daily java by altuure

Satellite Environment Software on the NetBeans Platform

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:01:25 -0800

Frane Milos discusses several applications on the NetBeans Platform.

Hard Drive Data Recovery Service- When Is It Necessary?

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:30:00 -0800

You need not to opt for recovery service, if your hard drive is physically intact and working properly. If all the hard drive internals are working properly, you would be able to start your system and access data from it. However, the the internal components of your computer hard drive gets damaged, you can not retrieve data from it and you need to opt for data recovery services for easy and quick accessing of your valuable and mission critical data. Each file that you store on your computer hard drive is crucial from your business point of view. When you lose even a single file, you might feel lost. Particularly for the businesses, loss of valuable files might prove a real disaster. Although, the manufacturers might give you guarantee of the hardware, but when a problem occurs in your drive, you can not retrieve data from it. Manufacturers can only replace the damaged hard drive if it is in guarantee period, but could not help you to get your data back.

Poll Result: Majority Supports Including Closures in Java 7

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:12:23 -0800

Slightly more than half of respondants to last week's java.net poll believe that closures will improve Java. A total of 365 votes were cast. The exact poll question and results were:

What do you think about closures in JDK 7?

51% (185 votes) - Closures will improve Java

12% (44 votes) - I was/am opposed to closures in Java

14% (50 votes) - Where was the community process in this decision?

9% (32 votes) - I don't know

13% (46 votes) - What's a closure?

2% (8 votes) - Other

While this is not a scientific poll, the results clearly show that, among those who chose to vote, closures in Java are viewed positively by a majority of developers who understand what closures are.

Unsurprisingly (to me), a significant number of people chose to register complaint on how the decision to include closures in Java 7 came about. "Where was the community process in this decision?" is a question that was asked by dozens of commentators immediately after Mark Reinhold's surprise announcement at Devoxx that closures (of a certain type) will be included in Java 7. While we can't tell for sure, my guess is that more of the people who selected this option oppose closures in Java -- but, I also think that this option was probably selected by many people who might favor the inclusion of closures in Java, but object to the effective closure of debate on closures in Java 7 that occurred a year ago, only to be followed by a sudden announcement out of the blue that closures will be included and Java 7, and "here's the type of closure we're going to include." That seemed rather dictatorial to me.

In his comment posted to the poll, ipsi said:

I'm a little concerned about the community process in this decision... I haven't seen the actual announcement (is that visible online anywhere? Or at the least the actual wording?), but it sounds like the announcement was "There will be closures in JDK 7". Not "Well, we've decided to push back the JDK 7 release for reasons that have nothing to do with the Sun/Oracle Deal, and now have time to revisit the closure proposals", not "Project leadership has changed, and we're interested in revisiting closures", but "Closures are coming. Our closures. Applaud. Now".

It's true that a few days ago, in his post "There's not a moment to lose!", Mark Reinhold invited the community to participate going forward:

Revising a programming language that’s in active use by millions of developers is no small task. Sun neither can nor should do it alone, so I hereby invite everyone who participated in the earlier closures conversations--as well as anyone else with an informed opinion--to join us.

But, clearly, in the past year, thought was being put into having some form of closures in Java 7 -- yet, that thinking was not occuring within the broader public venue. Hence, the astonishment by virtually all observers when Mark's "Closures: It's time to add them to Java" slide appeared on the big screen at Devoxx. As Alex Miller said in "Closures after all?":

I can't say what to make of that really. For years Sun has been saying that there is no consensus on closures and delayed the formation of a JSR or expert group on the subject despite having three proposals, all with prototypes.

dog registered another concern in his poll comment:

The only thing that worries me is this "keep up with the Joneses attitude" that if language X has it Java must have it too. I like Java, I still think it is a great language and is better than many alternatives (including C# and Scala). But Java shouldn't be dynamically typed or have automatic type inference (like OCaml) or have some of the weirder features other languages have.

To me, yet another surprise is Mark Reinhold's declaration that the reason closures are needed now (the reason "there's not a moment to lose") is the advent of multicore processors! Are multicore processors so new and novel?

New poll: Java's parallel programming support

This week's new java.net poll proceeds from this line of thought. What do you think: Is Java's parallel programming support sufficient to meet 'the Multicore Challenge'? If not, will closures in Java 7 eliminate the deficiencies?

In Java Today, Geerjan Wielenga provides a Sneak Preview: 5 Satellite Applications on the NetBeans Platform:

I'm working on an article for NetBeans Zone about how the satellite software provider Amphinicy Technologies is working with SES-Astra TechCom (who own the applications) in creating applications on the NetBeans Platform. They have around 10 applications built on the NetBeans Platform, but the story discusses 5 of these (since the others are confidential for various reasons). Here's a quick sneak preview on each of these (detailed descriptions and more [and larger] screenshots in the upcoming article) ...

robilad posted Conferences: Devoxx 2009:

It's been a So, last week I bought a couple of books, a train ticket, and headed south to Antwerp. At this time of year, the sky over Antwerp in Belgium has the same kind of shade of post-apocalyptic sci-fi gray like the sky over Hamburg in Germany, so I didn't go there for a boost of my vitamin D levels. Instead, I went there to spend a few days in a cinema complex, with very comfortable chairs, interesting talks and curious Java developers - the yearly Devoxx conference. As I didn't have a presentation scheduled myself, I could sit back and enjoy the sessions. On the first day of Devoxx, I saw Mark Reinhold's fun JDK 7 talk, with the simple closures moment, which a few hours later led to a packed JDK 7 BoF. Squeezed between the two was Joe Darcy's nice presentation on the small language changes in Project Coin. I saw James Gosling's session as well, which had an entertaining run through the complexities of dealing with legal & tax codes on the world...

