Slashdot Mirror

The Apache Software Foundation has released NetBeans 10.0, the second major release of the Apache NetBeans IDE. The release, said the Apache Software Foundation, is focused in adding support for JDK 11, JUnit 5, PHP, JavaScript and Groovy, as well in solving many issues. From a blog post: JDK 11 support has been enhanced in the following ways: Integration with the nb-javac project, adding support for JDK 11, removed the CORBA modules, support for JEP 309, Dynamic Class-File Constants, support for JEP 323, Local-Variable Syntax for Lambda Parameters, and support for LVTI Support for Lamdba Parameters.

PHP 7.3: You can now add trailing commas in function calls under PHP 7.3 (mailing list thread), and also use the list reference assignment, the flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc Syntaxes are also supported. [...] And more: context sensitive lexer, PHPStan support, debugger, twig, hints, suggestions, code completionâ¦â visit PHP Features Page and NetBeans 10 New and Noteworthy for more details on PHP support. JUnit 5.3.1 has been added as a new Library to NetBeans, so you can quickly add it to your Java projects. For Maven projects without no existing tests, JUnit 5 is now the default JUnit version.

Thursday a bug report complained that the source code for OpenJDK, the free and open-source implementation of Java, "has too many swear words." An anonymous reader writes: "There are many instances of swear words inside OpenJDK jdk/jdk source, scattered all over the place," reads the bug report. "As OpenJDK is used in a professional context, it seems inappropriate to leave these 12 instances in there, so here's a changeset to remove them."
IBM software developer (and OpenJDK team member and contributor) Adam Farley responded that "after discussion with the community, three determinations were reached":

• "Damn" and "Crap" are not swear words.

• Three of the four f-bombs are located in jszip.js, which should be corrected upstream (will follow up).

• The f-bomb in BitArray.java, as well as the rude typo in SoftChannel.java, *are* swear words and should be removed to resolve this work item.

He promised a new webrev would be uploaded to reflect these determinations, and the bug has been marked as "resolved."

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: Oracle plans to drop from Java its serialization feature that has been a thorn in the side when it comes to security. Also known as Java object serialization, the feature is used for encoding objects into streams of bytes... Removing serialization is a long-term goal and is part of Project Amber, which is focused on productivity-oriented Java language features, says Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle.

To replace the current serialization technology, a small serialization framework would be placed in the platform once records, the Java version of data classes, are supported. The framework could support a graph of records, and developers could plug in a serialization engine of their choice, supporting formats such as JSON or XML, enabling serialization of records in a safe way. But Reinhold cannot yet say which release of Java will have the records capability. Serialization was a "horrible mistake" made in 1997, Reinhold says. He estimates that at least a third -- maybe even half -- of Java vulnerabilities have involved serialization. Serialization overall is brittle but holds the appeal of being easy to use in simple use cases, Reinhold says.

An anonymous reader quotes Application Development Trends: Oracle announced the general availability of Java SE 10 (JDK 10) this week. This release, which comes barely six months after the release of Java SE 9, is the first in the new rapid release cadence Oracle announced late last year. The new release schedule, which the company is calling an "innovation cycle," calls for a feature release every six months, update releases every quarter, and a long-term support (LTS) release every three years. Java 10 is a feature release that obsoletes Java 9. The next LTS release will be Java 11, expected in September. The next LTS version after that will be Java 17, scheduled for release in September 2021...

The six-month feature release cadence is meant to reduce the latency between major releases, explained is Sharat Chander, director of Oracle's Java SE Product Management group, said in a blog post. "This release model takes inspiration from the release models used by other platforms and by various operating-system distributions addressing the modern application development landscape," Chander wrote. "The pace of innovation is happening at an ever-increasing rate and this new release model will allow developers to leverage new features in production as soon as possible. Modern application development expects simple open licensing and a predictable time-based cadence, and the new release model delivers on both."
This release finally adds var to the Java language (though its use is limited to local variables with initializers or declared in a for-loop). It's being added "to improve the developer experience by reducing the ceremony associated with writing Java code, while maintaining Java's commitment to static type safety, by allowing developers to elide the often-unnecessary manifest declaration of local variable type."

An anonymous reader writes: Google is ditching the Java application programming interfaces (APIs) in Android and moving to only OpenJDK. The news first came by a "mysterious Android codebase commit" from last month submitted to Hacker News. Google confirmed to VentureBeat that Android N will rely solely on OpenJDK. “As an open-source platform, Android is built upon the collaboration of the open-source community,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat. “In our upcoming release of Android, we plan to move Android’s Java language libraries to an OpenJDK-based approach, creating a common code base for developers to build apps and services. Google has long worked with and contributed to the OpenJDK community, and we look forward to making even more contributions to the OpenJDK project in the future.”

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle acquired GlassFish when it acquired Sun Microsystems, and now — like OpenSolaris and OpenOffice — the company has announced it will no longer support a commercial version of the product. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. said in an interview the decision wasn't exactly a surprise: "The only company that was putting any real investment in GlassFish was Oracle," Milinkovich said. "Nobody else was really stepping up to the plate to help. If you never contributed anything to it, you can't complain when something like this happens." An update to the open source version is still planned for 2014." GlassFish is an open source application server.

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle has released the first developer preview of Java 8 for the full range of platforms (Windows, Max OS X, Linux, Solaris). Java 8 is a major update to both language and platform with Lambda expressions, method references, default methods, a new Date and Time API, Compact Profiles, the Nashorn JavaScript Engine, and the removal of the Permanent Generation from the HotSpot virtual machine. 'This milestone is intended for broad testing by developers,' Java Platform Chief Architect Mark Reinhold wrote on his blog. 'We've run all tests on all Oracle-supported platforms and haven't found any glaring issues. We've also fixed many of the bugs discovered since we reached the Feature Complete milestone back in June.' Let the bug hunt commence!" This is the second part of the JDK "Plan B" where JDK 7 was pushed out without cool new features like lambda expressions to prevent stalling language development for too long.

