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Quote of the Day

No one in Silicon Valley sits here and thinks, "You need massive inside-the-Beltway experience." Sergey and Larry were in their early 20s when they started Google. The YouTube guys were also in their 20s. So were the guys who started Facebook. And I’ll tell you, we recognize what great companies have been built on, and that’s ideas, talent, and inspirational leadership.

-- John Roos
Read the rest in The Amazing Money Machine

Barcode4J 2.0, an open source (Apache license) barcode generation library, has been released Supported barcode formats include Interleaved 2 of 5, Code 39, Codabar, Code 128, UPC-A and UPC-E (with supplementals), EAN-13 and EAN-8 (with supplementals), EAN-128, POSTNET, Royal Mail Customer Barcode, PDF417, and DataMatrix. Output formats include SVG, EPS, PNG, JPEG), and Java2D.

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Recent News

Saturday, May 10, 2008 (Permalink)

I missed JavaOne this year, but from what I'm reading it doesn't sound like I missed all that much. No Java 7. JavaFX still being pitched as the next big thing. Threads are important. Closures good! Closures bad! Blah. Blah. Blah. Sounds like a repeat of last year's show. Did anything new happen? Maybe Java has grown too large to change significantly in just one year. Should JavaOne be biennial? Or maybe we should just attend every other year. Here's a thought: how about moving Javaone to the East Coast or Europe every other year so even if it's the same story, different people will attend?

Friday, May 9, 2008 (Permalink)

Nokia and Vodafone have posted the early draft review of JSR-249 Mobile Service Architecture 2 :

The Java ME community has developed a unified Java application environment standard for mobile phones as part of the JSR 248 Mobile Service Architecture (MSA) specification. Mobile Service Architecture 2 (MSA2) Initiative continues the work by providing an updated platform specification needed by the mobile industry today. MSA2 Specification (JSR 249) addresses an even broader set of devices than MSA with more enhanced and diverse capabilities but continues its focus on high-volume mobile devices. This JSR broadens the architecture defined by MSA by adding support for new technologies and features that are already available or will become available in the foreseeable future. It also oversees compatibility with the JSR 248 MSA environment.

The MSA2 Specification is a Java architecture definition that describes the essential Java client components of an end-to-end wireless environment. The MSA2 Specification defines a set of Java ME technologies and shows how these technologies must be be correctly integrated in a mobile device to create an optimal mobile Java platform. As a normative specification, the MSA2 Specification produces compatibility requirements that are reflected in the MSA2 TCK. Service and content providers can use the MSA2 Specification as a guideline for application development and can benefit from better application portability between different MSA2 compliant implementations.

Comments are due by May 29.

Thursday, May 8, 2008 (Permalink)

Sun has posted the early draft review of JSR-317 Java Persistence API. "This draft addresses improvements in the areas of domain modeling, O/R mapping, and EntityManager and Query runtime APIs. " Comments are due by June 1.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 (Permalink)

Bill Pugh of the University of Maryland has released FindBugs 1.3.4, an automated open source tool for finding potential bugs in Java code. New bug detectors in this release include:

EQ_OVERRIDING_EQUALS_NOT_SYMMETRIC: equals method overrides equals in superclass and may not be symmetric
EQ_ALWAYS_TRUE: equals method always returns true
EQ_ALWAYS_FALSE: equals method always returns false
EQ_COMPARING_CLASS_NAMES: equals method compares class names rather than class objects
EQ_UNUSUAL: Unusual equals method
EQ_GETCLASS_AND_CLASS_CONSTANT: equals method fails for subtypes
SE_READ_RESOLVE_IS_STATIC: The readResolve method must not be declared as a static method.
SE_PRIVATE_READ_RESOLVE_NOT_INHERITED: private readResolve method not inherited by subclasses
MSF_MUTABLE_SERVLET_FIELD: Mutable servlet field
XSS_REQUEST_PARAMETER_TO_SEND_ERROR: Servlet reflected cross site scripting vulnerability
SKIPPED_CLASS_TOO_BIG: Class too big for analysis

Saturday, May 3, 2008 (Permalink)

Sun has posted a public review draft of JSR 311 JAX-RS: The Java API for RESTful Web Services 1.0. This amounts to a moderately complex API for server side HTTP. There's some good stuff here, including support for URI templates, and the use of annotations to associate methods with paths. I still suspect it's more complex than it needs to be; and I'm not sure if Java code is really the right place to be mapping handlers to paths. The again maybe it is appropriate for some HTTP servers, even if not all of them. Comments are due by May 22.

Friday, May 2, 2008 (Permalink)

Google has posted the second milestone of GWT 1.5, an open source Java-to-JavaScript compiler and library for building AJAX applications in Java. The major new feature in version 1.5 is support for Java 5, including generics, enums, annotations, and the enhanced for loop. According to Bruce Johnson, new features in this milestone include:

There is a new DOM API package. Using the new ability to subclass JavaScriptObject, GWT 1.5 M2 includes bindings for nearly the entire W3C HTML DOM spec. See the javadoc for the package com.google.gwt.dom.client for details. The widgets will be retrofitted to use the new DOM classes in the upcoming release candidate.