Fabien Duminy documented the recent Paris JUG - Atmosphere evening:

On thursday 12th november, I attended to the Atmosphere evening of the Paris JUG. News from Paris JUG: * Paris JUG is at devoxx09 that week. * For the second birthday of Paris JUG, the theme will be the open source in France. We are searching for a cheap room that can contain from 250 to 300 persons. Atmosphere presentation: Jean-Francois Arcand has presented Atmosphere, a portable and open source framework to do ajax push or Comet (which process ajax push requests in a non blocking way)...

In today's Weblogs, Felipe Gaucho talks about Dismantling monoliths:

When I comment in mailing lists that I am implementing a registration module for my application, hundreds of other developers comment they are coding exactly the same functionality in their projects - an indicator that something is missing in the Java EE Universe. Registration is just an example, there are many others like notification, content repository management, etc. If you look for solutions to such problems you will find a lot of frameworks and products supplying solutions for separated parts of a common enterprise application. The point is, you can't can adopt one of this features without adopting the whole framework surrounding the feature and usually you can't or you dont'n want to do that. It is senseless to expect such specialized features included in the container specification, but at same time we should recognize that today it takes too long from the concept of a feature to production in a standard Java EE Server, and it is not a problem of the server, it is something else, something missing...

Ed Burns has a Project Idea: memcached JSF Component:

While speaking at the Globalcode Developer's conference in Rio de Janeiro, I met a dynamic and intelligent student by the name of Thiago Diogo. Thiaogo presented his group's work on student project to provide a real, mission critical distributed application for his university, Universidade Federal Fulminense. They chose JSF 1.2 and Seam as a part of their stack. One idea Thiaogo shared with me was a memcached JSF component...

Masoud Kalali announces GlassFish Application Server v3 Refcard Available - Download Now:

I authored a new refcard covering GlassFish v3, This is different from my previous one which covers GlassFish v2. This new refcard discuss the following items ...

In the Forums, skja gets an error Initializing Mojarra 2.0.1 (FCS b02) Error: java.lang.IllegalArgumentExcept: "I am using Mojarra 2.0.1 (FCS b02) implementation of JSF. I am using Netbeans IDE 6.7.1, Java 1.5.0_16 & same jre; on a Windows XP machine. I have GlassFish 2.x server. I am trying out the project in this url ..."

technolgia wonders if there is a Calendar setDate Bug?: "Hi, When i display the calendar component i want the date displayed to be the current date.I tried the setDate(new Date()) but the date selected is not the current date. Is this a bug? Kindly help me with this. Thanking you ..."

ungsikyu has Custom TableCellRenderer questions: "I would like to show a Map > as a table using JXTable. I want to show a key in a column and corresponding values next to the column. I also want to enable individual value selection and hyperlinking. I tried..."

In our current Spotlight, Terrence Barr invites us to Check out Java Card 3.0 Connected Edition: Real Java, just really flat ;-): "Java Card 3.0 was released a couple of months ago – and the second update (version 3.0.2) is scheduled for December. If you haven’t paid much attention to Java on smart cards because you thought it’s not “real” Java – well, look again. It’s true that Java Card 2 was very limited in many ways – a testament to the kind of technology you had available on smart cards 10 years ago. There are billions of these out there today..."

The new java.net Poll asks Is Java's parallel programming support sufficient to meet 'the Multicore Challenge'? The poll will run through next Thursday / early Friday.

Our Feature Articles lead off with Sanjay Dasgupta's in-depth article Simplify Native Code Access with JNA. We're also featuring Eric Siegelberg's Using a Service Delegate to Avoid MVC Controller Bloat, which describes how to maintain separation of concerns and avoid MVC controller bloat through the use of service delegates.

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobile Podcast 90: Augmented Reality: Excerpts from the JavaOne 2009 Augmented Reality session with Kenneth Andersson and Erik Hellman of Sony Ericsson.

Current and upcoming Java Events:

December 1-4: 2009 JSF Summit
December 1-4: 2009 Rich Web Experience
December 3: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Melbourne
December 8: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Sydney
December 10: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Auckland
December 11-12: 4th IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology, Pune, India
January 15: Spring Grails Asia 2010
March 17-19: TheServerSide Java Symposium 2010

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media

Groovy Goodness: Simple Evaluation of Groovy Expressions in Java

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:23:33 -0800

We can run Groovy code from Java code in several ways.