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle has released the first developer preview of Java 8 for the full range of platforms (Windows, Max OS X, Linux, Solaris). Java 8 is a major update to both language and platform with Lambda expressions, method references, default methods, a new Date and Time API, Compact Profiles, the Nashorn JavaScript Engine, and the removal of the Permanent Generation from the HotSpot virtual machine. 'This milestone is intended for broad testing by developers,' Java Platform Chief Architect Mark Reinhold wrote on his blog. 'We've run all tests on all Oracle-supported platforms and haven't found any glaring issues. We've also fixed many of the bugs discovered since we reached the Feature Complete milestone back in June.' Let the bug hunt commence!" This is the second part of the JDK "Plan B" where JDK 7 was pushed out without cool new features like lambda expressions to prevent stalling language development for too long.

mikejuk writes "Java Development Kit 8, planned for September 2013, is being delayed until next year because of 'a renewed focus on security.' Java has been having security publicity problems recently, but Oracle now seems to be taking them more seriously. Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group, said, 'Maintaining the security of the Java Platform always takes priority over developing new features, and so these efforts have inevitably taken engineers away from working on Java 8.' The major change still to be made to Java 8 is Project Lambda, which Reinhold says is 'the sole driving feature of the release.' He laid out alternatives, such as dropping Lambda from this release, but said Oracle has decided instead to wait until Lambda is ready. The revised schedule for JDK 8 has a developer preview scheduled for September, a release candidate scheduled for January 2014, and general availablity scheduled for March 2014. The delay means that Java SE 9 will probably be released in early 2016, rather than late 2015."

hypnosec writes "Oracle has proposed a new project for OpenJDK — Nashorn, which aims to implement a high-performance yet lightweight JavaScript runtime that would run on the JVM natively. Nashorn will be headed by Jim Laskey, multi-language Lead at Oracle and the project will be sponsored by HotSpot group. The project proposes an implementation of JavaScript such that it can run standalone JavaScript applications via the JSR 223 APIs. Nashorn's design will enable it to take advantage of new JVM technologies like the MethodHandles and the InvokeDynamic APIs."

sproketboy writes "It seems Oracle has decided in their infinite wisdom to remove digital signatures from the Java projects that they put into the open source community. Of course this breaks any application out there depending on Java Webstart using these libs. Looks like Java3D and JAI are currently affected — probably other APIs are as well. Oh Oracle! What are we supposed to do with you?"

An anonymous reader writes "The monetization of Java has begun. Sun released the Java 1.6.0_14 JDK and JRE today which include a cool new garbage collector called G1. There is just one catch. Even though it is included in the distribution, the release notes state 'Although G1 is available for use in this release, note that production use of G1 is only permitted where a Java support contract has been purchased.' So the Oracle touch is already taking effect. Will OpenJDK be doomed to a feature-castrated backwater while all the good stuff goes into the new Java SE for Business commercial version?"

arkowitz writes "I invented a protocol called CICP for interacting with virtual worlds, and filed a provisional patent application on it March 20 of last year. I have since declared the protocol open and public, and contributed an implementation of it to the Sun Wonderland project, which is GPL; and made public the LSL code and accompanying Java servlet for the Second Life implementation of the protocol. I've been collaborating with a fellow in Finland named Tommi S. E. Laukkanen on a new protocol called MXP: Metaverse Exchange Protocol (here's a full description at cybertechnews.com). MXP is and will always be public domain; we intend it to enable an open and ubiquitous metaverse. My question is this: is there any reason to complete the patent app for CICP, which could potentially cover MXP as well, and release it to the public domain? The full app is due by March 20 and the legal work would probably cost my company $10k. Would finishing the patent protect the open and public protocols from patent trolls, or would it be a waste of money? Also, what kind of document would I need to make official the public-domaining of the app?"

ruphus13 writes "As the mobile space heats up, Sun has released the source code for Java Lightweight UI Toolkit under the GPL v2 license. ZDNet quotes Sun's senior director of embedded software saying, 'By creating LWUIT, Sun is reaffirming its commitment to the mobile development community and by open-sourcing the LWUIT code, we are enabling mobile developers to quickly and easily create rich, portable interfaces for their applications -- functionality that they have been requesting for some time.' Will Adobe follow suit?" Sun is also working on some fixes to holes in their mobile Java platform, which were discovered by a Polish researcher who demanded €20,000 to disclose the information.

Feint writes "I'm working on an business platform for inter-company collaboration based on an open source software stack. As part of that platform I would like to integrate some sort of digital rights management for the documents in the system. The vast majority of articles about DRM are focused how good or evil it is to apply DRM to digital music or video. I haven't seen many articles address open source solutions for protecting business data like CAD / MS Office / PDF / etc. documents, which is a real need in business today. Can the Slashdot readership suggest some open source DRM offerings other than the Sun DReaM initiative, which hasn't had a release since Jan. 2007?"

LarsWestergren writes "David Flanagan, the author of Java in a Nutshell, has a nice writeup on the state of the open source development of the next version of Java. The article explains the difference between the JDK7 and the OpenJDK projects and how to join them. Furthermore, it has an overview of the release schedule, proposed language changes and projects of interest. A more technical and in-depth tracking of the language changes and proposed new features can be found at Alex Miller's blog. This is the first in a series, and 'each future installment will provide an update on what's currently happening in the latest builds from the project, along with a deep dive into a new feature or API that's tracking for inclusion in Java 7.'"

Jean-Marie Dautelle writes to inform us that the public review period ends on July 8 for JSR-275, "Measures and Units" Early Draft. The JSR-275 will be a major enhancement for Java 7 by providing "strong" typing (through class parameterization) and easy internationalization of Java programs, preventing conversion errors. The latest version 0.8 is available as a PDF. The reference implementation is provided by the JScience project under a BSD license."

An anonymous reader writes "You can now get GPLed JVM sources from Sun. Everyone seemed to be expecting the desktop version (J2SE) but J2ME has been released first. It looks to be buildable for Linux x86, MIPS, and ARM platforms. Sun now calls it 'phoneME.' Enjoy."

Ivan Tarasov writes "Ever wanted to hack the JDK sources to get rid of some nasty bug which bothered you for so long, but was embarrassed by the complexity of the JDK build process? Now you have a good tutorial on how to do it on Debian GNU/Linux: last night I posted a blog entry on how to build the JDK 6 (sources of which are available at the Peabody site). This entry describes in detail which packages you need installed, how do you tweak the sources to make them buildable and how to proceed with the build. The build process for other Linux distributions must be very similar, so don't turn away if you don't use Debian. There is also a nice blog entry by Cay Horstmann "Honey, I built the JDK! (on Ubuntu)"."

