Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Abiword 2.0 has been released. Finally the Linux desktop has a quality word processor that is faster to load than OpenOffice.org and includes proper footnotes. It also no longer uses its own font directory. At the same time Enchant 1.0.0 has been released, a cross-platform abstract layer to spellchecking. Enchant has been proposed to be a Freedesktop.org standard." That's not the only news, though: Abiword 2.0 is part of the just-released GNOME-Office 1.0, which, as riggwelter writes "coordinates GNOME2 versions of AbiWord, Gnumeric, and GNOME-DB, the database interface." Sun's StarOffice has just reached version 7, as well: read on below for some more information on that, including a first-look review.

Jim Hall writes "I just noticed that Sun Microsystems has released StarOffice 7. I've been using the StarOffice betas for a while now, so I have been eagerly awaiting this release! StarOffice is, of course, based on the ever-popular OpenOffice.org. StarOffice 7 software adds functionality to enable export to PDF, and to the Macromedia Flash format. It also introduces the new StarOffice Configuration Manager, the StarOffice Software Development Kit, a macro recorder, and support for assistive technologies, as well as for complex text layouts. Multi-platform running on Linux, Solaris OS and Windows. Only US$79.95 to buy your copy for home (free for edu, plus cost of media+shipping.) Now is a great time to show this to your boss and pitch that 'MS Office to StarOffice' conversion project."

An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge has a 'drive-by' 'quick-peek' look at the new StarOffice up on their site."

One suggestion on office software for the Free Software desktop: Casually re-start a friend or co-worker's Windows computer with Knoppix and show them you can open their Word files with OpenOffice.org. Mention their machine is moderately safe from Word-borne viruses until they reboot into Windows.

An anonymous reader writes "Abiword 2.0 has been released. Finally the Linux desktop has a quality word processor that is faster to load than OpenOffice.org and includes proper footnotes. It also no longer uses its own font directory. At the same time Enchant 1.0.0 has been released, a cross-platform abstract layer to spellchecking. Enchant has been proposed to be a Freedesktop.org standard." That's not the only news, though: Abiword 2.0 is part of the just-released GNOME-Office 1.0, which, as riggwelter writes "coordinates GNOME2 versions of AbiWord, Gnumeric, and GNOME-DB, the database interface." Sun's StarOffice has just reached version 7, as well: read on below for some more information on that, including a first-look review.

Jim Hall writes "I just noticed that Sun Microsystems has released StarOffice 7. I've been using the StarOffice betas for a while now, so I have been eagerly awaiting this release! StarOffice is, of course, based on the ever-popular OpenOffice.org. StarOffice 7 software adds functionality to enable export to PDF, and to the Macromedia Flash format. It also introduces the new StarOffice Configuration Manager, the StarOffice Software Development Kit, a macro recorder, and support for assistive technologies, as well as for complex text layouts. Multi-platform running on Linux, Solaris OS and Windows. Only US$79.95 to buy your copy for home (free for edu, plus cost of media+shipping.) Now is a great time to show this to your boss and pitch that 'MS Office to StarOffice' conversion project."

An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge has a 'drive-by' 'quick-peek' look at the new StarOffice up on their site."

One suggestion on office software for the Free Software desktop: Casually re-start a friend or co-worker's Windows computer with Knoppix and show them you can open their Word files with OpenOffice.org. Mention their machine is moderately safe from Word-borne viruses until they reboot into Windows.

Sequoia writes "According to this article, 'The company's new pricing model for its systems will be based on a company's employee count, as declared in a company's annual filings with government regulators. Sun will charge $100 an employee for a single package that includes an application server, a Web portal and security software, among other components -- all of which Sun executives say will work together in a more integrated fashion than they did previously.'" Sun's press information is a little more informative.

Ted Cabeen writes "The 2002 Salary Survey run by SAGE, SANS, and Sun's BigAdmin Group profiled in a March Slashdot Article has finally been released. Everybody who participated in the survey is entitled to a copy, as well as current members of those groups. How does your salary stack up in the post-crash economy?"

CHaN_316 writes "Yahoo is running a story called 'Is Java Finished?' It provides a brief overview of the strengths and weaknesses of J2EE and contrasts them with .NET. Classic arguments are brought up like Java being great for portability while .NET ties you down to Microsoft products, etc. It's interesting that they bring up the Java Community Process, and how it is a rather slow moving procedure that is causing Java to become stagnant."

Simon P. Chappell writes "Now, I enjoy a good technical book more than the next geek, but it's been quite a while since one left me quite so excited with the possibilities that it presented. Code Generation in Action is beyond interesting, it is a masterful tome on its subject matter, written by one who is obviously an experienced practicioner in his craft." If "code generation" isn't a familiar term to you, this enthusiastic overview on devx.com is a concise introduction to what code generation is about, though it makes no pretense of ambivalence about its importance as a programming tool. Read on for the rest of Chappell's review. Code Generation in Action author Jack Herrington pages 342 (10 page index) publisher Manning rating 9 reviewer Simon P. Chappell ISBN 1930110979 summary A masterful tome.

Overview Code Generation in Action, CGiA to its friends, is presented in two parts. The first part is four chapters, and covers a code generation case-study, the basic principles of code generation, including the different types of code generation strategies together with reasons why you would or would not use each strategy. The book's chosen toolset for building generators is presented next, and then some walk-through examples of building simple generators wraps up the first part.

The second part is a kind of a cross between a cookbook and a list of engineering solutions. There are nine chapters with the breadth of solutions covered being quite impressive, covering the gamut of generation of user interfaces, documentation, unit tests and data access code. Each chapter presents a couple of solutions within its topic area, often for different technologies within that topic. For example, the user interface chapter covers the generation of Java ServerPages, Swing dialog boxes and then Microsoft MFC dialog boxes. No favouritism here!

What's To Like There's a lot to like with this book. The writing is very clear and of good prose. I found the introduction to be very compelling, and I felt completely drawn in by the opening case-study. The four chapters of part one are a concise case for code generation, and would be very useful information to help persuade co-workers and management of the positive risk/benefit ratio with trying code-generation on a live project.

It would be impossible to try enough of any solution from part two in a time-frame short enough to make this review useful, but in the solutions that match my areas of knowledge, I found myself admiring Herrington's straight-forward and pragmatic approach.

What's To Consider There are two aspects of this book that I want to flag. One of these aspects, some will love and others will hate, and that is the choice of generator language for CGiA. The author has chosen to use Ruby as his working language. This is an interesting choice. Ruby is certainly a language that is inspiring a lot of admiration these days (in fact, it's hard to get Dave Thomas to stop talking about it :-), but with the majority of the code-generation examples being for Java-related technologies, I wonder why Java was not selected instead.

I also found myself wondering about the lack of discussion of how to integrate these Ruby tools into a typical Java build process. Many developers I know use ant to bring automation and consistency to their builds, yet the book doesn't mention this. (JRuby anyone?) Certainly something to consider for the second edition or future code-generation authors.

Summary

This is a masterful tome that inspires and delights, although the two issues raised above did cost it a perfect score of ten.

Table Of Contents

1. Code generation fundamentals
2. 1. Overview
   2. Code generation basics
   3. Code generation tools
   4. Building simple generators
3. Code generation solutions
4. 1. Generating user interfaces
   2. Generating documentation
   3. Generating unit tests
   4. Embedding SQL with generators
   5. Handling data
   6. Creating database access generators
   7. Generating web services layers
   8. Generating business logic
   9. More generator ideas

You can purchase Code Generation in Action from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

nut writes "MIDP 2.0 is the latest version of the most common J2ME Profile. It comprises the Java Connected Limited Device Configuration (Usually referred to just as the CLDC) and a Java API for handheld wireless devices -- i.e. mobile phones, PDAs, etc. The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition is one of a class of books that every application developer should read, and that not enough do, much like Nielsen's classic Designing Web Usability. It provides cheap access to knowledge that is expensive to obtain. The title is almost a misnomer; Call it a usability guide and give a better idea of its usefulness." Read on for the rest of nut's review. MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition author Cynthia Bloch, Annet Wagner pages 260 pages approx. publisher Addison Wesley rating 8 reviewer nut ISBN 0321198018 summary A comprehensive guide to usability in MIDP 2.0 programming.

MIDP 2.0 is also a fairly new specification -- in fact, the final release only came out in November of last year. Some phone and handheld manufacturers are already supporting it, however. Nokia, for example, have announced support for MIDP 2.0 on their Series 60 devices quite recently, and I would be very surprised if the competition hangs back in the wake of the success of the MIDP 1.0 specification.

A lot of the content in this book can be usefully applied to the many MIDP 1.0 devices. There is in fact a MIDP 1.0 style guide, now available online, but I would still recommend this book for the wealth of extra content that it has.

The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide is a widget-by-widget guide to best-practice programming with the MIDP 2.0 API. The information contained within comes from established design principles, J2ME programming and implementation experience, and usability studies. Usability studies, especially, don't come cheap. Such labour-intensive research is well out of the reach of most individual programmers and small companies, so there is real value for money here.