How to handle Memory Leaks in Java/J2EE Applications ?

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 03:06:19 -0800

In this article, I have tried to analyze the various causes which may lead to Memory Exception. Once an ‘OutOfMemoryException’ is thrown, how best can it be handled has been discussed in this artilce. OutOfMemoryException is thrown when there is not sufficient available memory to carry out a requested activity. In this article, I have tried to illustrate the different methods by which memory leaks can be handled in Web Applications.

Strong Groovy

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:33:42 -0800

Usually Groovy is thought of as a loose, dynamically typed language that is otherwise similar to Java. Given this, it would make sense to write in Groovy when dynamism is needed an write in Java when you need strong typing, etc. to avoid side effects. But a great differentiator for groovy over any other dynamic language running on the JVM is that it also has all of Java's support for Strong typing, Generics, immutable objects and the like. This allows Groovy a tremendous range using dynamism where it makes sense and locking it down where it makes sense to do that.

Using Comet for asynchronous user notification of autonomous server thread progression

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:46:55 -0800

Joseph McCarthy from IBM Ireland has written a tutorial called "Using Comet for asynchronous user notification of autonomous server thread progression" about how to use polling and Comet (long polling) in Java with the ItsNat Java web framework to asynchronously notify end users by web about what is doing an autonomous thread (not a web thread) doing a long task in parallel. Note: to read this article use MSIE 6 or FireFox disabling styles (View/Page Style/No Style)

Classloader Acrobatics: Code Generation with OSGi

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:59:31 -0800

Porting great infrastructure to OSGi often means solving complex class loading problems. This article is dedicated to the frameworks that face the hardest issues in this area: those that do dynamic code generation. Incidentally these are also the coolest frameworks: AOP wrappers, ORM mappers, and service proxy generators are just a few examples.

US Senators Give Ellison a Hand

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:33:01 -0800

59 US Senators signed a request this week asking the European Commission to expedite its investigation of the Oracle-Sun deal. The letter was addressed to the EU's head US delegate, Angelos Pangratis. The signatories, led by Senators John Kerry (D) and Orrin Hatch (R), came from both Democratic and Republican parties.

Voice Your Opinion on Potential Upcoming Java.net Enhancements!

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 07:11:18 -0800

You may have noticed a new item in the "Get Involved" section at the upper left of the java.net home page: Java.net Enhancements. This is a new feature that's been added as a way to enable the broader java.net community to identify potential enhancements to java.net that are most important.

The Java.net Future Enhancements provides many different ways of looking at enhancements that are being considered for the site. The default view briefly describes several of the proposed enhancements, and lets you vote your view of the importance of each item or add a comment. Clicking on an item's title brings you to a detail page for that proposed enhancement, where you can see the already-posted comments, or post your own comment.

The rating system for the importance of each proposed enhancement is as follows:

5 stars: Must have!
4 stars: Very useful
3 stars: Useful
2 stars: Could be useful
1 star: Don't care

These additional enhancement views are also available:

List view - view a summary table of proposed enhancements, with statistics on number of views, comments, and the target schedule for implementation (if a date has been set)
All Completed Enhancements - a summary table of enhancements that have already been completed

If you don't see an enhancement you consider important on the Java.net Future Enhancements page, you can visit the Wish List Forum or the java-net project issue list. If still don't see the enhancement you're interested in, you can enter it as a new enhancement request, and it will be given consideration by the java.net development team.

In Java Today, Kelly O'Hair provides Faster OpenJDK Build Tricks:

Here are a few tips and tricks to get faster OpenJDK builds. * RAM: RAM is cheap, if you don't have at least 2Gb RAM, go buy yourself some RAM for Xmas. ;^) * LOCAL DISK: Use local disk if at all possible, the difference in build time is significant. This mostly applies to the repository or forest you are building (and where the build output is also landing). Also, to a lesser degree, frequently accessed items like the boot jdk (ALT_BOOTDIR). Local disk is your best choice, and if possible /tmp on some systems is even better. * PARALLEL_COMPILE_JOBS=N ...

peligri posted Please No Commits on v3 Trunk... and Other Stories of GFv3 FCS:

It's been a hard year, but the GlassFish community has kept pushing v3 onward and all the indicators are that the result is very much worth the effort. The target date for GlassFish v3 is mid-December so the last few weeks have been very busy - check out these MarkMail charts: ...

Elliotte Rusty Harold expresses his view on the news that Sun has decided to add closures to Java 7:

They will, of course, not remove anything to make room, so Java just gets bigger and bulkier. They will also give us a half-hearted implementation that removes some interesting pieces that would make it backwards incompatible, so we're getting really aren't closures after all. Did Sun learn nothing from the generics debacle? Most tellingly, despite all the talk of openness, this seems to very much be Sun's decision. There's no proposal in the JCP, and all discussion of this seems to have purely been internal to Sun. If you aren't eating lunch in the Sun cafeteria, you don't get to chime in. Sun simply presented the decision as a fait accompli to the community. First they decided they wouldn't do closures in Java 7; then they decided they would; and now they'll decide how and when. Scala's looking more attractive by the hour.