Ivan Tarasov writes "Ever wanted to hack the JDK sources to get rid of some nasty bug which bothered you for so long, but was embarrassed by the complexity of the JDK build process? Now you have a good tutorial on how to do it on Debian GNU/Linux: last night I posted a blog entry on how to build the JDK 6 (sources of which are available at the Peabody site). This entry describes in detail which packages you need installed, how do you tweak the sources to make them buildable and how to proceed with the build. The build process for other Linux distributions must be very similar, so don't turn away if you don't use Debian. There is also a nice blog entry by Cay Horstmann "Honey, I built the JDK! (on Ubuntu)"."

thePowerOfGrayskull writes "Sun is now stating that the Hotspot JVM and javac will be open-sourced in October of this year, with the rest to follow by the end of 2007. There is still no word as to which license it will be released under. For those who haven't seen it yet, Sun has previously opened a public developer community site for soliciting feedback and providing updates about the process."

Anml4ixoye writes "I recently got sent a copy of Bruce Tate's newest book Beyond Java - A Glimpse at the Future of Programming Languages. Having read Bruce's Bitter Java and Better, Faster, Lighter Java, I was intrigued to see what he would have to say about moving beyond Java. In short: If you're a hard-core Java (or to a lesser extent, C#) developer who thinks Ruby is something that goes on a ring, Pythons will bite you, and Smalltalk is something you have to do at parties, you are in for a rude awakening." Read the rest of Cory's review. Beyond Java: A Glimpse at the Future of Programming Languages author Bruce A. Tate pages 185 publisher O'Reilly rating 9 reviewer Cory Foy ISBN 0-596-10094-9 summary Excellent book for Java developers who haven't been exploring what else is out there

Let's get down to it. For many people, Java pays the bills. For dealing with big problems, it is a wonderful language with a myriad of libraries for solving domain-specific problems. The author thinks that this focus on the larger applications is causing Java to alienate the developers who need solutions to small, real-world problems, like babysitting a database with a web site.

Bruce starts out in Chapter 1 discussing a disrupting experience he recently had when he discovered how much faster and more productive he and his team were when they switched mid-stream to Ruby on Rails. He gives some controversial numbers that discuss this improvement. This experience leads him to realize that maybe Java is dying - or at least fading in certain areas.

His next sections (Chapters 2 and 3) discusses the "Perfect Storm" that led Java to become the leader it is today. How it traded the OO purity of Smalltalk to woo C++ developers. And how the programming environment was calling out for a language like it.

But that landscape is changing, and Java is having a hard time keeping up. In chapter 4, he gives an example of servlets. Earlier servlet specs allowed you to get a Hello, World servlet, albeit ugly, up rather quickly. That same example now requires deployment descriptors, packaging into WAR files, configuration files, etc, etc. For Java developers, this is the norm, but for a developer new to Java, who wants to learn all that?

Chapter 5 is a discussion of what Bruce feels is the Rules of the Game, or what the next "Killer language" will need in order to beat out Java. This was a very good treatment, highlighting some of the good and bad of Java and languages as a whole. For example, he rates high that you will need some sort of Enterprise Integration, Internet Focus, and Interoperability. He also feels things like dynamic typing, rapid feedback loops and dynamic class models (making reflection more natural).

Most importantly, it needs a killer app to act as a catalyst to get people's mindsets changed. In Chapters 6, 7 and 8, he gives examples of some killer apps - Ruby on Rails and Smalltalk's Continuation servers (like Seaside). Chapter 6 is a kick-in-the-teeth intro to Ruby (which left me wanting to go out and pick up Dave Thomas' Programming Ruby book). Chapter 7 shows a sample Ruby on Rails application, and Chapter 8 gives a very interesting look into Continuation servers and the work being done by the Smalltalk community on it.

Finally, he closes the book with a list of Primary and Secondary contenders that could up and replace Java. Primaries include Ruby, Python, Groovy, and .NET (C# and VB.NET). Secondary contenders include Perl, Smalltalk, PHP and Lisp, which he summarizes as: "Perl's too loose and too messy, PHP is too close to the HTML, Lisp is not accessible, and Smalltalk wasn't Java". To which he adds, "...go ahead and fire up your GMail client and your thesaurus, and drop me a nasty note. Ted Neward reviewed this book, so I can take a few more euphemisms for the word sucks".

Thankfully there is nothing in this book that would cause me to write a nasty note to Mr. Tate. In fact, if you haven't begun looking at other languages and are heavy in the Java world, I would highly recommend picking up a copy of the book. It's a fast, intriguing read with great insights and the chance to save yourself from looking around 4 years from now wondering what the heck happened, and why all of these developers can afford jewels and play with snakes while chatting among themselves."

You can purchase Beyond Java: A Glimpse at the Future of Programming Languages from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

pdoubleya writes "As part of the development of Mustang (Java 1.6), Sun is developing a new, smaller and faster classfile verifier which they want your help in trying to break. As Sun VP Graham Hamilton puts it in his blog entry, "As part of Mustang we will be delivering a whole new classfile verifier implementation based on an entirely new verification approach. The classfile verifier is the very heart of the whole Java sandbox model, so replacing both the implementation and the basic verification model is a Really Big Deal.... The new verifier is faster and smaller than the classic verifier, but at the same time it doesn't have the ten years of reassuring shakedown history that we have with the classic verifier." You can read about the new verifier on Gilad Bracha's blog, and join the new Crack the Verifier initiative to if you can break it. Read all about the Crack the Verifier - Challenge."

pdoubleya writes "As part of the development of Mustang (Java 1.6), Sun is developing a new, smaller and faster classfile verifier which they want your help in trying to break. As Sun VP Graham Hamilton puts it in his blog entry, "As part of Mustang we will be delivering a whole new classfile verifier implementation based on an entirely new verification approach. The classfile verifier is the very heart of the whole Java sandbox model, so replacing both the implementation and the basic verification model is a Really Big Deal.... The new verifier is faster and smaller than the classic verifier, but at the same time it doesn't have the ten years of reassuring shakedown history that we have with the classic verifier." You can read about the new verifier on Gilad Bracha's blog, and join the new Crack the Verifier initiative to if you can break it. Read all about the Crack the Verifier - Challenge."