The layout is very browseable, with most of the sixteen chapters each being a set of recommendations for a specific widget such as a text box or a gauge. The first three chapters (this includes the introduction) are more concerned with defining the goals of the book, the technology it relates to and the bones of a user-interface design process. For the most part, each chapter follows a standard format that is defined in the introduction.

Some of the later chapters cover topics that have less to do with user interface design, such as application installation and management, and the security API. The table of contents is comprehensive, listing not only chapters but two layers of headings within chapters -- useful in a reference book.

There are two target audiences here: J2ME developers and MIDP 2.0 implementors. For the former, it's an excellent resource. For the latter, I would say it was required reading. This is because it ends up defining what amounts to a contract between MIDP implementors and application developers.

For instance, from two successive recommendations on text boxes:

Application Developers
"Use [The NON_PREDICTIVE] modifier in a textbox that has a URL, EMAIL, NUMERIC, or DECIMAL constraint. Email addresses and domain names are not typical words, so turning off predictive text input ..."

And in the next paragraph,

MIDP Implementors
"If the application specifies the NON_PREDICTIVE modifier, allow users to enter one character at a time without any predictive input facilities."

Clearly the first recommendation is only meaningful if the second has been followed already. There are lot of these sort of co-dependent recommendations, covering areas such as default actions for abstract commands, list selection defaults, field constraints, etc.

There is still a lot of slop in the MIDP 2.0 specification. Its scope is, after all, fairly broad -- encompassing forms and form widgets, graphics canvases, game canvases and sprites, command design patterns, messaging and networking, security and application delivery APIs. Besides which, large chunks of the spec are optional, or can be implemented in more than one way. In part this is to preserve backward compatibility with MIDP 1.0, but it also means that your UDP-based streaming video application might work on only some the devices that support the same standard.

This looseness is only to be expected in such a young technology, but it means that books such as this may help to define the standard if people use the recommendations they provide. I would expect many of the recommendations in here to become part of future versions of the MIDP specification.

NOTES:
For more information on J2ME in general, and MIDP in particular, I also recommend Programming Wireless Devices with the Java 2 Platform, Micro edition [2nd ed.] and, of course, there are all the specifications and tutorials at Sun's Java site.

The J2ME Wireless Toolkits versions 1.0.x and 2.0 are good starting points for development as well. Version 2.0 of the wireless toolkit supports MIDP 2.0.

You can purchase MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

nut writes "MIDP 2.0 is the latest version of the most common J2ME Profile. It comprises the Java Connected Limited Device Configuration (Usually referred to just as the CLDC) and a Java API for handheld wireless devices -- i.e. mobile phones, PDAs, etc. The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition is one of a class of books that every application developer should read, and that not enough do, much like Nielsen's classic Designing Web Usability. It provides cheap access to knowledge that is expensive to obtain. The title is almost a misnomer; Call it a usability guide and give a better idea of its usefulness." Read on for the rest of nut's review. MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition author Cynthia Bloch, Annet Wagner pages 260 pages approx. publisher Addison Wesley rating 8 reviewer nut ISBN 0321198018 summary A comprehensive guide to usability in MIDP 2.0 programming.

MIDP 2.0 is also a fairly new specification -- in fact, the final release only came out in November of last year. Some phone and handheld manufacturers are already supporting it, however. Nokia, for example, have announced support for MIDP 2.0 on their Series 60 devices quite recently, and I would be very surprised if the competition hangs back in the wake of the success of the MIDP 1.0 specification.

A lot of the content in this book can be usefully applied to the many MIDP 1.0 devices. There is in fact a MIDP 1.0 style guide, now available online, but I would still recommend this book for the wealth of extra content that it has.

The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide is a widget-by-widget guide to best-practice programming with the MIDP 2.0 API. The information contained within comes from established design principles, J2ME programming and implementation experience, and usability studies. Usability studies, especially, don't come cheap. Such labour-intensive research is well out of the reach of most individual programmers and small companies, so there is real value for money here.

The layout is very browseable, with most of the sixteen chapters each being a set of recommendations for a specific widget such as a text box or a gauge. The first three chapters (this includes the introduction) are more concerned with defining the goals of the book, the technology it relates to and the bones of a user-interface design process. For the most part, each chapter follows a standard format that is defined in the introduction.

Some of the later chapters cover topics that have less to do with user interface design, such as application installation and management, and the security API. The table of contents is comprehensive, listing not only chapters but two layers of headings within chapters -- useful in a reference book.

There are two target audiences here: J2ME developers and MIDP 2.0 implementors. For the former, it's an excellent resource. For the latter, I would say it was required reading. This is because it ends up defining what amounts to a contract between MIDP implementors and application developers.

For instance, from two successive recommendations on text boxes:

Application Developers
"Use [The NON_PREDICTIVE] modifier in a textbox that has a URL, EMAIL, NUMERIC, or DECIMAL constraint. Email addresses and domain names are not typical words, so turning off predictive text input ..."

And in the next paragraph,

MIDP Implementors
"If the application specifies the NON_PREDICTIVE modifier, allow users to enter one character at a time without any predictive input facilities."

Clearly the first recommendation is only meaningful if the second has been followed already. There are lot of these sort of co-dependent recommendations, covering areas such as default actions for abstract commands, list selection defaults, field constraints, etc.

There is still a lot of slop in the MIDP 2.0 specification. Its scope is, after all, fairly broad -- encompassing forms and form widgets, graphics canvases, game canvases and sprites, command design patterns, messaging and networking, security and application delivery APIs. Besides which, large chunks of the spec are optional, or can be implemented in more than one way. In part this is to preserve backward compatibility with MIDP 1.0, but it also means that your UDP-based streaming video application might work on only some the devices that support the same standard.

This looseness is only to be expected in such a young technology, but it means that books such as this may help to define the standard if people use the recommendations they provide. I would expect many of the recommendations in here to become part of future versions of the MIDP specification.

NOTES:
For more information on J2ME in general, and MIDP in particular, I also recommend Programming Wireless Devices with the Java 2 Platform, Micro edition [2nd ed.] and, of course, there are all the specifications and tutorials at Sun's Java site.

The J2ME Wireless Toolkits versions 1.0.x and 2.0 are good starting points for development as well. Version 2.0 of the wireless toolkit supports MIDP 2.0.

You can purchase MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

nut writes "MIDP 2.0 is the latest version of the most common J2ME Profile. It comprises the Java Connected Limited Device Configuration (Usually referred to just as the CLDC) and a Java API for handheld wireless devices -- i.e. mobile phones, PDAs, etc. The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition is one of a class of books that every application developer should read, and that not enough do, much like Nielsen's classic Designing Web Usability. It provides cheap access to knowledge that is expensive to obtain. The title is almost a misnomer; Call it a usability guide and give a better idea of its usefulness." Read on for the rest of nut's review. MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition author Cynthia Bloch, Annet Wagner pages 260 pages approx. publisher Addison Wesley rating 8 reviewer nut ISBN 0321198018 summary A comprehensive guide to usability in MIDP 2.0 programming.

MIDP 2.0 is also a fairly new specification -- in fact, the final release only came out in November of last year. Some phone and handheld manufacturers are already supporting it, however. Nokia, for example, have announced support for MIDP 2.0 on their Series 60 devices quite recently, and I would be very surprised if the competition hangs back in the wake of the success of the MIDP 1.0 specification.

A lot of the content in this book can be usefully applied to the many MIDP 1.0 devices. There is in fact a MIDP 1.0 style guide, now available online, but I would still recommend this book for the wealth of extra content that it has.

The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide is a widget-by-widget guide to best-practice programming with the MIDP 2.0 API. The information contained within comes from established design principles, J2ME programming and implementation experience, and usability studies. Usability studies, especially, don't come cheap. Such labour-intensive research is well out of the reach of most individual programmers and small companies, so there is real value for money here.

The layout is very browseable, with most of the sixteen chapters each being a set of recommendations for a specific widget such as a text box or a gauge. The first three chapters (this includes the introduction) are more concerned with defining the goals of the book, the technology it relates to and the bones of a user-interface design process. For the most part, each chapter follows a standard format that is defined in the introduction.

Some of the later chapters cover topics that have less to do with user interface design, such as application installation and management, and the security API. The table of contents is comprehensive, listing not only chapters but two layers of headings within chapters -- useful in a reference book.

There are two target audiences here: J2ME developers and MIDP 2.0 implementors. For the former, it's an excellent resource. For the latter, I would say it was required reading. This is because it ends up defining what amounts to a contract between MIDP implementors and application developers.

For instance, from two successive recommendations on text boxes:

Application Developers
"Use [The NON_PREDICTIVE] modifier in a textbox that has a URL, EMAIL, NUMERIC, or DECIMAL constraint. Email addresses and domain names are not typical words, so turning off predictive text input ..."

And in the next paragraph,

MIDP Implementors
"If the application specifies the NON_PREDICTIVE modifier, allow users to enter one character at a time without any predictive input facilities."

