008?

Java Today: Java evolution and stability, new GlassFish podcast, and Gosling interviewed

Forums: Java Plug-In fixes, ObjectOutputStream references, and sending SMS with Java

Weblogs: Java and the Nokia n810, JDIC and NetBeans, and seeking another million Java programmers

04 Jan 2008 2:33pm GMT

The Update Center Repository includes Social Network Bundle with Apache Roller for blogging and Slynkr for content rating. You can download it very easily - check Manveen's reminder. And, over the holidays, Dave played around with jMaki and he can now show jMaki on Roller. Check it out and let us know how it works for you!

04 Jan 2008 2:00pm GMT

Nokia has posted the second public review draft of JSR-279 Service Connection API for Java ME. More...

04 Jan 2008 1:00pm GMT

Bruce Eckel has written an article on Artima, saying that Java should not change much any more, that maybe "the right thing to do is just not add the feature at all (what fun is that?). That if you can't do it right then maybe the language should stop growing and become stable. That it should stop chasing every language feature du jour."

04 Jan 2008 11:34am GMT

Tim Bray has pointed out a note from Jim Baker: Django on Jython is almost there. It can run! There's still more work to do, as Mr. Baker points out, but Django is likely to serve Jython in the same way Rails serves JRuby: the "killer application" that allows people to adopt Jython without regret.

04 Jan 2008 11:09am GMT

Rhino-in-Spring, the alternative web flow controller for Spring that allows you to write your flows in JavaScript, has a new version. The main new feature in the 1.2 release is support for clustering web flows using Terracotta DSO.

04 Jan 2008 10:40am GMT

Motorola has posted a public review draft of JSR 271 - JMobile Information Device Profile 3 . According to the draft: More...

04 Jan 2008 10:00am GMT

Kathleen Richards of Redmond Developer News published an interview with Sun Microsystems' James Gosling, in which they discussed JavaFX and its competition in the RIA space. Gosling shared some pointed thoughts on how he believes JavaFX compares to the Flash / Flex platform.

04 Jan 2008 9:11am GMT

Last week, I had an interview with Geertjan Wielenga, an author at JavaLobby (also Netbeans Engineer ), it was about JUG in Egypt and our upcoming event.

04 Jan 2008 8:54am GMT

A picture of snow-covered mountains from our bedroom window.

The ski-ers are looking happy these days.

Shot with the 70-210 Tamron telephoto, you can't actually see this view from that window unless you've got surgically modified eyes.

04 Jan 2008 8:40am GMT

Kohsuke posted the a new version of Hudson that includes the first cut support for internationalization and localization. In his blog, he explained the approach that is similar to used in Metro as well. Let us know if you are interested in creating localized bundles for Hudson. There are a few comments on the blog already showing the consistent community support around Hudson.

Find out more about how the project got started in a podcast that was released earlier.

04 Jan 2008 7:00am GMT

It's starting to happen. There's a long way to go between successfully executing a bit of Rails and actually making the sucker run usefully, as the JRuby guys will tell you. But speaking of JRuby, there are some eerie similarities: a language-platform project that was promising, then drifting, now revitalized. The ecosystem gets more interesting all the time.

04 Jan 2008 6:20am GMT

What happened was, a sudden email from Sun PR went around about fifteen minutes to Christmas saying "SYS-CON wants predictions for 2008; right now would be good." It happened that I was in the middle of doing three months and ten trips' worth of expenses, thus bored out of my mind, thus happy to prognosticate. I gave them five, but, given the urgency, not much more than sound-bites. I think each of them is worth a little exegesis.

1. RIA vs. AJAX: below, in this fragment.

2. Windows Looks Bad.

3. Rails Rules.

Prediction

The short version:

There's a major struggle going on between "RIAs" (Rich Internet Applications) and AJAX, which tries to do everything in the browser using just what the browser ships with. RIA frameworks are AIR ("Flash, the Next Generation"), Silverlight ("Microsoft wants in") and JavaFX ("Isn't open-source better?") I'm not brave enough to predict who wins, but I do predict that 2008 will be a crucial year; either RIAs enter the mainstream, or they start to smell like a red herring left in the sun.