pdoubleya writes "As part of the development of Mustang (Java 1.6), Sun is developing a new, smaller and faster classfile verifier which they want your help in trying to break. As Sun VP Graham Hamilton puts it in his blog entry, "As part of Mustang we will be delivering a whole new classfile verifier implementation based on an entirely new verification approach. The classfile verifier is the very heart of the whole Java sandbox model, so replacing both the implementation and the basic verification model is a Really Big Deal.... The new verifier is faster and smaller than the classic verifier, but at the same time it doesn't have the ten years of reassuring shakedown history that we have with the classic verifier." You can read about the new verifier on Gilad Bracha's blog, and join the new Crack the Verifier initiative to if you can break it. Read all about the Crack the Verifier - Challenge."

mymaxx writes "Tuxmachines.org has a review of LG3D, a LiveCD distro using Sun's Looking Glass technology. It looks very promising for the future of desktops, but it still has a ways to go." Tuxmachines also has a few screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

farble1670 writes "Sun Microsystems has released their Application Server 9.0 PE platform as open source, under the code name Glassfish. Version 9.0, when complete, will be J2EE 5 compliant. Code is released under Sun's CDDL (common development and distribution license), the same license used to cover the Open Solaris, the open-source Solaris operating system. This is most likely a response to the popular open-source application server JBoss, which has cut into profits for Sun as well as other major application server vendors such as BEA and IBM."

Bruce writes "Newsforge is reporting that Java 2 Standard Edition, may soon be set free of Sun Microsystems' notoriously complicated licensing. A group of 12 Apache developers have put together a proposal called Harmony. The proposal appeared as a simple project call last Friday on an Apache incubator mailing list. It would make this new, built-from-the-ground-up version of Java available under the Apache 2.0 free software license. And it's causing quite a stir in the Java community, especially since respected Sun frontmen Tim Bray, Simon Phipps, and Graham Hamilton have given the project their blessing. As yet there has been no reaction from Dr. Java, James Gosling himself, who is in Brazil talking to developers. In a FAQ on the Apache site, Harmony project leader Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: 'We believe that there is broad community interest in coming together to create and use an open source, compatible implementation of J2SE 5, the latest version of the Java 2 Standard Edition specification. While the Java Community Process has allowed open source implementations of JSRs for a few years now, Java 5 is the first of the J2SE specs that we are able to do due to licensing reasons.'"

remember_beos writes "Sun created Project Looking Glass (LG3D) as a 'proof of concept' not long ago. It is an environment for Linux, like KDE or Gnome, but with some really great 3D functionality. More than just eye-candy, LG3D provides functional use of an extra spatial dimension on your desktop. Now there is a LiveCD for us all to try it out."

jg21 writes "Although this reader-compiled list of software development's giants omits pioneers like George Boole, John Louis von Neumann, and the 'Forgotten Father of the Computer' John Vincent Atanasoff - among others - it does a pretty good job of mapping the Code Masters, from Alan Turing who gave us the algorithm, to Klaus Knopper the one-man band behind Knoppix. They're mostly here - the inventors of C, C++, C#, Java, and Python; example. There are a couple of programmers who have snuck in more for their business acumen than their programming talent, like the former Powersoft/Sybase CEO Mitchell Kertzman but otherwise the 40 nominees seem pretty 'pure' and the overall idea is to narrow the list down to the Top Twenty Software People in the World - a phrase invented by Tim Bray, who blogged that Adam Bosworth would be among them. Be careful what you wish for when blogging - looks like Bray's about to find out who the community thinks the the 19 others are."

madcowbrit writes "J2SE 5.0 Source code bundles are now available with SCSL and the new and exciting Java Research license! Coders have been asking for Java J2SE source code access under new terms. The new Java Research license gives people more access and options to work with the Java J2SE source code."

Max Goff writes "Given the recent chatter surrounding the extinction of the U.S. programmer, /. readers might also be interested in a series of articles I recently penned for java.net -- the Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper (part 1, part 2 and part 3) -- in which I posit that the postmodern programmer (the entire sub-species, not just those domiciled in the U.S.) shares much with the blacksmith of old, and will become just as extinct in relatively short order. It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself."

Max Goff writes "Given the recent chatter surrounding the extinction of the U.S. programmer, /. readers might also be interested in a series of articles I recently penned for java.net -- the Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper (part 1, part 2 and part 3) -- in which I posit that the postmodern programmer (the entire sub-species, not just those domiciled in the U.S.) shares much with the blacksmith of old, and will become just as extinct in relatively short order. It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself."

Max Goff writes "Given the recent chatter surrounding the extinction of the U.S. programmer, /. readers might also be interested in a series of articles I recently penned for java.net -- the Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper (part 1, part 2 and part 3) -- in which I posit that the postmodern programmer (the entire sub-species, not just those domiciled in the U.S.) shares much with the blacksmith of old, and will become just as extinct in relatively short order. It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself."

Max Goff writes "Given the recent chatter surrounding the extinction of the U.S. programmer, /. readers might also be interested in a series of articles I recently penned for java.net -- the Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper (part 1, part 2 and part 3) -- in which I posit that the postmodern programmer (the entire sub-species, not just those domiciled in the U.S.) shares much with the blacksmith of old, and will become just as extinct in relatively short order. It is not due to work visas or outsourcing, but has much more to do with the evolution of work itself."

jg21 writes "After Java 5, what will become of Calvin Austin now that he's lead engineer - and spec lead - in charge of J2SE on Linux? This interview shows him to be Sun's most personable developer asset after James Gosling. (Gosling BTW, who famously uses Mac OS rather than a PC, has a Linux box and uses the X support on OS X to run Java 5.) Asked what feature in the new Java edition he considered coolest of all, Austin without hesitation replied "Metadata" - the spec lead for that particular feature, Austin's former colleague at Sun Joshua Bloch, was headhunted recently by Google. Now Java, Linux, and Google would be quite a combo. Maybe that's what's fueling all the recent speculation that a Google browser would probably be a browser, feed reader, blog tool, desktop search, online search, gmail, news reader, photo editing, and online photo publishing all rolled into one."