Clearly the first recommendation is only meaningful if the second has been followed already. There are lot of these sort of co-dependent recommendations, covering areas such as default actions for abstract commands, list selection defaults, field constraints, etc.

There is still a lot of slop in the MIDP 2.0 specification. Its scope is, after all, fairly broad -- encompassing forms and form widgets, graphics canvases, game canvases and sprites, command design patterns, messaging and networking, security and application delivery APIs. Besides which, large chunks of the spec are optional, or can be implemented in more than one way. In part this is to preserve backward compatibility with MIDP 1.0, but it also means that your UDP-based streaming video application might work on only some the devices that support the same standard.

This looseness is only to be expected in such a young technology, but it means that books such as this may help to define the standard if people use the recommendations they provide. I would expect many of the recommendations in here to become part of future versions of the MIDP specification.

NOTES:
For more information on J2ME in general, and MIDP in particular, I also recommend Programming Wireless Devices with the Java 2 Platform, Micro edition [2nd ed.] and, of course, there are all the specifications and tutorials at Sun's Java site.

The J2ME Wireless Toolkits versions 1.0.x and 2.0 are good starting points for development as well. Version 2.0 of the wireless toolkit supports MIDP 2.0.

You can purchase MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

nut writes "MIDP 2.0 is the latest version of the most common J2ME Profile. It comprises the Java Connected Limited Device Configuration (Usually referred to just as the CLDC) and a Java API for handheld wireless devices -- i.e. mobile phones, PDAs, etc. The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition is one of a class of books that every application developer should read, and that not enough do, much like Nielsen's classic Designing Web Usability. It provides cheap access to knowledge that is expensive to obtain. The title is almost a misnomer; Call it a usability guide and give a better idea of its usefulness." Read on for the rest of nut's review. MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition author Cynthia Bloch, Annet Wagner pages 260 pages approx. publisher Addison Wesley rating 8 reviewer nut ISBN 0321198018 summary A comprehensive guide to usability in MIDP 2.0 programming.

MIDP 2.0 is also a fairly new specification -- in fact, the final release only came out in November of last year. Some phone and handheld manufacturers are already supporting it, however. Nokia, for example, have announced support for MIDP 2.0 on their Series 60 devices quite recently, and I would be very surprised if the competition hangs back in the wake of the success of the MIDP 1.0 specification.

A lot of the content in this book can be usefully applied to the many MIDP 1.0 devices. There is in fact a MIDP 1.0 style guide, now available online, but I would still recommend this book for the wealth of extra content that it has.

The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide is a widget-by-widget guide to best-practice programming with the MIDP 2.0 API. The information contained within comes from established design principles, J2ME programming and implementation experience, and usability studies. Usability studies, especially, don't come cheap. Such labour-intensive research is well out of the reach of most individual programmers and small companies, so there is real value for money here.

The layout is very browseable, with most of the sixteen chapters each being a set of recommendations for a specific widget such as a text box or a gauge. The first three chapters (this includes the introduction) are more concerned with defining the goals of the book, the technology it relates to and the bones of a user-interface design process. For the most part, each chapter follows a standard format that is defined in the introduction.

Some of the later chapters cover topics that have less to do with user interface design, such as application installation and management, and the security API. The table of contents is comprehensive, listing not only chapters but two layers of headings within chapters -- useful in a reference book.

There are two target audiences here: J2ME developers and MIDP 2.0 implementors. For the former, it's an excellent resource. For the latter, I would say it was required reading. This is because it ends up defining what amounts to a contract between MIDP implementors and application developers.

For instance, from two successive recommendations on text boxes:

Application Developers
"Use [The NON_PREDICTIVE] modifier in a textbox that has a URL, EMAIL, NUMERIC, or DECIMAL constraint. Email addresses and domain names are not typical words, so turning off predictive text input ..."

And in the next paragraph,

MIDP Implementors
"If the application specifies the NON_PREDICTIVE modifier, allow users to enter one character at a time without any predictive input facilities."

Clearly the first recommendation is only meaningful if the second has been followed already. There are lot of these sort of co-dependent recommendations, covering areas such as default actions for abstract commands, list selection defaults, field constraints, etc.

There is still a lot of slop in the MIDP 2.0 specification. Its scope is, after all, fairly broad -- encompassing forms and form widgets, graphics canvases, game canvases and sprites, command design patterns, messaging and networking, security and application delivery APIs. Besides which, large chunks of the spec are optional, or can be implemented in more than one way. In part this is to preserve backward compatibility with MIDP 1.0, but it also means that your UDP-based streaming video application might work on only some the devices that support the same standard.

This looseness is only to be expected in such a young technology, but it means that books such as this may help to define the standard if people use the recommendations they provide. I would expect many of the recommendations in here to become part of future versions of the MIDP specification.

NOTES:
For more information on J2ME in general, and MIDP in particular, I also recommend Programming Wireless Devices with the Java 2 Platform, Micro edition [2nd ed.] and, of course, there are all the specifications and tutorials at Sun's Java site.

The J2ME Wireless Toolkits versions 1.0.x and 2.0 are good starting points for development as well. Version 2.0 of the wireless toolkit supports MIDP 2.0.

You can purchase MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

nut writes "MIDP 2.0 is the latest version of the most common J2ME Profile. It comprises the Java Connected Limited Device Configuration (Usually referred to just as the CLDC) and a Java API for handheld wireless devices -- i.e. mobile phones, PDAs, etc. The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition is one of a class of books that every application developer should read, and that not enough do, much like Nielsen's classic Designing Web Usability. It provides cheap access to knowledge that is expensive to obtain. The title is almost a misnomer; Call it a usability guide and give a better idea of its usefulness." Read on for the rest of nut's review. MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition author Cynthia Bloch, Annet Wagner pages 260 pages approx. publisher Addison Wesley rating 8 reviewer nut ISBN 0321198018 summary A comprehensive guide to usability in MIDP 2.0 programming.

MIDP 2.0 is also a fairly new specification -- in fact, the final release only came out in November of last year. Some phone and handheld manufacturers are already supporting it, however. Nokia, for example, have announced support for MIDP 2.0 on their Series 60 devices quite recently, and I would be very surprised if the competition hangs back in the wake of the success of the MIDP 1.0 specification.

A lot of the content in this book can be usefully applied to the many MIDP 1.0 devices. There is in fact a MIDP 1.0 style guide, now available online, but I would still recommend this book for the wealth of extra content that it has.

The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide is a widget-by-widget guide to best-practice programming with the MIDP 2.0 API. The information contained within comes from established design principles, J2ME programming and implementation experience, and usability studies. Usability studies, especially, don't come cheap. Such labour-intensive research is well out of the reach of most individual programmers and small companies, so there is real value for money here.

The layout is very browseable, with most of the sixteen chapters each being a set of recommendations for a specific widget such as a text box or a gauge. The first three chapters (this includes the introduction) are more concerned with defining the goals of the book, the technology it relates to and the bones of a user-interface design process. For the most part, each chapter follows a standard format that is defined in the introduction.

Some of the later chapters cover topics that have less to do with user interface design, such as application installation and management, and the security API. The table of contents is comprehensive, listing not only chapters but two layers of headings within chapters -- useful in a reference book.

There are two target audiences here: J2ME developers and MIDP 2.0 implementors. For the former, it's an excellent resource. For the latter, I would say it was required reading. This is because it ends up defining what amounts to a contract between MIDP implementors and application developers.

For instance, from two successive recommendations on text boxes:

Application Developers
"Use [The NON_PREDICTIVE] modifier in a textbox that has a URL, EMAIL, NUMERIC, or DECIMAL constraint. Email addresses and domain names are not typical words, so turning off predictive text input ..."

And in the next paragraph,

MIDP Implementors
"If the application specifies the NON_PREDICTIVE modifier, allow users to enter one character at a time without any predictive input facilities."

Clearly the first recommendation is only meaningful if the second has been followed already. There are lot of these sort of co-dependent recommendations, covering areas such as default actions for abstract commands, list selection defaults, field constraints, etc.

There is still a lot of slop in the MIDP 2.0 specification. Its scope is, after all, fairly broad -- encompassing forms and form widgets, graphics canvases, game canvases and sprites, command design patterns, messaging and networking, security and application delivery APIs. Besides which, large chunks of the spec are optional, or can be implemented in more than one way. In part this is to preserve backward compatibility with MIDP 1.0, but it also means that your UDP-based streaming video application might work on only some the devices that support the same standard.

This looseness is only to be expected in such a young technology, but it means that books such as this may help to define the standard if people use the recommendations they provide. I would expect many of the recommendations in here to become part of future versions of the MIDP specification.

NOTES:
For more information on J2ME in general, and MIDP in particular, I also recommend Programming Wireless Devices with the Java 2 Platform, Micro edition [2nd ed.] and, of course, there are all the specifications and tutorials at Sun's Java site.

The J2ME Wireless Toolkits versions 1.0.x and 2.0 are good starting points for development as well. Version 2.0 of the wireless toolkit supports MIDP 2.0.

