I've updated the conferences page. New shows include Eclipse Forum, JAX, and The Server Side. If you know of any other Java-centric conferences I'm missing, please send in their info. In January, I'll be at the XML Developers Network of the Capital District in Albany on the 17th to talk about XOM; and on February 8, I'll be at the Capital District Java Developers Network, also in Albany, to talk about Measuring JUnit Code Coverage. Then in March it's back to Santa Clara for Software Development 2006 West. If you'd like me to talk to your user group, just send me an e-mail. I do ask that groups outside the New York City area cover my travel expenses, though sometimes we can piggy back a user group talk on top of a conference in the same general vicinity. See you there!
Interestingly I've noticed that a lot of the biggest and most interesting Java conferences are now happening in Europe. After JavaOne, the three biggest are Javapolis (Belgium, 2100 people this year), JavaZone (Norway), and JAOO (Denmark). Possibly JavaOne just sucks up all the U.S. developers so other U.S. conferences have to compete to be the second conference a programmer attends. Also interesting: none of those three European conferences are run by professional conference organizations. Javapolis and JavaZone are run by user groups, and JAOO by a consulting firm. Javapolis is also much cheaper than JavaOne or other U.S. conferences of similar size, the strong Euro notwithstanding. (I'm not sure what JAOO and JavaZone cost.) Possibly the relatively small size of Europe helps too. Almost anyone in Europe can get to Belgium/Denmark/Norway more quickly and easily than a New Yorker can reach San Francisco or vice versa.
The RSS feeds may be temporarily broken at various times today while I work on upgrading them. Update: it should all be fixed now. If you notice any remaining problems, please holler.
Sun's posted an early access release of JavaMail 1.4. JavaMail is a basic library for performing POP, SMTP, and IMAP. I wrote about this in the final chapter of Java Network Programming. According to Sun's Bill Shannon, "This release of the JavaMail API also includes bug fixes and performance improvements." There also appear to be a few minor additions to the API, nothing earth-shattering.
Apple has posted the third beta of Java 5 Release 4 for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) on the Apple Developer Connection (first born child required). This is based on Sun's J2SE 1.5.0_06. It also uses Sun's rendering by default instead of native Quartz graphics. (This will probably change again before final release.) Most importantly it finally makes Java 1.5 the default instead of 1.4. "This release is not compatible with the Intel-based Developer Transition Systems." The second beta caused a lot of problems for people who installed it. This release fixes assorted bugs, but I'd still be very wary of installing it.