In today's Weblogs, John Ferguson Smart presents Test-Driven Development with Legacy code - an introduction:

Test-Driven Development, or TDD, is often quoted as an essential Agile best practice, and so it is. It works wonders on green-fields projects and new code bases where you can start afresh and ensure that all your code is both easily testable and well tested. But what about legacy code? (By legacy code, I mean any code that does not have a comprehensive set of automated tests, so you might be writing legacy code as we speak). For most of us, most of the code we will ever work on will not have originally been our own work. And, unfortunately for the software industry, only a small fraction of code can really boast comprehensive unit and integration tests. How can techniques like Test-Driven Development make our work as developers more productive and less frustrating? ...

Masoud Kalali posted Architecting a system need a wide knowledge of technologies, COTS, projects, standards....:

When we start working on a new project as an architect we are dealing basically with a set of requirement which our architecture should be able to act as a foundation for the design and implementation of those requirements in form of a software system. to let the customer fulfill its requirements in a better and more efficient way. Preparing the architecture for a software system means not only the architect to be familiar with the domain but also he should well aware of new technologies, frameworks, COTS, and standards available not only for the domain he is working on but also for the development platform which will realize the architecture into a working piece of software...

Fabrizio Giudici talks about "As" (when an RDF store meets NetBeans Lookup):

My latest example of an API that would benefit from support by a RDF store was the "Observation API" and focused on modeling a set of observations made by some subjects and related to some places (I'm keeping birds and birdwatchers in mind, but it's only a special case): ...

In the Forums, bradmiley is seeing jerky animations: "My animations are consistently not smooth. A create an animation of duration one second. Below is an example of the of the fraction of the percent of the animation elapsed. Note the huge jump from 0.381 to 0.629 that causes the jerky behavior. I..."

nareshdoni has a problem with Image scroll: "I was trying to make the image scrollale . but I could not able to do that. any help is highly appreciated. I have given my source code below. Suggest mw where I have to make changes. public FloorPlanDisplayable(YasmoLive _ParentMIDlet,..."

hiraldesai needs to Display commands as buttons on Dialog: "HI, I am trying to display the commands of a dialog as buttons on the dialog.This can be achieved by using the static methods on Dialog : 1.Dialog.setCommandsAsButtons(true) 2.Dialog.show("title",Component,cmds[]) ..."

The new java.net Poll asks What do you think about closures in JDK 7? The poll will run through Thursday.

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobile Podcast 90: Augmented Reality: Excerpts from the JavaOne 2009 Augmented Reality session with Kenneth Andersson and Erik Hellman of Sony Ericsson.

Current and upcoming Java Events:

November 26: JavaEdge '09, Israeli Conference for Java Technologies
December 1-4: 2009 JSF Summit
December 1-4: 2009 Rich Web Experience
December 3: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Melbourne
December 8: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Sydney
December 10: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Auckland
December 11-12: 4th IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology, Pune, India
January 15: Spring Grails Asia 2010
March 17-19: TheServerSide Java Symposium 2010

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media

Virtualization Expo Call for Papers Deadline December 15

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:45:00 -0800

Delegates will leave Virtualization Expo with a full understanding of the interaction between virtual servers and the rest of the data center infrastructure. Indeed our overall aim is to ensure that all attendees leave the Jacob Javits Convention Center with abundant resources, ideas and examples they can apply immediately to leveraging Virtualization in their own corporate datacenter, on the desktop, and elsewhere. If you wish to submit a speaking proposal for the 8th Virtualization Expo, April 19–21, 2010, then you can do so right here

Performance Tuning Essentials for Java

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:00:00 -0800

In light of today’s compressed development cycles, multi-tiered application architectures and complex technologies, many organizations are challenged to get reliable yet scalable enterprise Java applications out the door in a timely manner. Devoting a small amount of energy throughout the development process to identify, address, and correct performance obstacles can lower the risks and costs associated with poorly performing applications over the life of the code.

'Spring Enterprise Recipes,' from Apress

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:54:41 -0800

A shameless plug for my book "Spring Enterprise Recipes," from Apress. The book covers all manner of topics including business process management, batch processing, web services, messaging, schedulers, application integration, distributed computing and clustered caching. The book provides a discussion of all these techniques as well as prescriptions for Spring and various other libraries to build real-world, practical solutions. I hope you'll consider it for your next purchase.

IDEOne online mini IDE and debugging tool.

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:09:57 -0800

ideone.com is a... pastebin. But a pastebin like no other in the Internet. More accurate expression would be online mini IDE and debugging tool. ideone.com is designed mostly for programmers (but, of course, common plain text can also be uploaded). You can use it to: * share your code (that's obvious - it is a pastebin, isn't it? :)) in a neat way, * run your code on server side in almost 40 programming languages * and do it all with your own input data!