You can purchase MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

nut writes "MIDP 2.0 is the latest version of the most common J2ME Profile. It comprises the Java Connected Limited Device Configuration (Usually referred to just as the CLDC) and a Java API for handheld wireless devices -- i.e. mobile phones, PDAs, etc. The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition is one of a class of books that every application developer should read, and that not enough do, much like Nielsen's classic Designing Web Usability. It provides cheap access to knowledge that is expensive to obtain. The title is almost a misnomer; Call it a usability guide and give a better idea of its usefulness." Read on for the rest of nut's review. MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition author Cynthia Bloch, Annet Wagner pages 260 pages approx. publisher Addison Wesley rating 8 reviewer nut ISBN 0321198018 summary A comprehensive guide to usability in MIDP 2.0 programming.

MIDP 2.0 is also a fairly new specification -- in fact, the final release only came out in November of last year. Some phone and handheld manufacturers are already supporting it, however. Nokia, for example, have announced support for MIDP 2.0 on their Series 60 devices quite recently, and I would be very surprised if the competition hangs back in the wake of the success of the MIDP 1.0 specification.

A lot of the content in this book can be usefully applied to the many MIDP 1.0 devices. There is in fact a MIDP 1.0 style guide, now available online, but I would still recommend this book for the wealth of extra content that it has.

The MIDP 2.0 Style Guide is a widget-by-widget guide to best-practice programming with the MIDP 2.0 API. The information contained within comes from established design principles, J2ME programming and implementation experience, and usability studies. Usability studies, especially, don't come cheap. Such labour-intensive research is well out of the reach of most individual programmers and small companies, so there is real value for money here.

The layout is very browseable, with most of the sixteen chapters each being a set of recommendations for a specific widget such as a text box or a gauge. The first three chapters (this includes the introduction) are more concerned with defining the goals of the book, the technology it relates to and the bones of a user-interface design process. For the most part, each chapter follows a standard format that is defined in the introduction.

Some of the later chapters cover topics that have less to do with user interface design, such as application installation and management, and the security API. The table of contents is comprehensive, listing not only chapters but two layers of headings within chapters -- useful in a reference book.

There are two target audiences here: J2ME developers and MIDP 2.0 implementors. For the former, it's an excellent resource. For the latter, I would say it was required reading. This is because it ends up defining what amounts to a contract between MIDP implementors and application developers.

For instance, from two successive recommendations on text boxes:

Application Developers
"Use [The NON_PREDICTIVE] modifier in a textbox that has a URL, EMAIL, NUMERIC, or DECIMAL constraint. Email addresses and domain names are not typical words, so turning off predictive text input ..."

And in the next paragraph,

MIDP Implementors
"If the application specifies the NON_PREDICTIVE modifier, allow users to enter one character at a time without any predictive input facilities."

Clearly the first recommendation is only meaningful if the second has been followed already. There are lot of these sort of co-dependent recommendations, covering areas such as default actions for abstract commands, list selection defaults, field constraints, etc.

There is still a lot of slop in the MIDP 2.0 specification. Its scope is, after all, fairly broad -- encompassing forms and form widgets, graphics canvases, game canvases and sprites, command design patterns, messaging and networking, security and application delivery APIs. Besides which, large chunks of the spec are optional, or can be implemented in more than one way. In part this is to preserve backward compatibility with MIDP 1.0, but it also means that your UDP-based streaming video application might work on only some the devices that support the same standard.

This looseness is only to be expected in such a young technology, but it means that books such as this may help to define the standard if people use the recommendations they provide. I would expect many of the recommendations in here to become part of future versions of the MIDP specification.

NOTES:
For more information on J2ME in general, and MIDP in particular, I also recommend Programming Wireless Devices with the Java 2 Platform, Micro edition [2nd ed.] and, of course, there are all the specifications and tutorials at Sun's Java site.

The J2ME Wireless Toolkits versions 1.0.x and 2.0 are good starting points for development as well. Version 2.0 of the wireless toolkit supports MIDP 2.0.

You can purchase MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

ap writes "Justin T. Gibbs, of the FreeBSD Foundation, announced today the availability of a native binary release of the Java JDK 1.3.1 for FreeBSD. He also mentioned that more attention will now be focused on providing a release of the 1.4.x JDK. Such developments should allow for FreeBSD to be better suited for enterprise uses."

magellan writes "Sun has released screenshots of its upcoming Mad Hatter Linux desktop. Mad Hatter includes GNOME, StarOffice, Evolution, and Mozilla. Sun has made minor modifications to Gnome to make it more familiar to Windows users. Sun's Mad Hatter, along with SuSE's new push on the desktop, could make Linux on the corporate desktop and laptop a bigger reality."

Bingo Foo asks: "My company is in the process of reviewing replacements to our existing multi-platform VPN, which has now been discontinued. I was under the impression that every major vendor's OS ships with a VPN configuration solution. What gives? Are these not standard enough? Are they not secure enough? not flexible enough? Regardless, our IT department is leaning toward a clientless, web-based solution, which frankly sounds too good to be true. Can simply directing your browser at the portal allow X11, NFS, SMB, AFP, ssh, etc. transparently through the firewall? Anyone have experience with Neoteris and their VPN?"

Jonboy X writes "CNet has an article detailing the resolution of a long-standing feud between open-source J2EE server vendor JBoss and Sun. It seems they've decided to break down and shell out the clams to be certified by Sun. Quoth Bob Bickel, JBoss's vice president of corporate development and strategy: 'Our core base of developers, a lot of them say they don't give a damn...But the reality is that a lot of big companies who are using this are moving into production.' JBoss gives away its server software and survives on support contracts."

Pieroxy queries: "I recently had a look at various ways to draw a graph (lines, bar chart, pie chart...) for a web-based enterprise application. As we need some interactivity, the GIF image generated on the server-side is not an option. Here is the list of technologies I can think of: Flash is probably over kill and a closed technology. Java is very flexible but slow (to start and run). SVG (discussed here) still requires a plugin. VML is supported only on IE5+, but it is natively supported. Which one of these technologies is the more flexible and interactive? Is it reasonable to require a plugin from the end users of our enterprise application? Is IE5+ a wide enough target for an enterprise application?"

Simon P. Chappell writes "The Eclipse IDE has thundered into the collective consciousness of Java developers since its release by IBM as Open Source Software. Up until this time, the majority of available documentation at the Eclipse website has been for plug-in developers, with scant attention given to the rest of us that actually want to use the tool for anything else. This book restores the balance and brings much needed help to those interested in this IDE." Read on for the rest of Simon's review, about which he says "Full Disclosure: I received a free, review copy of this book, so feel free to assume that I've been bought off and have traded my technical integrity to put about an inch of dead tree on my shelf." Eclipse in Action author Gallardo, Burnette and McGovern pages 383 (15 page index) publisher Manning rating 8 reviewer Simon P. Chappell ISBN 1930110960 summary A good book that lives up to its name.

Overview With a book like this it's difficult to know where to pitch the level. Do you aim for the lowest common denominator or do you assume some experience on the part of your reader? This book seems to have pitched itself well, not pandering to the absolute Java newbie, not afraid to get down into the code and yet gentle enough that newer Java developers can follow easily. The heavyweight chapter on writing plug-ins is at the back where it shouldn't frighten those of a sensitive nature.

The book is divided into two sections. The first and largest section concerns actual use of Eclipse during Java application development. The second section is for those who wish to write plug-ins for Eclipse.

The book takes a very 'Test Driven Development' approach to Java development and this shows in the manner that Eclipse is presented and taught. Emphasis is given to the tools that come with Eclipse, especially Ant, Junit and the CVS client. For those already skilled in these tools, this might seem like filler, but remember that there are still pitifully few Java developers using even these simple and free tools. My hat is off to the authors for their TDD evangelism, skillfully disguised as Eclipse usage instruction.

What's To Like I liked the progression followed in the book, first teaching the basic operation of Eclipse and then moving on to the tools that come with the base install. What's To Consider Some may consider that the material on Ant, Junit and CVS is filler. The 'Test Driven Development' theme may be a little too much evangelism for some.

I use Eclipse on a Mac OS X box and I felt that there was very little discussion concerning the cross-platform attributes of the tool. All of the screenshots were from a Microsoft Windows build of the software; a Linux or OS X screenshot would have been helpful.

One more niggle and then I'm done. There is no information on using Eclipse with other programming languages (a couple of paragraphs in the introduction chapter doesn't really count). I've recently started tinkering with Ruby and have used a Ruby plug-in to allow me to work within Eclipse as I learn the language. This is a wonderful testament to the power and extensibility of Eclipse.

Summary This is a good book. You know it's a good book when you already use the tool (both pure Eclipse and IBM's WSAD) regularly and you find yourself learning things that you had not previously been aware of. If you are working with Java and want a good free IDE that's going to grow with you, then Eclipse is a tool you should try -- and consider this book the User's Guide that would have been in the box if Eclipse came shrink-wrapped.