Suspicion

Ever since we've had the Web, we've had those who say it's Not Good Enough. I've long been among the RIA skeptics, for a couple of reasons. First, let me quote myself, from here:

This notion, that the Web GUI is insufficiently interactive and we need something richer, is widely held among developers and almost never among actual users of computers, and it's entirely wrong. I can remember when people were forced to use compiled Windows and X11 applications, and most of them were extremely bad because it's really hard to design a good interactive UI; when the Web came along, more or less everyone abandoned those UIs in favor of the Web, almost instantly and with shrieks of glee. Yes, Web UIs are drastically constrained, offer a paucity of controls, and enforce a brutally linear control flow; and these are good things. I remember, in the early days, people saying "Once you know how to use one Windows app, you know how to use them all". Ha ha ha. But you know what? Once you know how to use a browser, you are well on the way to being able to use most Web apps. The best AJAX apps are still very Web-like (as in, the Back button always works); but they're faster and more responsive and nicer to look at. The worst AJAX apps are like bad Nineties VB.

I stand by my point: the people who want to add UI "richness" to the Web are always developers, never users. Doesn't mean they're wrong; after all, the users weren't clamoring for the Web before it arrived, either.

My other problem is that while I like my Internet applications to be rich, I have this old-fashioned notion that "richness" is mostly about compelling words and pictures and sounds and especially, most especially, interaction with living people.

On The Other Hand

I use Rich Internet Applications all the time. Mail. iTunes. In fact all rich applications have become Internet applications: I can publish ongoing fragments with a keystroke in Emacs, and create a Web slide-show from Lightroom.

But that's not what they mean when they say RIAs; they mean "Whatever lies in the direction that Flash is pointing." Which puzzles me, because near as I can tell, Flash is most useful for watching movies portably (a la YouTube) and cool casual games like N and Desktop Tower Defense.

But I Could Be Wrong

I've always seen it as a big problem that at the end of the day, Flash is proprietary. So is Silverlight (although it's damn interesting that it runs on OS X). JavaFX tries to remove that problem. Maybe if we unleash the creativity of all the people who just don't want to be sharecroppers on someone else's plantation, we'll see some RIAs that are actually interesting to business.

But don't kid yourself that it'll be easy. The browser already offers what most people (who aren't software developers) consider an excellent user experience, and AJAX, done well, makes it even better.

04 Jan 2008 6:07am GMT

This is the third of five predictions for 2008, expanded from the short form generated on short notice as described here.

Prediction

The short version:

Rails will continue to grow at a dizzying speed, and Ruby will in consequence inevitably become one of the top two or three strategic choices for software developers. But at the same time, other frameworks and tool-sets are learning its lessons, so Rails will get some serious competition.

I Hear a Very Gentle Sound

I don't know anyone who's actually doing methodologically respectable head-counts of Web developers, so any opinion from anyone is based on anecdotal evidence at best. But these days, based on my anecdotal evidence, everything I see and smell, the white-hot pace of Rails adoption isn't slowing down at all.

Rails drags Ruby along behind it, and good programmers who are exposed to Ruby tend to become addicted pretty quickly.

Who's Watching

There is one group of technologists who are now 100% familiar with Rails. I'm speaking of the developers of competitive Web frameworks, many of whom felt somewhat smacked upside the head by Rails' sudden noisy chomp into their market share.

By and large, they're not stupid. They may not have been as quick to notice the things that DHH and the other Railsists noticed, but they've noticed them now, and more or less every other piece of the Web ecosystem has something "Rails-like" in hot development or in production. Some of the names to watch are Django (based on Python), lift (based on Scala), and Grails (based on Groovy). But I predict fearlessly that there will be a Real Important Web-framework grabbing mindshare a year from now that's learned Rails' lessons but ain't one of those.

I Could Be Wrong

Maybe the population of developers will wake up, shake their heads, and say "Nah, going back to PHP, it's faster" or "Actually, now I see that Java EE's XML configuration files are da bomb".

But I don't think so.

04 Jan 2008 6:03am GMT

From the dept.:

...This release adds some serious jazz (more extensive list below):



Full merge of 1.5 generics work. Bootstrappable with OpenJDK javac compiler. URLConnection timeout support. TimeZone can use platform zoneinfo file when available. The Collection classes, lang.management and util.spi have been updated to 1.6. Addition of 1.6 ServiceLoader. Speedup for cairo and freetype Graphics2D support. The ASM library is now included. Better detection of browser plugin mechanisms for gcjwebplugin applet support in mozilla, iceweasel and firefox.

04 Jan 2008 5:00am GMT