Vale JCP? - Scala and Java:

Rick Jelliffe — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:28:21 -0800

Using Ext JS, Servlets, JSON, MySQL and Tomcat on Fedora

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:15:00 -0800

These days the popularity of Ext JS (a JavaScript library) is gaining momentum. One of the most popular widgets within Ext JS is the DataGrid. The reason – displaying data from a database is one of the most common tasks of a web application. “Out of the box” the DataGrid has functionality (for instance ascending or descending sorting and reordering of columns by dragging it) that otherwise would require some effort from developers.

Free Eclipse-Based Web 2.0 Tool from IBM Rational software

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:15:31 -0800

EGL Community Edition is a free Eclipse-based tool that simplifies the development of rich Web 2.0 style applications. Learn more from Will Smythe, Product manager, how EGL CE dramatically accelerates development of JavaScript and Java-based, rich Internet applications without needing to learn or program the intricacies of Ajax, JavaScript, REST, HTML, or XML.

What every developer should know about bitmaps

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:43:33 -0800

Virtually every developer will use bitmaps at times in their programming. Or if not in their programming, then in a website, blog, or family photos. Yet many of us don't know the trade-offs between a GIF, JPEG, or PNG file – and there are some major differences there. This is a short post on the basics which will be sufficient for most, and a good start for the rest.

Writing a Java function in Clojure

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:36:19 -0800

A function that we had to write in Java on a project that I worked on recently needed to indicate whether there was a gap in a series of data points or not.

Closures as a Response to Multi-core Processors?

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:24:00 -0800

I was surprised to read, in Mark Reinhold's post "There's not a moment to lose!", that the primary objective, or use case, behind Sun's sudden desire to add closures to Java is multi-core processors. I mean, it's not like multi-core processors are a brand new development, a stunning revolutionary technology that has popped up out of nowhere!

Mark cites Herb Sutter's March 2005 Dr. Dobb's Journal article "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" in making his case that closures are needed now in Java. But that article is almost five years old at this point. Multicore isn't news anymore, is it?

Still, it's quite true that, while the typical new PC even for home use has 2 or 4 cores today, very little mainstream software has been redesigned to take advantage of multiple cores. Rather, the gain in speed comes from the possibility of an individual core being fully tasked running a single foreground application, while the other cores take care of background and OS processes.

It has actually surprised me a bit, how slow companies have been to develop multithreaded apps. Of course, many of the most commonly used desktop applications are highly interactive. In that case, much more time is spent by the user deciding what to input or where to move the mouse than is spent by the computer processing the user's requests for action. And, also, much of people's activity as they sit in front of their computers today actually takes place on a remote server somewhere -- so, again, when your computer is serving as a smart terminal, having that terminal application (for example, your browser) multithreaded isn't really critical, since much of your wait time is likely to be your network connection anyway. But, still, it's hard to picture a future where 16 and 32 core PCs are inexpensive and the marketplace is not demanding that those cores be utilized to speed up our computer-based activities. Has there ever been a time when we thought our software applications ran too fast?

A couple years ago, I participated in the launch of Intel's open source Threading Building Blocks (TBB) project. I was the community manager for that project for its first nine months. TBB is a C++ threading library. It's objective is to facilitate development of multithreaded C++ applications that can take full advantage of multicore processors. In some cases, existing software can be "parallelized" automatically by wrapping the code in TBB structures. TBB represents a significant and formidable advance for the C++ world, when it comes to development for multicore/multiprocessor systems, in my view.

My 107 blog posts about TBB and multithreaded development in general are still public, if anyone's interested. I even engaged in a small debate with Herb Sutter over whether "superlinearity" in multithreaded development is really possible (see "Superlinearity Is Impossible; We Just Don't Always Think Correctly" and "Superlinearity and Algorithmic Complexity; or, My Interesting Conversation with Herb Sutter"). So, you can see that development for multicore systems is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about...

But, getting back to Java and closures: Mark links to the "Connection with closures" section of an IBM Developer Works paper. This section talks about ParallelArray, which "offers a nice way to declaratively specify filtering, processing, and aggregation operations on data sets, while also facilitating automatic parallelization." Later on:

one of the arguments in favor of closures is that it makes expressing small snippets of code - such as filters, mappers, and reducers in ParallelArray - much more compact.

Looking at the code snippet that follows (Listing 4 in the article), I am indeed reminded of some of the TBB constructs I was working with a couple years ago. The code snippet is part of a set of routines that compute the maximum GPA for graduating students. The snippet uses the closure syntax from the BGGA proposal. Here's the code:


double bestGpa = students.withFilter({Student s => (s.graduationYear == THIS_YEAR) }) .withMapping({ Student s => s.gpa }) .max();

Needless to say, for me, the entire closures discussion is becoming very interesting. But, I'm still a bit confused. For example, Java has had threads for a very long time. So, I would have thought that the concept of programming for multicore processors would have received a lot of attention in the past. And it's still confusing to read that suddenly right now is when Java must react to the advent of multi-core processors. This wasn't being thought about four or five years ago? Also, I see almost nothing about multi-core processors and multithreaded programming in the primary closures proposals. So, as I say, I find closures as a response to the multicore challenge, at this time, a quite surprising -- but nonetheless very interesting -- development.