Table Of Contents

1. Using Eclipse
2. 1. Overview
   2. Getting started with the Eclipse Workbench
   3. The Java development cycle: test, code, repeat
   4. Working with source code in eclipse
   5. Building with Ant
   6. Source control with CVS
   7. Web development tools
3. Extending Eclipse
4. 1. Introduction to Eclipse plug-ins
   2. Working with plug-ins in Eclipse

You can purchase Eclipse in Action from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

ravenousbugblatter writes "The New York Times online has an article discussing grid computing and recent advances made by Dr. Ian Foster, among others. The article compares the state of grid computing over the internet to where the internet was in 1994, which was soon after the development of the software for the use of URL's, HTML, and HTTP. Predictions are made in the article that in the near future the massive power of grid computing will be available to anyone with an internet connection, not just to big companies that can afford to hire HP and Sun to run a grid project for them."

PotPieMan writes "I recently finished reading JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development, a book for JSP developers wanting to improve their skillset. Read on for my review." It's not a new book, but still relevant. JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development author Wellington L.S. da Silva pages 420, including appendices publisher New Riders rating 6 reviewer PotPieMan ISBN 0735710953 summary A guide to designing and implementing JSP applications, with a focus on tag libraries.

The Scoop Web developers and designers have long wrestled with strategies for combining their efforts. Web developers don't mind looking at code but dislike dealing with the look of a page, while Web designers are the opposite. Dynamic Web page technologies, such as Microsoft's ASP, Perl's many template systems and Web frameworks (Text::Template, HTML::Template, HTML::Mason, CGI::Application, etc.), and PHP, were designed to give both developers and designers a chance to do their work without stepping on each other's toes.

Sun's answer was to release the Servlet API and later extend that to make JavaServer Pages. Initially, there was no clear role separation for servlets and JSPs, since a servlet could generate and display HTML just as easily as a JSP could perform business logic. The Model 2 architecture, based on Smalltalk's Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern, showed that servlets and JSPs complemented each other. Tag libraries extended the functionality of JSPs in a way that made it easier for developers and designers to collaborate.

JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development is mostly targeted at Web developers who want advice on designing JSP applications and incorporating tag libraries. The book covers custom tag libraries, the Jakarta Struts framework, and various commercial and noncommercial tag libraries, such as Jakarta Taglibs.

What's to Like? The author starts with an introduction to servlets and JSPs, including a decent explanation of MVC. If you are comfortable with servlets and JSPs, this discussion is really more of a review than anything else.

The next two chapters introduce tag libraries and the author's example application (a simple article and author tracking system). The author illustrates the lifecycle of a tag, which helps if you haven't really used or written custom tags before. Da Silva also gives a very detailed discussion of tag library descriptors (TLDs). Some details might have been better left as an appendix, but it is nice to see such a comprehensive explanation of what you can put in a TLD.

Da Silva then spends about 100 pages on writing simple tags, iteration tags, body tags, and making all of these types of tags cooperate. The discussion is again very detailed, but seems unfocused in many parts. Very little of the code in these chapters ties in with his example application.

Next, the author spends three chapters on the Jakarta Struts framework. He explains how Struts naturally fits into the MVC design pattern and gives various examples of how to structure your Struts application. He also includes an entire chapter on finishing his example application, going over Struts ActionForms, Struts Actions (including a method to prevent double submission that I had not seen before), and Struts' method of internationalization on JSPs.

Finally, the author runs through the Jakarta Taglibs project and some commercial tag libraries. Brief examples are provided, but this chapter really needed more attention than da Silva gave it.

What's to Consider Overall, JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development feels unfocused. The author's central points are explained well in many places, but lost in many others. With some reorganization, I think the book could make a much stronger case for appropriate uses of tag libraries, both application-specific and general (e.g. Struts and Taglibs).

Sections where general tag libraries are discussed read very much like the documentation available on project Web sites, such as the struts-html tag library documentation. These really should have been left as an appendix, with better explanations and usage examples provided in their place.

I was also very disappointed in the author's use of Struts Action classes. He combined various actions (add, edit, delete, etc.) to perform on a specific object and tested for a URL parameter to decide what to do. In my opinion, each action should be encapsulated in one Action class (AddObjectAction, EditObjectAction, and DeleteObjectAction). The author's design leads to URL hackery which Struts tries to avoid.

Recently, Struts released a stable version of the 1.1 series, which this book does not cover (it was published in early 2002). Readers should be familiar with the Struts documentation for this release before picking up this book.

The book's Web site is under construction, and I've been able to find little information on the publisher's site.

The Summary A okay book with room for improvement. While the author shows his technical knowledge, the book loses its direction in places. Most developers can probably get by with the documentation available on the Web. Table of Contents

1. Understanding the Tag Library Extension API
2. 1. Introduction to Servlets and JavaServer Pages
   2. Introduction to Tag Libraries
   3. Writing Custom Tags
   4. Cooperating Tags and Validation
   5. Design Considerations
3. The Struts Framework
4. 1. The Jakarta Struts Project
   2. Struts Tag Libraries
   3. Anatomy of a Struts Application
5. The Jakarta Taglibs and Other Resources
   1. The Jakarta Taglibs Project
   2. Commercial Tag Libraries
   3. Other Resources
6. Appendices
7. 1. Tomcat
   2. Allaire JRun
   3. Orion
   4. MySQL
   5. Mapping Servlet-JSP Objects
   6. The Apache Software License, Version 1.1

You can purchase the JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

PotPieMan writes "I recently finished reading JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development, a book for JSP developers wanting to improve their skillset. Read on for my review." It's not a new book, but still relevant. JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development author Wellington L.S. da Silva pages 420, including appendices publisher New Riders rating 6 reviewer PotPieMan ISBN 0735710953 summary A guide to designing and implementing JSP applications, with a focus on tag libraries.

The Scoop Web developers and designers have long wrestled with strategies for combining their efforts. Web developers don't mind looking at code but dislike dealing with the look of a page, while Web designers are the opposite. Dynamic Web page technologies, such as Microsoft's ASP, Perl's many template systems and Web frameworks (Text::Template, HTML::Template, HTML::Mason, CGI::Application, etc.), and PHP, were designed to give both developers and designers a chance to do their work without stepping on each other's toes.

Sun's answer was to release the Servlet API and later extend that to make JavaServer Pages. Initially, there was no clear role separation for servlets and JSPs, since a servlet could generate and display HTML just as easily as a JSP could perform business logic. The Model 2 architecture, based on Smalltalk's Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern, showed that servlets and JSPs complemented each other. Tag libraries extended the functionality of JSPs in a way that made it easier for developers and designers to collaborate.

JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development is mostly targeted at Web developers who want advice on designing JSP applications and incorporating tag libraries. The book covers custom tag libraries, the Jakarta Struts framework, and various commercial and noncommercial tag libraries, such as Jakarta Taglibs.

What's to Like? The author starts with an introduction to servlets and JSPs, including a decent explanation of MVC. If you are comfortable with servlets and JSPs, this discussion is really more of a review than anything else.

The next two chapters introduce tag libraries and the author's example application (a simple article and author tracking system). The author illustrates the lifecycle of a tag, which helps if you haven't really used or written custom tags before. Da Silva also gives a very detailed discussion of tag library descriptors (TLDs). Some details might have been better left as an appendix, but it is nice to see such a comprehensive explanation of what you can put in a TLD.

Da Silva then spends about 100 pages on writing simple tags, iteration tags, body tags, and making all of these types of tags cooperate. The discussion is again very detailed, but seems unfocused in many parts. Very little of the code in these chapters ties in with his example application.

Next, the author spends three chapters on the Jakarta Struts framework. He explains how Struts naturally fits into the MVC design pattern and gives various examples of how to structure your Struts application. He also includes an entire chapter on finishing his example application, going over Struts ActionForms, Struts Actions (including a method to prevent double submission that I had not seen before), and Struts' method of internationalization on JSPs.

Finally, the author runs through the Jakarta Taglibs project and some commercial tag libraries. Brief examples are provided, but this chapter really needed more attention than da Silva gave it.

What's to Consider Overall, JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development feels unfocused. The author's central points are explained well in many places, but lost in many others. With some reorganization, I think the book could make a much stronger case for appropriate uses of tag libraries, both application-specific and general (e.g. Struts and Taglibs).

Sections where general tag libraries are discussed read very much like the documentation available on project Web sites, such as the struts-html tag library documentation. These really should have been left as an appendix, with better explanations and usage examples provided in their place.

I was also very disappointed in the author's use of Struts Action classes. He combined various actions (add, edit, delete, etc.) to perform on a specific object and tested for a URL parameter to decide what to do. In my opinion, each action should be encapsulated in one Action class (AddObjectAction, EditObjectAction, and DeleteObjectAction). The author's design leads to URL hackery which Struts tries to avoid.

Recently, Struts released a stable version of the 1.1 series, which this book does not cover (it was published in early 2002). Readers should be familiar with the Struts documentation for this release before picking up this book.

The book's Web site is under construction, and I've been able to find little information on the publisher's site.