An anonymous reader writes "In his blog entry for the 10th August, James Gosling (finally) publishes a short paper he wrote in 2002 entitled 'Window System Design: If I had to do it over again in 2002'. His design is to make the window system do the absolute minimum and move all the work into the client."

An anonymous reader writes "In his blog entry for the 10th August, James Gosling (finally) publishes a short paper he wrote in 2002 entitled 'Window System Design: If I had to do it over again in 2002'. His design is to make the window system do the absolute minimum and move all the work into the client."

cereal3825 writes "Well Sun Microsystems Looking Glass has been released for testing. The Project can be found here. Though remember this is beta and a quote from the Getting Started Doc says 'This mode is still very much a work in progress. To date, only a few X11 applications run bug-free in this mode.' so dont expect a work of art."

cereal3825 writes "Well Sun Microsystems Looking Glass has been released for testing. The Project can be found here. Though remember this is beta and a quote from the Getting Started Doc says 'This mode is still very much a work in progress. To date, only a few X11 applications run bug-free in this mode.' so dont expect a work of art."

mrp101 writes "Over the past few months (aka year) the future of Java3D has been in question. Not too long ago Apple announced a port to Mac OS X, but still no official update from Sun. A few weeks ago Sun announced that they were going to release the source code and begin collecting comments for version 1.4/2.0. And today they delivered, right before the JavaOne conference. The announcement can be found here(1) and the CVS here(2). The code includes the core scenegraph, the vector math library, and Sun's own add-on utility libraries."

Jahf writes "Sun has released the JDIC / JDesktop Integration Components API via the LGPL. The idea is to create a Java API that allows Java applications to better integrate with a modern desktop. It allows apps to embed a web browser component, access/launch desktop applications and associate filetypes. Documentation and demos are available and there is an incubator project (SaverBeans Screensaver) under way. Sun has been a proponent of developing desktop apps in Java, including a number of open source Java apps in the Java Desktop System and developing new ones for it as well (Java System Updater), and this appears to be a step towards making that goal a bit easier. I'm sure that every release of Java Desktop System (disclaimer: yes, I work on it) will continue to get the 'it has nothing to do with Java!' trolling since Sun is using GNOME as a desktop foundation (imagine what people would say if Sun created a 3rd environment in Java!) But those willing to step back and look at all facets (JDIC, Java Desktop System, Looking Glass previews, etc), hopefully others will see that Sun is getting more serious about making Java a platform for desktop developers."

Jahf writes "Sun has released the JDIC / JDesktop Integration Components API via the LGPL. The idea is to create a Java API that allows Java applications to better integrate with a modern desktop. It allows apps to embed a web browser component, access/launch desktop applications and associate filetypes. Documentation and demos are available and there is an incubator project (SaverBeans Screensaver) under way. Sun has been a proponent of developing desktop apps in Java, including a number of open source Java apps in the Java Desktop System and developing new ones for it as well (Java System Updater), and this appears to be a step towards making that goal a bit easier. I'm sure that every release of Java Desktop System (disclaimer: yes, I work on it) will continue to get the 'it has nothing to do with Java!' trolling since Sun is using GNOME as a desktop foundation (imagine what people would say if Sun created a 3rd environment in Java!) But those willing to step back and look at all facets (JDIC, Java Desktop System, Looking Glass previews, etc), hopefully others will see that Sun is getting more serious about making Java a platform for desktop developers."

Jahf writes "Sun has released the JDIC / JDesktop Integration Components API via the LGPL. The idea is to create a Java API that allows Java applications to better integrate with a modern desktop. It allows apps to embed a web browser component, access/launch desktop applications and associate filetypes. Documentation and demos are available and there is an incubator project (SaverBeans Screensaver) under way. Sun has been a proponent of developing desktop apps in Java, including a number of open source Java apps in the Java Desktop System and developing new ones for it as well (Java System Updater), and this appears to be a step towards making that goal a bit easier. I'm sure that every release of Java Desktop System (disclaimer: yes, I work on it) will continue to get the 'it has nothing to do with Java!' trolling since Sun is using GNOME as a desktop foundation (imagine what people would say if Sun created a 3rd environment in Java!) But those willing to step back and look at all facets (JDIC, Java Desktop System, Looking Glass previews, etc), hopefully others will see that Sun is getting more serious about making Java a platform for desktop developers."

Alex Garrett writes "First, a quibble. Hardcore Java is not hardcore. Hardcore is implementing coroutines in assembly language or creating a full-fledged OO system in 6K. But if you ignore the title and judge the book solely on its merits you'll find that a Java novice will find a good selection of interesting topics and even an expert will learn a few things. The expert will also find plenty of things to disagree with -- some matters of opinion and others of fact." With that start, read on for the rest of Garrett's review of Hardcore Java, a book in which he finds slightly more worth for Java novices than experts. Hardcore Java author Robert Simmons, Jr. pages 400 publisher O'Reilly rating Experts: 4/10; Novices: 6/10 reviewer Alex Garrett ISBN 0596005687 summary The path to Java guru-hood

The two fatal flaws with this book are that it suffers from a lack of cohesion and focus on its audience and that it doesn't present anything new. That the book doesn't present anything new isn't bad if its goal is to summarize, clarify, and educate the novice. But this book doesn't even work for novices because the author has misidentified his audience. At times he writes for the intermediate programmer, at other times he writes for beginners. The confusion over the audience causes the book to leave novices and experts unsatisfied in equal parts.

Detailed Review
Simmons goal is to write a book that helps "transform a [Java] developer from the intermediate level to a true guru." It is his contention that there is a distinct lack of books that target the intermediate to advanced programmer -- his shining exception is the book Secrets of the C++ Masters by Jeff Alger. While I tend to agree with his assessment, I think that he fails for the following reasons: he doesn't stay true to the audience he has chosen and he doesn't say anything particularly new about the topics he covers.

Rather than provide a review of the book as a whole, I'm going to focus on a few chapters and describe what I thought worked and what I thought didn't work. I chose chapters where I thought the author really had an opportunity to distinguish this book from other similar books. At the end of the chapter reviews I provide an overview of the book.

