Slashdot Mirror

wchatam writes "After a long delay, Apple has finally released a version of Java 6 for OS X. 64-bit Intel Macs are starting to see this pushed out via Software Update, but there has not been an announcement for when 32-bit Intel and PowerPC Mac users will get their versions."

El Lobo writes with a sobering account of how Javalobby dropped off the face of Google last month. The site had been attacked by forum spammers and Google indexed some of their spew before the Javalobby guys could remove it. According to a post in Rich Skrenta's blog, Google is now the de-facto front page for the Internet, accounting for anywhere from 70% to 78% of the search market. The power this conveys is hard to overstate. From the Javalobby saga: "We had completely disappeared from Google's main index! If you run a website, then you know how serious a problem this is. On any given day over 10,000 visitors arrive at Javalobby as a result of Google searches, and suddenly they stopped coming! ... Suddenly we no longer existed in the eyes of Google."

dautelle writes "Because of trademark issues we had to rename our Java Addition to Default Environment (JADE) project. We did a little more than that, we created two new projects with additional features and capabilities: Javolution (javolution.org) and jScience (jscience.org). Java developers, please update your bookmarks. You may also read the 'Top 10 reasons' why you should consider using Javolution in your current Java project or how you can take part in this immense undertaking that the jScience project represents."

greg_barton writes "James Gosling has responded to the two previous commentaries cited on Slashdot about the Java Dilemma. Some interesting excerpts: "In Rick Ross's 'Where Is Java In This Settlement?' he worries that Sun may have sold out the Java community. We didn't. We have not sold our soul to the Dark Side." and "There's a long thread of discussion on Slashdot 'Two Takes on the Java Dilemma' that is pretty entertaining, from a wow, what are they smoking! point of view. There are voices of reason, and conspiracy nuts.""

jgeelan writes "In a commentary titled "Microsoft Killed Java" the founder of JavaLobby, Rick Ross, revisits the 'death' of Java on the client. "Five years ago, almost to the day," Ross declares, "Microsoft shipped IE4 with a JVM that was intentionally engineered to provide leverage to corrupt and pollute Java compatibility standards." According to an Associated Press report, Microsoft Corp has until only October 4 to respond to Sun Microsystems' request for a federal court injunction requiring Microsoft to integrate Java into Windows."

Sowbug writes "Here's some interesting Saturday night reading: a critical examination of many of the advertised benefits of .NET's CLR (Common Language Runtime) and the other technologies (MSIL, CLS, CTS) that make it possible. It's written from the perspective of a Java advocate, Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein. "

Matts writes: "I work from home with a number of people from the U.S. (I live in Scotland). One thing I miss about an office is the ability to discuss things over a whiteboard. So I've been looking all over the Net for some sort of shared whiteboard facility so that I can work very quickly with short bits of text and/or drawings. The text bit is very important there. Unfortunately the only products I've found are either old and require Motif and other huge libraries, commercial, or written in Java." Many of us communicate best when we can draw pictures, and being able to scribble and chart over the Net using such an app is an extraordinary idea, especially for those of us working in the "Virtual Office".

"Other ones I've found are an add-on for mIRC (which I didn't even look at because I don't use Windows), and one called wb which appears to be part of the Mbone tools, which I couldn't find the source for and the binary for Linux wouldn't run. What I'm really after is something for either the Gnome or KDE toolkits, although straight GTK+ or QT would be just fine. Surely someone in the open source community has thought of this before - these were hot ideas when I was in university and everyone was building one!"

Begonia writes "While we're on the subject of Java, I'm really impressed with its performance on Linux these days. I'm using IBM's latest (1.3) version of the JDK, which has only been out for a couple of months. And I just stumbled across this latest set of benchmarks for various JDK's on Linux and Windows here. Not dated, but must be at most a couple of weeks old. Lots of very interesting food for thought."

gark writes "The Java Lobby has a weblog on Java success stories. Many of the successful applications are servlet based, and several use Apache JServ. Perhaps WORA [write once, run anywhere] really has been achieved, at least for server apps."

gark writes "The Java Lobby has a weblog on Java success stories. Many of the successful applications are servlet based, and several use Apache JServ. Perhaps WORA [write once, run anywhere] really has been achieved, at least for server apps."

EmilEifrem writes "A JavaLobby member asked RMS ^[?] about his opinion on Java and GPL. Interesting, as always." I think my favorite quote is the intro: "It is strange to argue for ensuring compatibility in Java by keeping implementations non-free. Even if you accept the choice of values (compatibility above freedom) this idea is based on, which I don't, it simply won't do the job."

Snoop Baron writes " The Java Lobby is holding a poll on their front page along with a discussion thread on the question: Should Sun make Java open source? Expect a lot of Java stories next week as the Java Business Expo starts on Monday. Of particular interest are the Java World awards, where many products that run on Linux are finalists: IBM Research's Jikes, Tower J's fast commercial native Java compiler, the GPL'd Kaffe VM, Metroworks' IDE (soon), JDK 1.2 (soon). It's interesting how stong IBM's showing is with 7 entries beating Sun's 5.

As part of their 20,000 member drive, the Java Lobby is teaming up with the Java Journal to offer every one of their members a free subscription for a year. This offer is unlike most others in that people who live outside the US can also benefit... In related news, there's a rather interesting article about Java Virtual Machine performance showing that Linux has far to go. But has anyone performed a VolcanoMark test under Kaffe? On the other hand, TowerJ's native compiler does rather well... I wonder what performance Cygnus' offering will have (it's based on gcc and compiles native code).

As part of their 20,000 member drive, the Java Lobby is teaming up with the Java Journal to offer every one of their members a free subscription for a year. This offer is unlike most others in that people who live outside the US can also benefit... In related news, there's a rather interesting article about Java Virtual Machine performance showing that Linux has far to go. But has anyone performed a VolcanoMark test under Kaffe? On the other hand, TowerJ's native compiler does rather well... I wonder what performance Cygnus' offering will have (it's based on gcc and compiles native code).

Rick Ross wrote in to tell us about another Java Lobby project. He says "Sign the JavaReady Petition Now! Support the Java Lobby's effort to get PC manufacturers and resellers to ship all new PC's with standard, compatible Java pre-installed. Your signature will help us prove to the major PC vendors that Java is an important factor in your purchasing decisions. Sign now, and please ask your friends and associates to sign, too!"

Richard Cannings of Java-Linux.org to just tell us that the site is up and running now, and is the central repository for Java/Linux JDK ports as well as other neato stuff like JITs and Dox. We also have this link from Andy Tai where you can read about the java Lobby's attempts to create a Free Software java desktop and applications under JFC as a way to prevent java from collapsing into a dozen incompatible variations.

Microsoft presented its next salvo in its war against Java: AVAJ, a language which looks like Java, but has two extra keywords, making it incompatible with Java. Simultaneously, it has announced that Windows Foundation Classes will be included in Visual J++ 6.0. (J as in avaJ) The great thing about Avaj, is that it will probably have a set of classes for building server-side applications that won't run on other machines. Of course, real hackers are not best pleased. (A name has been changed to protect the innocent)