Some widgets now have animation effects. Popups, trees, etc. have subtle animation effects to provide visual cues when hidden and shown.

The addition of a "Showcase" sample. This sample combines features from several other samples and demonstrates the new, nicer-looking GWT default stylesheet and widget animations. Note that the default style is still in flux and is likely to change.

Keyboard support has been added where previously absent in UI classes, including in menus and tab panels.

ARIA support for enhanced accessibility is now present in most widgets, including menus, trees, tabs, and button variants.

Bi-di. Widgets and panels have built-in support for bi-directional layout.

"long" emulation. The Java language defines "long" types to be 64-bit signed integers, whereas JavaScript only supports 64-bit floating point numbers, which cannot accurately represent the same whole-number range as a true "long" type. GWT 1.5 M2 transparently emulates long types properly to more faithfully maintain Java semantics in web mode.

There is a single Mac OS X distribution that works on both Leopard (10.5) and Tiger (10.4).

Thursday, May 1, 2008 (Permalink)

Sun announced financial results for the third quarter of their fiscal year that ended in March, and they weren't pretty. Sun lost $34 million, 4 cents per share. Total revenue was $3.266 billion, down down half a percentage point from the same quarter last year. Gross margins grew to 44.9%. Plans were announced to lay off another 2500 or so people.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 (Permalink)

Hallelujah. Apple has finally (maybe two years after everyone else?) released Java 6 for Mac OS X. Of course, it's only for Mac OS X 10.5.2, and only for 64-bit Intel processors, which means we still can't count on Java 6 being available to all users. Furthermore, this release is incompatible with QuickTime for Java. What was it Steve Jobs said about making the Mac the "best Java delivery platform on the planet"?

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 (Permalink)

The Eclipse Project has posted the sixth milestone release of Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede, their open integrated development environment for Java. This release dramatically improves updates and installs. In addition Eclipse should appear somewhat more native on both Mac OS X and Vista in this release.

Monday, April 28, 2008 (Permalink)

Sun has released NetBeans 6.1, its open source IDE for Java, Ruby, and JavaScript. "The NetBeans IDE 6.1 release provides several features and enhancements, such as rich JavaScript editing features, support for using the Spring web framework, tighter MySQL integration, and better mechanisms for projects to share use of libraries. The acclaimed support for Ruby/JRuby has been enhanced with new editor quick fixes, a Ruby platform manager, fast debug support for JRuby, and many other new features and fixes. By popular demand, the bean pattern and JSF CRUD generation features that were missing in the 6.0 release have returned. In addition, early versions of new modules, such as ClearCase support, are available as plugins. This release also provides improved performance, especially faster startup (up to 40%), lower memory consumption and improved responsiveness while working with large projects."

Saturday, April 25, 2008 (Permalink)

The Apache Software Foundation has released Maven 2.0.9. Version 2.0.9 attempts to improve plugin version stability.

Thursday, April 24, 2008 (Permalink)

I'm back from China. As expected this site was blocked by the Great Firewall, likely because the shared host I use also hosts Friends of Tibet, Tibet Writes, and several similar sites. One thing I learned in China is that the government there is very sensitive about Tibet, and is doing everything they can to convince folks that Tibet is a natural part of China. For instance, one of the mascots of the Beijing Olympics is a Tibetan antelope, and many tourist sites emphasized the historical connections between Tibet and China, and the fealty paid by previous Dalai Lamas to the Chinese emperors. Sometimes it felt like every other news story on the English language channel involved Tibet in one way or another. I've been writing about the trip as time permits on Mokka mit Schlag. Regular updates will resume shortly.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 (Permalink)

I'm leaving for China tomorrow. This site likely won't be updated for a couple of weeks. For one thing, IBiblio (that hosts this site) also host Friends of Tibet, Tibet Writes, and several similar sites, and is therefore routinely blocked at the Great Firewall. If I have Internet access, and anything interesting to say about the trip, I'll probably put it on Mokka mit Schlag.

Sunday, April 13, 2008 (Permalink)

CMP has posted the Call for Papers for Software Development Best Practices 2008. Tracks include:

Agile Processes and Methods
C++
Design and Architecture
Languages and Implementation
People, Projects and Teams
Process and Methods
Requirements and Analysis
Secure Design
Testing and Quality
Web Services/SOA
Advanced Algorithms and Concepts

Deadline is May 16. The conference takes place October 27-30 in Boston. I think I'm skipping this one this year. It's always a good show, but my time is very constrained these days, and it's all the way on the other side of the country from me now. No more taking the early Acela up the first morning.

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