Chapter 1: Java in Review
In this chapter the author sets the stage for the following chapters by providing an overview of the Java concepts that the reader is expected to be familiar with.

The Good:
Assertions are one of the things that a good software engineer should understand and use. It shows good judgement on the author's part to put them at the beginning of the book so the reader can benefit from the author's impressions. I also found his discussion of initialization to be insightful and interesting. I thought I had a pretty solid understanding of the subject but I was surprised to learn that a field can be initialized by what amounts to an inline method. The author cautions that this technique shouldn't be used often, but he gives a compelling example of when it can be used. It's definitely a trick I'm going to keep in my toolkit.

The Bad:
The first problem is that none of the material in this chapter is necessary for understanding the other parts of the book. Most of it could be reduced to footnotes or sidebars if the author felt it necessary to clarify subsequent topics, but to spend time explaining the importance of the default clause in a conditional is a waste of the reader's time. There's an old saying, "Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I'll understand." The author of a technical book needs to make a significant effort to involve the reader. If involving the reader isn't possible for some reason, the author should, at the very least, show the reader rather than simply enumerating principles divorced from a learning context. Simmons should show us how to use assertions by using them. He does a great job of this with his ubiquitious use of final. I'm less certain of how well he does with his other core concepts. I could go back to the book and look it up, but if I need to do that, it means he's already failed.

The other problem with this chapter is that the author assumes the stance that the reader is a C++ programmer approaching Java. He asserts, "To understand the advanced concepts of the Java language, there are a few core concepts that you must have firmly in mind. Without these concepts, much of this book will not make a lot of sense. The concepts of pointers in Java, its class hierarchy, and RTTI (runtime type identification) are three of the most important on this list." This list might be important for a C or C++ programmer moving to Java (which is a position I'll hazard a guess that the author found himself) but it's marginally useful for anyone else. Allow me to summarize: Java has no pointers, all objects inherit from java.lang.Object, and you can interrogate an object to determine its type at runtime. 'Nuff said.

Unfortunately, this is a theme that runs throughout the book. The author seems to assume that his audience has a C++ background and he either differentiates between the things that Java has that C++ doesn't (e.g., pointers) or he introduces bits from his C++ background that are also in Java (e.g., the ternary operator). The reason for this, I believe, is that the author has failed to separate himself sufficiently from his audience. That's to say, he's writing the book that he would have liked to have read when he was starting his Java career. This isn't a bad thing if you're sufficiently like Robert Simmons, Jr. to warrant that kind of advice, but if you're not, his exposition is going to be hit or miss.

Chapter 5: Exceptional Code
This chapter covers the use and misuse of exceptions in Java. It provides a summary of the different types of exceptions and provides some guidelines for good coding practices.

The Good:
Exceptions are an important part of Java and are misunderstood by a fair chunk of Java developers. The author recognizes this and attempts to provide an introduction to exceptions and show some of the common exception anti-idioms. His discussion on the necessity of the atomicity of transactions was valuable and clear. He shows what happens in the rare instances when a transaction fails midstream and isn't rolled back. He then provides good advice on how to write code to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

The Bad:
This is a short chapter and that's unfortunate because the topic of exceptions is rich and worth much investigation. This chapter provided an excellent opportunity for Simmons to display some virtuosity and say something significant about the subject. If nothing else, he could have elaborated on the relative merits of checked exceptions vs. unchecked exceptions; a topic that has been the subject of Holy Wars in the Java/C# community. Unfortunately, all he really mustered was an, "unchecked exceptions are Java's way of not cluttering up your code with too many 'throws' clauses." (paraphrased, but see the end of section 5.1.1)

The author seems to have some good intuitions around the use and misuse of exceptions, but rather than clearly delineating the issues and sharing his insight with the reader, he sets up a couple of toy examples that show the syntax of exception handling and waffles around the issue of when to use checked exceptions and when to use unchecked exceptions. There is little enough spoken about exception handling that this might be sufficient if Joshua Bloch hadn't already provided a solid grounding in exceptions with Effective Java. But since he has, I had hoped for some new insights, which Simmons failed to provide.

Chapters 9 & 10: Practical Reflection and Proxies
These chapters provide an introduction to Java's capabilities for introspection of types and objects, as well as describing the new JDK 1.4 DynamicProxy class. Simmons also gives some examples of how to write proxies--dynamic and static.

The Good:
In choosing to cover Java's introspection facilities, the author demonstrates that he recognizes the importance of metaprogramming as a qualification of Java expertise. It's on par with things like writing classloaders or grokking bytecode and it separates the gurus from the merely competent. If nothing else, it gives Java programmers the opportunity to do the things that smug lisp weenies are always nattering on about.

The author gives a good overview of how reflection works in Java as well as providing some examples. He also distinguishes between static proxies (like the Proxy pattern in Design Patterns) and the nifty dynamic proxy part of JDK 1.4 and shows how to use these proxies and provides some demonstrations of how they can be used.

The Bad:
As with much of the book, the examples aren't particularly compelling and Simmons doesn't take the opportunity to take the reader to the next level and show him some sweet metaprogramming. Reflection and proxies aren't complicated conceptually, and the syntax is fairly straightforward. He could have gotten the implementation details out of the way and then provided examples from the field. The JMock guys are doing some nice work in generating mock objects for unit testing with dynamic proxy and the Nanning guys have a nice aspect-oriented programming framework that uses reflection and proxies. This is the kind of work that's being done with metaprogramming and confining the discussion to toy examples is discouraging.

Overall:
The Good:
The author has a good conversational style and seems like the kind of guy that you'd enjoy working with--friendly, knowledgable, and genuinely enthusiastic about his subject. The book has plenty of interesting material. The use of final is a great way of turning logic errors into compiler errors. A knowledge of metaprogramming is becoming more important every day, and bringing metaprogramming to test-driven development is an idea with considerable merit. Someone new to Java could use this book as a sampler of some important ideas in the practice of Java programming and explore the topics in greater depth at a later point.