More to come!

In Java Today, Mark Reinhold leads the closures charge with There’s not a moment to lose!:

The free lunch is over. Multicore processors are not just coming—they’re here. Leveraging multiple cores requires writing scalable parallel programs, which is incredibly hard. Tools such as fork/join frameworks based on work-stealing algorithms make the task easier, but it still takes a fair bit of expertise and tuning. Bulk-data APIs such as parallel arrays allow computations to be expressed in terms of higher-level, SQL-like operations (e.g., ﬁlter, map, and reduce) which can be mapped automatically onto the fork-join paradigm. Working with parallel arrays in Java, unfortunately, requires lots of boilerplate code to solve even simple problems...

Robilad provides his latest OpenJDK roundup:

The JVM Language Summit 2009 took place in September. The first video of a full talk is now available on InfoQ, and it's Rich Hickey's keynote, "Are We There Yet?". John Rose has blogged about his paper on "Bytecodes meet Combinators: invokedynamic on the JVM" for the VMIL workshop at OOSPLA on the internals and implications of adding invokedynamic to the JVM...

Java Champion Alan Williamson talks about Server side Javascript with CFML:

I have always wondered why CFSCRIPT was never Javascript, but instead a half-way house. This is something I have spoken about before in various blogs and forums. I have made no secret of the fact that I have not been a fan of CFSCRIPT and feel it was a lost opportunity. Javascript has taken the development world by storm, with it now being one of the fastest growing languages out there. In short, there is a lot of Javascript talent out there, and I want them to be able to utilise this talent server-side, within CFML applications...

In today's Weblogs, Jan Haderka provides his devoxx roundup:

There was a bunch of good things to see at this years Devoxx. My personal highlights are ScalaTest (you definitively want to look into this when testing concurrency in any java code ... the best way to test different race scenarios I've seen so far). Another highlight was the amount of work done on JavaFX yet. The new UI for the clickable gui builder shown briefly by Tor ... surely you remember when Tor has shown this thing for the first time on JavaOne ... well, guess what, since then, the UI have been completely re-written and is using FX only. This language has a potential for building the slick UIs (and not only games, tho those are also very interesting ... check work by Rich and Jasper) ...

Remi Forax talks abou NIO server with continuation in Java:

Java VM embodies continuations now (not in production, in a hacking mode :), This post shows how to write a non-blocking server with continuations...

And Harold Carr completed his Kynetx conference with Kynetx Impact Conference - notes - afternoon day 2:

1:00-1:45 pm
Show Me the Money!
by Kristen Knight, Kynetx VP Product Management

Monetizing cross-site, context-sensitive apps, revenue models, VAR &
Implementor business opportunities.

Wal-Mart
- generated their own warehousing and distribution infrastructure
rather than depending on manufacturers or 3rd party distributors

Before Kynetx:
- search engines (3rd party) direct people to YOUR site
- website sales funnel

With Kynetx:
- consumer/community is center
- search engine, web-enabled devices, other people's sites, desktop, on you site...

In the Forums, kleopatra has a question about Appframework: how-to restore session state dynamically?: "Works fine for everything actually added to the demo app at startup. Problem are that the demo pages themselves are loaded and added only when selected. Any way to restore their state? And if so, how-to? BTW, in case you have not noticed yet:..."

ntimesc has a question Regarding stateful webservices: "Hi All, i have implemented stateful web servies using following mechanism enable a binding property at client side: ((BindingProvider)port).getRequestContext().put(BindingProvider.SESSION_MAINTAIN_PROPERTY, ..."

xclaim wonders how to stop/exit the mediabox: "hi. may i know how to exit the mediabox? for example i create a group inside that is the mediabox, but when i click the close button(custom button) it will go to the other group and thus exit the mediabox. current situation is..."

The new java.net Poll asks What do you think about closures in JDK 7? The poll will run through Thursday.

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobile Podcast 90: Augmented Reality: Excerpts from the JavaOne 2009 Augmented Reality session with Kenneth Andersson and Erik Hellman of Sony Ericsson.

Current and upcoming Java Events:

November 26: JavaEdge '09, Israeli Conference for Java Technologies
December 1-4: 2009 JSF Summit
December 1-4: 2009 Rich Web Experience
December 3: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Melbourne
December 8: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Sydney
December 10: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Auckland
December 11-12: 4th IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology, Pune, India
January 15: Spring Grails Asia 2010
March 17-19: TheServerSide Java Symposium 2010

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media

CRUD Operation using JSF,Web Services and OJB

Frank Charles@nospam.com — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:42:19 -0800

An article summarizes the rapid application development on SOA platforms using JSF and OJB.

Simple guide to Java Message Service (JMS) using ActiveMQ

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:39:58 -0800

JMS is used to exchange asynchronously messages between programs in Java. Learn here how to get it to work using open source ActiveMQ and see sample cut-and-paste-ready codes of JMS producer and JMS consumer.