The Summary A okay book with room for improvement. While the author shows his technical knowledge, the book loses its direction in places. Most developers can probably get by with the documentation available on the Web. Table of Contents

1. Understanding the Tag Library Extension API
2. 1. Introduction to Servlets and JavaServer Pages
   2. Introduction to Tag Libraries
   3. Writing Custom Tags
   4. Cooperating Tags and Validation
   5. Design Considerations
3. The Struts Framework
4. 1. The Jakarta Struts Project
   2. Struts Tag Libraries
   3. Anatomy of a Struts Application
5. The Jakarta Taglibs and Other Resources
   1. The Jakarta Taglibs Project
   2. Commercial Tag Libraries
   3. Other Resources
6. Appendices
7. 1. Tomcat
   2. Allaire JRun
   3. Orion
   4. MySQL
   5. Mapping Servlet-JSP Objects
   6. The Apache Software License, Version 1.1

You can purchase the JSP and Tag Libraries for Web Development from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

peterwilm writes "Sun released Java 1.4.2 today. It includes many enhancements and changes among them the native look&feel for Win XP and GTK 2.0 as well as support for Itanium 2."

peterwilm writes "Sun released Java 1.4.2 today. It includes many enhancements and changes among them the native look&feel for Win XP and GTK 2.0 as well as support for Itanium 2."

peterwilm writes "Sun released Java 1.4.2 today. It includes many enhancements and changes among them the native look&feel for Win XP and GTK 2.0 as well as support for Itanium 2."

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm rather new with programming and stumbled across these twe articles: The Perils of Floating Point from 1996 and What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic from 1991. I tried some of the examples in these articles with Intel's Fortran Compiler and g77 and noted that some of those issue reported no longer seem valid whereas quite a few still very much are around. Could someone, please, give me a pointer to some newer thoughts and/or new facts surrounding floating point programming. What has been improved since those articles were written? What is still the same? How is the future, especially with the new platforms IA64 and AMD64? I am most interested in the x86 and x86-64 architectures. Thank you for your kind help."

bugbear writes "Carlos Perez has just posted a page that quotes Sun Java 'theologist' Gilad Bracha about why there is no plan to add macros (in the Lisp sense) to Java."

Ben writes "I have an Open Letter to Sun at the PersonalJava forum (7th June) requesting Sun Micrososystems produce a free Java JRE for Microsoft Pocket PC - its over year and a half ago since they stopped work on one. If you're wondering why you should care its because Microsoft is the only competitor in that market and has no real competition. Java should flourish on mobile devices, why is Sun letting Microsoft get a foothold with .NET? If you are a Java developer for mobile devices please add a note of support to this open letter."

akweboa164 asks: "I work as a lone developer creating small to medium scale PHP/MySQL websites for different clients. I have been doing this for about two years now, and have tried different things as far as website layout/architecture goes. With sites that use the fusebox architecture, front controller (thanks J2EE), N-tier, to having a simple 'include(config.php);' line at the top of every file, I am left with the feeling that all of the sites I have created are 50% elegance, and 50% nasty kludge. I am left with a sinking feeling because I know that they could be better, but I lack to expertise and experience to make them that way. I am looking for overall architecture that is open and fits within the constraints of PHP (ie. relying little on OO) and separates logic, makes updates easy, etc. I wanted to ask Slashdot's crowd of web developers what their most elegant code layout/design web solutions were, and what advice would you dish out to new developers, as well as seasoned professionals."

Ahe writes "I have been working on a joint project between Sun Microsystems, The University of Aarhus, and The Alexandra Institute. As you might know, Sun has for long been commited to adding generics to Java. Our project was to extend this with variance annotations for more flexible typing of parameterized classes and arrays. Recently Sun has released the project result as a new prototype with variance. If you like variance, please vote for this bug."

Ahe writes "I have been working on a joint project between Sun Microsystems, The University of Aarhus, and The Alexandra Institute. As you might know, Sun has for long been commited to adding generics to Java. Our project was to extend this with variance annotations for more flexible typing of parameterized classes and arrays. Recently Sun has released the project result as a new prototype with variance. If you like variance, please vote for this bug."

Ahe writes "I have been working on a joint project between Sun Microsystems, The University of Aarhus, and The Alexandra Institute. As you might know, Sun has for long been commited to adding generics to Java. Our project was to extend this with variance annotations for more flexible typing of parameterized classes and arrays. Recently Sun has released the project result as a new prototype with variance. If you like variance, please vote for this bug."

Ahe writes "I have been working on a joint project between Sun Microsystems, The University of Aarhus, and The Alexandra Institute. As you might know, Sun has for long been commited to adding generics to Java. Our project was to extend this with variance annotations for more flexible typing of parameterized classes and arrays. Recently Sun has released the project result as a new prototype with variance. If you like variance, please vote for this bug."

gafter writes "An early access prototype implementation of the proposed new J2SE 1.5 language features is available. The prototype includes generics (JSR 14), typesafe enums, varargs, autoboxing, foreach loops, and static import (JSR 201). In other words, all the new language features planned for 1.5 except metadata (JSR 175). The prototype includes full sources for the compiler, written in the extended language. You can download the prototype from java.sun.com. It requires J2SE 1.4.1 and provides some examples of how to use the new language constructs. The prototype includes an experimental type system (variant type parameters) for Generic Java that is being considered for Tiger (1.5) based on a paper by Igarashi and Viroli at ECOOP 2002 . Comments and votes for the new type system are being gathered at bugParade."

gafter writes "An early access prototype implementation of the proposed new J2SE 1.5 language features is available. The prototype includes generics (JSR 14), typesafe enums, varargs, autoboxing, foreach loops, and static import (JSR 201). In other words, all the new language features planned for 1.5 except metadata (JSR 175). The prototype includes full sources for the compiler, written in the extended language. You can download the prototype from java.sun.com. It requires J2SE 1.4.1 and provides some examples of how to use the new language constructs. The prototype includes an experimental type system (variant type parameters) for Generic Java that is being considered for Tiger (1.5) based on a paper by Igarashi and Viroli at ECOOP 2002 . Comments and votes for the new type system are being gathered at bugParade."

An anonymous reader writes "Sun announced the new V60x and V65x servers (1U and 2U respectively). The 1U has 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs and the 2U has 3.06GHz Xeon CPUs. They also announced a partnership with RedHat and Oracle running on these boxes. RedHat will also start shipping Sun's Java with their distribution."

An anonymous reader writes "Over at java.sun.com, there's an informative article about the new features in JDK1.5. Some of the changes like generics are nice and should make some things easier. Some of the enhancements to me are purely sugar, like enumerators. When it comes down to it, once the code is compiled, it's the same. The thing I hope is, some of this new syntactic sugar doesn't result in more obfuscated code. Unlike some people, I feel using programming shorthand leads to increased maintenance. This is especially true when you have to debug a complex application."

An anonymous submitter points us to this page describing Belgium's rollout of Java-based smart cards as a national ID card.

cpfeifer writes "Performance has been the albatross around Java's neck for a long time. It's a popular subject when developers get together "Don't use Vector, use ArrayList, it's more efficient." "Don't concatenate Strings, use a StringBuffer, it's more efficient." It's a chance for the experienced developers to sit around the design campfire and tell ghost stories of previous projects where they implemented their own basic data structures {String, Linked List...} that was anywhere from 10-50% faster than the JDK implementation (and in the grand oral tradition of tall tales, it gets a little more efficient every time they tell it)." Want to kill the albatross? Read on for the rest of cpfeifer's review of O'Reilly's Java Performance Tuning, now in its 2nd edition. Java Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition author Jack Shirazi pages 570 publisher O'Reilly and Associates rating 9/10 reviewer cpfeifer ISBN 096003773 summary It's the most up to date publication dealing specifically with performance of Java applications, and is a one of a kind resource.

Every developer has written a microbenchmark (a bit of code that does something 100-1000 times in a tight loop and measure the time it takes for the supposed "expensive operation") to try and prove an argument about which way is "more efficient" based on the execution time. The problem, is when running in a dynamic, managed environment like the 1.4.x JVM, there are more factors that you don't control than ones that you do, and it can be difficult to say whether one piece of code will be "more efficient" than another without testing with actual usage patterns. The second edition of Review of Java Performance Tuning provides substantial benchmarks (not just simple microbenchmarks) with thorough coverage of the JDK including loops, exceptions, strings, threading, and even underlying JVM improvements in the 1.4 VM. This book is one of a kind in its scope and completeness.

The Gory Details
The best part of this book is that it not only tells you how fast various standard Java operations are (sorting strings, dealing with exceptions, etc.), but he has kept all of the timing information from the previous edition of the book. This shows you how the VMs performance has changed from version 1.1.8 up to 1.4.0, and it's very clear that things are getting better. The author also breaks out the timing information for 3 different flavors of the 1.4.0 JVM: mixed interpreted/compiled mode (standard), server (with Hotspot), and interpreted mode only (no run time optimization applied).