The Bad:
This book suffers because the author identified his audience and stated his goal and then didn't follow the path he laid out. As a result, the author winds up disappointing all readers. The novice will find that the author glosses over topics that are clearly over their heads, while the expert will be bored by the level of detail that the author devotes to relatively simple topics.

Additionally, the examples are so simple that a newcomer to Java will not have trouble following them, but someone who has used Java for more than half-a-dozen months will find them uninteresting and unchallenging. The author should have taken the opportunity to really explore the space.

Conclusion:
While this book covered some interesting and high level java topics, it covered them shallowly and its content was presented inconsistently to readers of varying levels of expertise. The author needed to stick with his audience, choose topics that fit well together, and challenge the reader. That said, I don't lay the blame entirely on the author. His editor should have made the book tighter, more compelling, and more focused on its central thesis: helping intermediate Java programmers become expert Java programmers. The technical reviewers, who are presumably experts, should have provided the feedback that Simmons needed to raise the bar.

The book would be more appropriately titled, Robert Simmons, Jr. Shares Some Cool Things from Projects He Has Worked On. I think the best thing for this book would have been for the author to cull each chapter down to one quarter of its existing size and then publish them separately as magazine articles.

Alternate Sources:
The Java Programming Language, 3ed and Effective Java together cover nearly everything in this book in much greater detail and with better authority. Ken Arnold and James Gosling are two of three authors for the first book, and Joshua Bloch, author of the java.util.Collections classes is the author of the second. If you've mastered the material in these two books, you're an expert, full stop. Unfortunately, these books don't really cover reflection and proxies. If you're an intermediate java programmer and you want a good overview of proxies and metaprogramming in Java, I recommend the source code for Nanning, a lightweight aspect-oriented programming framework for Java.

Alex Garrett is a contract programmer who mostly works with Java. For a while, he was the acquisitions editor for Manning Publications, which inclines him to be a smug publishing weenie. You can purchase Hardcore Java from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Alex Garrett writes "First, a quibble. Hardcore Java is not hardcore. Hardcore is implementing coroutines in assembly language or creating a full-fledged OO system in 6K. But if you ignore the title and judge the book solely on its merits you'll find that a Java novice will find a good selection of interesting topics and even an expert will learn a few things. The expert will also find plenty of things to disagree with -- some matters of opinion and others of fact." With that start, read on for the rest of Garrett's review of Hardcore Java, a book in which he finds slightly more worth for Java novices than experts. Hardcore Java author Robert Simmons, Jr. pages 400 publisher O'Reilly rating Experts: 4/10; Novices: 6/10 reviewer Alex Garrett ISBN 0596005687 summary The path to Java guru-hood

The two fatal flaws with this book are that it suffers from a lack of cohesion and focus on its audience and that it doesn't present anything new. That the book doesn't present anything new isn't bad if its goal is to summarize, clarify, and educate the novice. But this book doesn't even work for novices because the author has misidentified his audience. At times he writes for the intermediate programmer, at other times he writes for beginners. The confusion over the audience causes the book to leave novices and experts unsatisfied in equal parts.

Detailed Review
Simmons goal is to write a book that helps "transform a [Java] developer from the intermediate level to a true guru." It is his contention that there is a distinct lack of books that target the intermediate to advanced programmer -- his shining exception is the book Secrets of the C++ Masters by Jeff Alger. While I tend to agree with his assessment, I think that he fails for the following reasons: he doesn't stay true to the audience he has chosen and he doesn't say anything particularly new about the topics he covers.

Rather than provide a review of the book as a whole, I'm going to focus on a few chapters and describe what I thought worked and what I thought didn't work. I chose chapters where I thought the author really had an opportunity to distinguish this book from other similar books. At the end of the chapter reviews I provide an overview of the book.

Chapter 1: Java in Review
In this chapter the author sets the stage for the following chapters by providing an overview of the Java concepts that the reader is expected to be familiar with.

The Good:
Assertions are one of the things that a good software engineer should understand and use. It shows good judgement on the author's part to put them at the beginning of the book so the reader can benefit from the author's impressions. I also found his discussion of initialization to be insightful and interesting. I thought I had a pretty solid understanding of the subject but I was surprised to learn that a field can be initialized by what amounts to an inline method. The author cautions that this technique shouldn't be used often, but he gives a compelling example of when it can be used. It's definitely a trick I'm going to keep in my toolkit.

The Bad:
The first problem is that none of the material in this chapter is necessary for understanding the other parts of the book. Most of it could be reduced to footnotes or sidebars if the author felt it necessary to clarify subsequent topics, but to spend time explaining the importance of the default clause in a conditional is a waste of the reader's time. There's an old saying, "Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I'll understand." The author of a technical book needs to make a significant effort to involve the reader. If involving the reader isn't possible for some reason, the author should, at the very least, show the reader rather than simply enumerating principles divorced from a learning context. Simmons should show us how to use assertions by using them. He does a great job of this with his ubiquitious use of final. I'm less certain of how well he does with his other core concepts. I could go back to the book and look it up, but if I need to do that, it means he's already failed.

The other problem with this chapter is that the author assumes the stance that the reader is a C++ programmer approaching Java. He asserts, "To understand the advanced concepts of the Java language, there are a few core concepts that you must have firmly in mind. Without these concepts, much of this book will not make a lot of sense. The concepts of pointers in Java, its class hierarchy, and RTTI (runtime type identification) are three of the most important on this list." This list might be important for a C or C++ programmer moving to Java (which is a position I'll hazard a guess that the author found himself) but it's marginally useful for anyone else. Allow me to summarize: Java has no pointers, all objects inherit from java.lang.Object, and you can interrogate an object to determine its type at runtime. 'Nuff said.

Unfortunately, this is a theme that runs throughout the book. The author seems to assume that his audience has a C++ background and he either differentiates between the things that Java has that C++ doesn't (e.g., pointers) or he introduces bits from his C++ background that are also in Java (e.g., the ternary operator). The reason for this, I believe, is that the author has failed to separate himself sufficiently from his audience. That's to say, he's writing the book that he would have liked to have read when he was starting his Java career. This isn't a bad thing if you're sufficiently like Robert Simmons, Jr. to warrant that kind of advice, but if you're not, his exposition is going to be hit or miss.