Act Like a Senior Developer – About Clean Code

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:35:41 -0800

How to make your code dirty, how to avoid it?

JFXtras 0.6 Preview Available!

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:23:04 -0800

The JFXtras team has announced a 0.6 Preview Release that includes support for a JavaFX Menu, Tree, Table, Shelf, and other controls that you need to build large JavaFX applications today. Check out my blog for a full list of features, and have a Happy Thanksgiving for us (because we will be way too busy)!

JDK 7 Milestone 5 Includes Concurrency and Performance Updates, But Is Not Feature Complete

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:11:56 -0800

Sun's Java SE team recently released the Milestone 5 build of JDK 7. This was expected to be a feature complete release of Java 7 but is some way short of that. InfoQ takes a look at what has been added and some of the major features still missing.

Reviewing Project Lombok or the Right Way to Write a Library

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:34:19 -0800

Project Lombok seeks to reduce the (significant) amount of boilerplate in Java code with the use of some clever compile-time annotations. Some debate the wisdom of using annotations like these as a substitute for language features. Here is my review of this interesting new project that is causing quite a stir.

Programming Google App Engine

Dan Sanderson — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:20:26 -0800

Eclipse 4 Goes the Extra Mile

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:23:46 -0800

The Eclipse 4 development environment, codenamed "e4", just reached its second milestone. The new milestone includes significant changes to the platform and the XML Windowing Toolkit (XWT) for the GUI. XWT, a new feature in the fourth version of Eclipse, received a lot of attention in this milestone.

Session Handling in GWT

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:00:52 -0800

This post shows how to use session handling in GWT, shows the client and server-side plumbing that is required to get this done nicely...esp. when you are using Spring, GWT-SL, Gilead

JPA Under the Hood

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:17:33 -0800

I recently gave talks on the behaviour of different JPA frameworks at W-JAX(Germany) and TheServerSide Java Symposium (Prague). As some people have asked me, I am publishing the samples as well. I would also give away the eclipse project, however with all the third party libraries I am sure I will end up not doing it legally correct. Additionally I can add some comments on the samples and why they are as they are :-) .

Terracotta Aquires Quartz Scheduler Open-Source Project

Doug Flansbaugh@nospam.com — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:14:19 -0800

Terracotta Inc. announced late last week that it had acquired the Quartz Scheduler open source project.

Stephen Colebourne: Update on Closures in JDK 7

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:23:01 -0800

In Java Today, we highlight Stephen Colebourne's new blog post, More detail on Closures in JDK 7. In this informative post, Stephen talks about the announcement by Sun's Mark Reinhold at Devoxx last week (closures will be included in JDK 7) and "subsequent information that has become apparent."

Stephen speaks with authority on this topic, as he is co-author of one of the major Java closures proposals, "First=class methods: Java-style closures" (aka FCM). He notes that that the announcement "was a big surprise to everyone, and there was a bit of a vacuum as to what was announced." Still, the announcement showed that:

Sun, via Mark, have chosen to accept the basic case for including closures in Java. By doing so, the debate now changes from whether to go ahead, to how to proceed. This is an important step.

In Stephen's view, the big questions now relate to what's in and what's out. There have been multiple proposals on how closures could be implemented in Java, with differing proposed closure syntax. Assessing Mark's presentation and other information he's gathered since Mark's announcement, Stephen came up with a table that lists 13 fundamental characteristics of closures that have been specified in varying degrees of completeness in four major closure proposals:

CICE - "Concise Instance Creation Expressions" by Bob Lee, Doug Lea, and Josh Bloch
BGGA 0.5 - "Closures for the Java Programming Language" by Gilad Bracha, Neal Gafter, James Gosling, Peter von der Ahé
FCM 0.5 - "First-class methods: Java-style closures" by Stephen Colebourne and Stefan Schulz
CFJ 0.6a - "Closures for Java (v0.6a)" by Neal Gaffer

For each closure characteristic, Stephen shows which proposals indicate support for that aspect of closures. The final column of the table assesses whether support for each characteristic was suggested by Mark's announcement at Devoxx.

If you've been following the JDK 7 closures news, you'll want to read Stephen's More detail on Closures in JDK 7. It provides insight into the present course of events for closures in the upcoming JDK 7 (including what's known and what's still to be determined), while also pointing you to original documents that have been key in the ongoing debate and discussion regarding closures in Java.

In Java Today, Toni Epple invites people to Come to Zurich!:

I’m still alive although I’m not blogging much recently. It’s just because there’s so much happening in the NetBeans Universe. Thanks a lot to everyone voting for me as a member of the NetBeans Governance Board! If you happen to be in munich, visit me in my new office (Bergmannstr. 66) for the party in December (exact date has to be decided). Just came back from Devoxx on saturday where I had a great time hanging out with Geertjan, Aaron “This is” Houston, Sven Reimers, Florian Vogler and Martin Klähn. Geertjan and my session on Lookup and OSGi was nice (here’s a picture) and I met a lot of OSGi fans. It’s not so different from the NB Module system after all (but we were there first ). Also learned about Apache Ace. This is really cool technology...