Part 1 : Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
The book starts off with three chapters of sage advice about the tools and process of profiling/tuning. Before you spend any time profiling, you have to have a process and a goal. Without setting goals, the tuning process will never end and it will likely never be successful.

The author outlines a general strategy that will give you a great starting point for your tuning task forces. Chapter 2 presents the profiling facilities that are available in the Java VM and how to interpret the results, while chapter 3 covers VM optimizations (different garbage collectors, memory allocation options) and compiler optimizations.

Part 2 : The Basics
Chapters 4-9 cover the nuts and bolts, code-level optimizations that you can implement. Chapter 4 discusses various object allocation tweaks including: lazy initialization, canonicalizing objects, and how to use the different types of references (Phantom, Soft, and Weak) to implement priority object pooling. Chapter 5 tells you more about handling Strings in Java that you ever wanted to know. Converting numbers (floats, decimals, etc) to Strings efficiently, string matching -- it's all here in gory detail with timings and sample code.

This chapter also shows the author's depth and maturity; when presenting his algorithm to convert integers to Strings, he notes that while his implementation previously beat the pants off of Sun's implementation, in 1.3.1/1.4.0 Sun implemented a change that now beats his code. He analyzes the new implementation, discusses why it's faster without losing face. That is just one of many gems in this updated edition of the book. Chapter 6 covers the cost of throwing and catching exceptions, passing parameters to methods and accessing variables of different scopes (instance vs. local) and different types (scalar vs. array). Chapter 7 covers loop optimization with a java bent. The author offers proof that an exception terminated loop, while bad programming style, can offer better performance than more accepted practices.

Chapter 8 covers IO, focusing in on using the proper flavor of java.io class (stream vs. reader, buffered vs. unbuffered) to achieve the best performance for a given situation. The author also covers performance issues with object serialization (used under the hood in most Java distributed computing mechanisms) in detail and wraps up the chapter with a 12 page discussion of how best to use the "new IO" package (java.nio) that was introduced with Java 1.4. Sadly, the author doesn't offer a detailed timing comparison of the 1.4 NIO API to the existing IO API. Chapter 9 covers Java's native sorting implementations and how to extend their framework for your specific application.

PART 3 : Threads, Distributed Computing and Other Topics
Chapters 10-14 covers a grab bag of topics, including threading, proper Collections use, distributed computing paradigms, and an optimization primer that covers full life cycle approaches to optimization. Chapter 10 does a great job of presenting threading, common threading pitfalls (deadlocks, race conditions), and how to solve them for optimal performance (e.g. proper scope of locks, etc).

Chapter 11 provides a wonderful discussion about one of the most powerful parts of the JDK, the Collections API. It includes detailed timings of using ArrayList vs. LinkedList when traversing and building collections. To close the chapter, the author discusses different object caching implementations and their individual performance results.

Chapter 12 gives some general optimization principles (with code samples) for speeding up distributed computing including techniques to minimize the amount of data transferred along with some more practical advice for designing web services and using JDBC.

Chapter 13 deals specifically with designing/architecting applications for performance. It discusses how performance should be addressed in each phase of the development cycle (analysis, design, development, deployment), and offers tips a checklist for your performance initiatives. The puzzling thing about this chapter is why it is presented at the end of the book instead of towards the front, with all of the other process-related material. It makes much more sense to put this material together up front.

Chapter 14 covers various hardware and network aspects that can impact application performance including: network topology, DNS lookups, and machine specs (CPU speed, RAM, disk).

PART 4 : J2EE Performance
Chapters 15-18 deal with performance specifically with the J2EE APIs: EJBs, JDBC, Servlets and JSPs. These chapters are essentially tips or suggested patterns (use coarse-grained EJBs, apply the Value Object pattern, etc) instead of very low-level performance tips and metrics provided in earlier chapters. You could say that the author is getting lazy, but the truth is that due to huge number of combinations of appserver/database vendor combinations, it would be very difficult to establish a meaningful performance baseline without a large testbed.

Chapter 15 is a reiteration of Chapter 1, Tuning Strategy, re-tooled with a J2EE focus. The author reiterates that a good testing strategy determines what to measure, how to measure it, and what the expectations are. From here, the author presents possible solutions including load balancing. This chapter also contains about 1.5 pages about tuning JMS, which seems to have been added to be J2EE 1.3 acronym compliant.

Chapter 16 provides excellent information about JDBC performance strategies. The author presents a proxy implementation to capture accurate profiling data and minimize changes to your code once the profiling effort is over. The author also covers data caching, batch processing and how the different transaction levels can affect JDBC performance.

Chapter 17 covers JSPs and servlets, with very little earth shattering information. The author presents tips such as consider GZipping the content before returning it to the client, and minimize custom tags. This chapter is easily the weakest section of the book: Admittedly, it's difficult to optimize JSPs since much of the actual running code is produced by the interpreter/compiler, but this chapter either needs to be beefed up or dropped from future editions.

Finally, chapter 18 provides a design/architecture-time approach towards EJB performance. The author presents standard EJB patterns that lend themselves towards squeezing greater performance out of the often maligned EJB. The patterns include: data access object, page iterator, service locator, message facade, and others. Again, there's nothing earth shattering in this chapter. Chapter 19 is list of resources with links to articles, books and profiling/optimizing projects and products.

What's Bad?

Since the book has been published, the 1.4.1 VM has been released with the much anticipated concurrent garbage collector. The author mentions that he received an early version of 1.4.1 from Sun to test with. However, the text doesn't state that he used the concurrent garbage collector, so the performance of this new feature isn't indicated by this text.

The J2EE performance chapters aren't as strong as the J2SE chapters. After seeing the statistics and extensive code samples of the J2SE sections, I expected a similar treatment for J2EE. Many of the J2SE performance practices still apply for J2EE (serialization most notably, since that his how EJB, JMS, and RMI ship method parameters/results across the wire), but it would be useful to fortify these chapters with actual performance metrics.

So What's In It For Me?

This book is indispensable for the architect drafting the performance requirements/testing process, and contains sage advice for the programmer as well. It's the most up to date publication dealing specifically with performance of Java applications, and is a one-of-a-kind resource.

You can purchase Java Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

cioxx writes "Speaking to a few-hundred ISVs at an Oracle-sponsored event in New York, Larry Ellison made a bold prediction , also covered in Infoworld, stating: "(Microsoft has) already been killed by one open-source product. Slaughtered, wiped out, taken from market dominance to irrelevance [...]", referring to Apache's displacement of MS IIS server. He continues on with a claim that battle for datacenter dominance is looming with a clear advantage on the side of Open-Source platforms, and desktop would follow once Star Office becomes completely "usable" to compete with MS Office. "And it's going to happen to them again on Linux." Newsforge also has a related article on Oracles ongoing linux efforts.

MrRules writes "It's that time again; the 2002 salary survey's are out. This year there's an interesting twist: SAGE, SANS and Sun's BigAdmin site have combined to run the largest global participation sysadmin salary survey ever done. What I like is that this is different to those surveys done by HR departments -- this is real data on how you spend your time, by sysadmins for sysadmins. It'll be interesting to see how things have changed over the past 18 months."

mactari writes "Java client application developers should take a look at Sun's J2SE Client Developer Survey. Swing's relative slowness has always made a Java app with a GUI look and feel slow, and Sun might finally be doing something about it. Questions on the survey suggest Sun is considering moving away from a crossplatform look and feel (eg, Metal) towards native looks by default. If Sun is going to follow the suit played by IBM's native widget toolkit, SWT, or do things on individual platforms like Apple has done with its hardware accelerated version of Aqua-Swing, Java might finally find its way to becoming a competitor on the desktop."

Verity Stob writes "There is a turning point in the emergence of a programming methodology. It doesn't matter how big and popular the website is, nor how many papers have been published in the ACM journals or development magazines, nor even whether the first conferences have been a sell-out. A methodology hasn't made really made it until somebody has published a Proper Book. With Aspect-Oriented Programming with AspectJ author Ivan Kiselev is bidding to drag AOP into the mainstream. He is motivated, he says in his introduction, by the recollection of the 25 odd years it took for the object-oriented concept to spread from its Simula origins in frosty Norway to being the everyday tool of Joe Coder. He aims to prevent this delay happening to AOP." Read on for Verity Stob's review of Kiselev's book. Aspect-Oriented Programming with AspectJ author Ivan Kiselev pages 274 publisher SAMS rating Excellent reviewer Verity Stob ISBN 0672324105 summary Introduction to a new programming technique using an extension to Java

He has divided the book into four parts. Part I provides a brief sketch of AOP and introduces its concepts. AOP builds on OOP, asserting that we need a new programming entity called, wait for it, an aspect. Mr Kiselev's explanation of aspects reminded me of that bit in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the planet Golgafrincham divided its population into A types (who were the leaders, the scientists and the great artists), the C types (who were the people who did all the actual making of things and doing of things), and the B types, who comprised everybody left over: telephone sanitizers, advertising account executives and hairdressers. As I understand Mr Kiselev, the AOP view of things is that objects and classes (A type thinkers) and low-level procedures and APIs (C type doers) can be nicely encapsulated using traditional components. But aspects, software's little hairdressers, get their fingers into everything, and until now there has been no way to encapsulate them. This of course is what AOP in general and specifically the AspectJ superset of the Java language set out to do.