Chapter 5: Exceptional Code
This chapter covers the use and misuse of exceptions in Java. It provides a summary of the different types of exceptions and provides some guidelines for good coding practices.

The Good:
Exceptions are an important part of Java and are misunderstood by a fair chunk of Java developers. The author recognizes this and attempts to provide an introduction to exceptions and show some of the common exception anti-idioms. His discussion on the necessity of the atomicity of transactions was valuable and clear. He shows what happens in the rare instances when a transaction fails midstream and isn't rolled back. He then provides good advice on how to write code to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

The Bad:
This is a short chapter and that's unfortunate because the topic of exceptions is rich and worth much investigation. This chapter provided an excellent opportunity for Simmons to display some virtuosity and say something significant about the subject. If nothing else, he could have elaborated on the relative merits of checked exceptions vs. unchecked exceptions; a topic that has been the subject of Holy Wars in the Java/C# community. Unfortunately, all he really mustered was an, "unchecked exceptions are Java's way of not cluttering up your code with too many 'throws' clauses." (paraphrased, but see the end of section 5.1.1)

The author seems to have some good intuitions around the use and misuse of exceptions, but rather than clearly delineating the issues and sharing his insight with the reader, he sets up a couple of toy examples that show the syntax of exception handling and waffles around the issue of when to use checked exceptions and when to use unchecked exceptions. There is little enough spoken about exception handling that this might be sufficient if Joshua Bloch hadn't already provided a solid grounding in exceptions with Effective Java. But since he has, I had hoped for some new insights, which Simmons failed to provide.

Chapters 9 & 10: Practical Reflection and Proxies
These chapters provide an introduction to Java's capabilities for introspection of types and objects, as well as describing the new JDK 1.4 DynamicProxy class. Simmons also gives some examples of how to write proxies--dynamic and static.

The Good:
In choosing to cover Java's introspection facilities, the author demonstrates that he recognizes the importance of metaprogramming as a qualification of Java expertise. It's on par with things like writing classloaders or grokking bytecode and it separates the gurus from the merely competent. If nothing else, it gives Java programmers the opportunity to do the things that smug lisp weenies are always nattering on about.

The author gives a good overview of how reflection works in Java as well as providing some examples. He also distinguishes between static proxies (like the Proxy pattern in Design Patterns) and the nifty dynamic proxy part of JDK 1.4 and shows how to use these proxies and provides some demonstrations of how they can be used.

The Bad:
As with much of the book, the examples aren't particularly compelling and Simmons doesn't take the opportunity to take the reader to the next level and show him some sweet metaprogramming. Reflection and proxies aren't complicated conceptually, and the syntax is fairly straightforward. He could have gotten the implementation details out of the way and then provided examples from the field. The JMock guys are doing some nice work in generating mock objects for unit testing with dynamic proxy and the Nanning guys have a nice aspect-oriented programming framework that uses reflection and proxies. This is the kind of work that's being done with metaprogramming and confining the discussion to toy examples is discouraging.

Overall:
The Good:
The author has a good conversational style and seems like the kind of guy that you'd enjoy working with--friendly, knowledgable, and genuinely enthusiastic about his subject. The book has plenty of interesting material. The use of final is a great way of turning logic errors into compiler errors. A knowledge of metaprogramming is becoming more important every day, and bringing metaprogramming to test-driven development is an idea with considerable merit. Someone new to Java could use this book as a sampler of some important ideas in the practice of Java programming and explore the topics in greater depth at a later point.

The Bad:
This book suffers because the author identified his audience and stated his goal and then didn't follow the path he laid out. As a result, the author winds up disappointing all readers. The novice will find that the author glosses over topics that are clearly over their heads, while the expert will be bored by the level of detail that the author devotes to relatively simple topics.

Additionally, the examples are so simple that a newcomer to Java will not have trouble following them, but someone who has used Java for more than half-a-dozen months will find them uninteresting and unchallenging. The author should have taken the opportunity to really explore the space.

Conclusion:
While this book covered some interesting and high level java topics, it covered them shallowly and its content was presented inconsistently to readers of varying levels of expertise. The author needed to stick with his audience, choose topics that fit well together, and challenge the reader. That said, I don't lay the blame entirely on the author. His editor should have made the book tighter, more compelling, and more focused on its central thesis: helping intermediate Java programmers become expert Java programmers. The technical reviewers, who are presumably experts, should have provided the feedback that Simmons needed to raise the bar.

The book would be more appropriately titled, Robert Simmons, Jr. Shares Some Cool Things from Projects He Has Worked On. I think the best thing for this book would have been for the author to cull each chapter down to one quarter of its existing size and then publish them separately as magazine articles.

Alternate Sources:
The Java Programming Language, 3ed and Effective Java together cover nearly everything in this book in much greater detail and with better authority. Ken Arnold and James Gosling are two of three authors for the first book, and Joshua Bloch, author of the java.util.Collections classes is the author of the second. If you've mastered the material in these two books, you're an expert, full stop. Unfortunately, these books don't really cover reflection and proxies. If you're an intermediate java programmer and you want a good overview of proxies and metaprogramming in Java, I recommend the source code for Nanning, a lightweight aspect-oriented programming framework for Java.

Alex Garrett is a contract programmer who mostly works with Java. For a while, he was the acquisitions editor for Manning Publications, which inclines him to be a smug publishing weenie. You can purchase Hardcore Java from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Sim9 writes "Sun (among others) is sponsoring a $50,000 Java games competition, with the competition page explaining: 'With Java technology, developers are enabled to simplify their development process and create richer games reaching across a multitude of devices and platforms.' In my humble opinion, Java still has a ways to go in the gaming industry, but the competition could greatly help if skilled people enter."

MemRaven writes "In an article on CNet News, James Gosling reveals that he's returning to the Java Tools group at Sun. The article touches briefly on the Eclipse situation as well as some vague statements about what he's doing in the future. Since he's been gone from the Java fold for a while, this might spell some definite changes in how Sun treats its stepchild."

An anonymous reader writes "Sun just opened two new Java sites, java.com and java.net. java.com seems to be some marketing fluff. java.net, however, seems to be aimed at open source java programmers and is run by O'Reilly. It's got wikis, blogs, and hosts a lot of projects, including the new java gaming projects. Worth a look."