AspectJ's eponymous aspects are constructs not unlike ordinary classes. Mr Kiselev has not resisted the temptation to make an aspect Hello World example, and it looks reassuringly so-whatish:

package intro;

import java.io.*;

public aspect HelloWorldA
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println(Hello, world!);
}
}

Mr Kiselev then lays out his stall of New Things. A join point is any point in execution flow that AspectJ can identify and -- to get slightly ahead of ourselves -- execute some extra code. The most frequently used kind of join point being the call to a method. Pointcuts specify collections of join points; as a regular expression is to an instance of matched text, so a pointcut is to a matching join point. An advice (with horrid plural 'advices') is the code to be executed when a given pointcut is matched. If you are familiar with Eiffel's pre- and post-conditions, then you'll understand if I say that it is common for advices to run in the same way, topping and/or tailing the execution of a method. The differences are that aspects are specified from outside the method without touching the method or its class's code, and that aspects can be applied to multiple methods in one go. Mr Kiselev concludes this section of the book with a few simplistic examples of 'here is class A, here is class B' kind.

In Part II Mr Kiselev rolls up his sleeves and takes us through an extended, realistic example. I did wonder if perhaps it weren't a wee bit too realistic, as it is a miniature website application for news story submission and reading -- sort of Slashdot Ultralite -- all done using JSP and a MySQL database. Just explaining this setup, without even using any AspectJ, consumes a 15-page chapter. Since I am a C++ programmer who has not had any contact with JSP, I was initially anxious that I might not be able to follow this. However, recalling that www.[name withheld].com, the clumsiest, ugliest corporate website on the Internet, is programmed in JSP, I reasoned that if the dolts that programmed that site could understand JSP then it couldn't be very hard. So it proved.

The first example comprises adding password protection to the application. This is achieved by adding an advice that intercepts calls to doStartTag() methods. The advice can test if the user is logged in and, if he isn't, throw an exception that will dump him back at the login page. (Who says exceptions aren't 21st century gotos?) At this point Mr Kiselev admits that the cute 10-line implementation that he initially shows is in reality a non-starter; for one thing not all pages that must be secured define doStartTag() methods, for another the aspect can't reach an instance variable it needs to read because it is declared in protected scope. The second problem is easily overcome. AOP offers a mechanism by which extra classes can be bodged ('introduced' is the preferred verb in the AOP community) into the hierarchy as parents of existing classes. He uses this to add an accessor method for the field in question. The other problem is not so neatly smothered, and it is somewhat ruefully that Mr Kiselev produces his final, two-page solution. But I think that it is greatly to Mr K's credit that he does this - it tastes like programming in the real world as I have experienced it.

For the rest of Part II, Mr K demonstrates other applications of AOP using the AspectNews code. This includes Eiffelish design-by-contract stuff, improved exception handling, various debugging and tuning techniques (specifically logging, tracing and profiling) and a chapter on runtime improvements - stream buffering, database connection pooling and result caching - which show the AOP way to do things, usually where I would expect to be putting in proxy classes.

In part III we get down and dirty with the AspectJ language. This is the part where the book explains the obscure stuff: how to make a pointcut that picks up object preinitialization, or make an advice that goes off only when you are exiting a method on the back of an exception. I skimmed this bit - I guess it will become vital when I start using AspectJ in earnest. It looked good and clear on a flick through. A brief part IV contains some patterns, to give one a start when engaging AspectJ in earnest. Apparently it is horribly easy to create infinitely recursive situations, so if you here a faint popping sound from your machine it will be the stack colliding with the heap. There are seven appendices, supplying such things as a summary of the API in AspectJ's packages and hints on obtaining and using the Open Source supplementary tools mentioned in the book (Tomcat JSP container, MySQL database and Ant make replacement). AspectJ itself, now escaped from Xerox PARC, can be downloaded from the Eclipse website.

Complaints? None really. Oh all right, here's a nitpicklette because it's you: at page 75 Mr Kiselev adopts the irritating Internet habit of writing 'loosing' when he means 'losing'. Note to publisher SAMS proofreaders: do I win 25 cents?

For the rest, this is a lucid and readable book that describes the Next Big Methodology. I'm a bit alarmed at the prospect of squeezing new actions into the cracks of existing code, but I dare say I'll grow to love it.

A word of warning to the eager: since this technology is currently implemented as a species of preprocessor that relies on having all the source code available at once, so it is rather slow and probably isn't going into production shops for a while. There again, I seem to remember the comparable Cfront C++ compiler doing rather well, before we had platform-native C++ compilers.

And to the sceptics: if you think you can ignore AOP, don't forget the fate of the A and C type inhabitants of Golgafrincham, who having sent their B type telephone sanitizers into exile were all wiped out by a germ caught from a particularly dirty telephone.

You can purchase Aspect-Oriented Programming with AspectJ from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

gholmer writes "The Blackdown project has finally released a production version of Java 1.4.1 for both ix86 and Sparc on Linux. This much-awaited release gives Linux users another choice for Java besides Sun's and IBM's."

Bill Venners writes "In this interview, Java creator James Gosling says, 'There's a folk theorem out there that systems with very loose typing are very easy to build prototypes with. That may be true. But the leap from a prototype built that way to a real industrial strength system is pretty vast.' In this interview, Python creator Guido van Rossum responds with 'That attitude sounds like the classic thing I've always heard from strong-typing proponents. The one thing that troubles me is that all the focus is on the strong typing, as if once your program is type correct, it has no bugs left. Strong typing catches many bugs, but it also makes you focus too much on getting the types right and not enough on getting the rest of the program correct.'"

Bill Venners writes "In this interview, Java creator James Gosling says, 'There's a folk theorem out there that systems with very loose typing are very easy to build prototypes with. That may be true. But the leap from a prototype built that way to a real industrial strength system is pretty vast.' In this interview, Python creator Guido van Rossum responds with 'That attitude sounds like the classic thing I've always heard from strong-typing proponents. The one thing that troubles me is that all the focus is on the strong typing, as if once your program is type correct, it has no bugs left. Strong typing catches many bugs, but it also makes you focus too much on getting the types right and not enough on getting the rest of the program correct.'"

desau writes "This Yahoo article gives some tidbits on Sun's new toys that are being released today. Looks like they're aiming their guns at intel based systems with many new blade offerings and several small to midrange servers. The article also points out that they're lowering their prices on other servers." Probably a lot more information will come out from the web view - that starts @ 12:30 PM EST - but I think it'll take more than blade servers to make a difference in the future.Removed the first part of the link - the DoubleClick part was my copying link location, and not checking it - it should be correct now.

nairnr writes "Sun has announced that it is releasing Solaris 9 for Intel. Any takers? According to Sun, it extends the 'enterprise class OS to the X86 market'. How nice of them. Non-commercial usage is available at no charge, while commercial pricing starts at US $99; attractive OEM pricing is also available. Source code for Solaris will now be available. It seems they are after Microsoft, not Linux. More Power to them."

nairnr writes "Sun has announced that it is releasing Solaris 9 for Intel. Any takers? According to Sun, it extends the 'enterprise class OS to the X86 market'. How nice of them. Non-commercial usage is available at no charge, while commercial pricing starts at US $99; attractive OEM pricing is also available. Source code for Solaris will now be available. It seems they are after Microsoft, not Linux. More Power to them."

SadatChowdhury writes "Aside from templates as already reported in a past slashdot article , a little snooping around revealed the details of the following newly revealed features in the upcoming release of Java 1.5 (codenamed: Tiger) : Autoboxing , Enhanced-For-Loop, Enumerations and Static Imports . Must read for Java fans." In related news: jdkane writes "Sun Microsystems delays a much-anticipated Java specification by three months to comply with guidelines designed to keep Web services interoperable. Says Ralph Galantine, group marketing manager for Java Web services at Sun: "We thought that this change was important for the industry, so that there was no conflict between J2EE 1.4 and the WS-I, "We thought it was worth taking out to the summer." It's very refreshing to hear that a big software company is looking out for the industry, instead of just their own."

SadatChowdhury writes "Aside from templates as already reported in a past slashdot article , a little snooping around revealed the details of the following newly revealed features in the upcoming release of Java 1.5 (codenamed: Tiger) : Autoboxing , Enhanced-For-Loop, Enumerations and Static Imports . Must read for Java fans." In related news: jdkane writes "Sun Microsystems delays a much-anticipated Java specification by three months to comply with guidelines designed to keep Web services interoperable. Says Ralph Galantine, group marketing manager for Java Web services at Sun: "We thought that this change was important for the industry, so that there was no conflict between J2EE 1.4 and the WS-I, "We thought it was worth taking out to the summer." It's very refreshing to hear that a big software company is looking out for the industry, instead of just their own."