George Lawton speculates on Hard times for JavaFX?:

Sun has long touted JavaFX as a tool to provide interactivity to a wealth of platforms. It was introduced at a time when Windows Mobile was considered the interactive platform to compete against. But since then a number of credible alternatives have surfaced and Sun has made little traction. Anglin suggests that the adoption of Flash for the Blackberry might just spell the end of JavaFX...

Stephen Colebourne provides More detail on Closures in JDK 7:

This blog goes into a little more detail about the closures announcement at Devoxx and subsequent information that has become apparent. At Devoxx 2009, Mark Reinhold from Sun announced that it was time for closures in Java. This was a big surprise to everyone, and there was a bit of a vacuum as to what was announced. Firstly, Sun, via Mark, have chosen to accept the basic case for including closures in Java. By doing so, the debate now changes from whether to go ahead, to how to proceed. This is an important step...

In today's Weblogs, Wolfgang Zitselsberger presents Synthetica BlackEye Highlights:

Synthetica V2.9 (Swing Look and Feel) comes along with a new theme called Synthetica BlackEye Look and Feel. Below you'll find a short summary of the most important highlights.

Support of round rectangle window shapes - The BlackEye theme uses a round rectangle as window shape. As you maybe know you can do similar things by translucent window support since V2.8. However because translucency can affect performance (will be improved in Java 6u18) the default setting in BlackEye makes use of shape support which was introduced with Java6u10...

Harold Carr provided his Kynetx Impact Conference - notes - morning day 2:

9:00-9:45 am
User-Centric Identity in the Client-Side Revolution
Kim Cameron
Microsoft Chief Architect of Identity, Distinguished Engineer

Identity
- the stuff of poets and philosophers

Digital Identity
- Recognize us in different contexts
- foundation for personalization
- need to traverse silos
- need for contextual separation
- each person has mosaic of identities

Architectural problem
- internet was not designed with any way to know who you're connected to...

Fabrizio Giudici recently provided an update on Spinning JXMapViewer and related stuff out of SwingX-WS:

While SwingX is going on steadily (1.6 has been recently released), things are pretty quiet for SwingX-WS. I've just recently patched it in order to make it compatible with the latest 1.6 and I'm fine with it, but I think that it's important that it is taken care consistently. From what I can understand, the SwingLabs guys are focusing on SwingX and little time remains for SwingX-WS.

Also, SwingX-WS probably was born with a broader scope (collecting several stuff generically aimed at using a few common, public web services from Swing), while AFAIK most people now use it for JXMapViewer. I see a rather high interest in it...

In the Forums, osbald asks about Customising forms for multiple uses: "Hi all just after a sanity check on another idea. Today I need to customise a dialog for two different contexts (viewing and editing). What I was thinking of doing was creating the dialog with default view-only actions installed (all registered in the..."

mr_light wonders about Streaming(posible complete push towards client): "What is to way to go / how to setup your service so that one avoids buffing the response/message as a whole? I'm looking for the same paradigm as is typically encountered with servlets:

public void accept(Request request, Response..."

guy_penda is looking for information on image/icon support for Form title and TextArea: "Hi everybody! I want to customize the title of my form but I don't know if there a way to use an image instead of a text for the title of a Lwuit Form. Also I am using TextArea with setUIID("Label") to have multinline Label. But is there any support for..."

The new java.net Poll asks What do you think about closures in JDK 7? The poll will run through Thursday.

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobile Podcast 90: Augmented Reality: Excerpts from the JavaOne 2009 Augmented Reality session with Kenneth Andersson and Erik Hellman of Sony Ericsson.

Current and upcoming Java Events:

November 26: JavaEdge '09, Israeli Conference for Java Technologies
December 1-4: 2009 JSF Summit
December 1-4: 2009 Rich Web Experience
December 3: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Melbourne
December 8: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Sydney
December 10: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Auckland
December 11-12: 4th IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology, Pune, India
January 15: Spring Grails Asia 2010
March 17-19: TheServerSide Java Symposium 2010

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media

Java Card 3.0 Connected Edition: Full-Featured "Flat" Java

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:12:29 -0800

Terrence Barr highlights the Java Card 3.0 Connected Edition in this week's java.net Spotlight:

Java Card 3.0 was released a couple of months ago - and the second update (version 3.0.2) is scheduled for December. If you haven't paid much attention to Java on smart cards because you thought it's not "real" Java - well, look again.

Terrence points out that the limitations in Java Card 2 are in part related to the fact that Java Card 2.0 came out about 10 years ago. If you think of how much has changed in mobile technology in the past ten years, it feels like 10 years ago was the age of the dinosaurs.

And so, it makes sense that there is a lot of change between Java Card 2 and Java Card 3.0. Actually, the Java Card version numbering / edition naming is a bit confusing at this point. For Java Card 3.0, there is a "Classic Edition" and a "Connected Edition." Even when I first saw this several months ago, when Java Card 3.0 was announced, I considered it confusing. Java Card 3.0 "Classic Edition" is really a maintenance release of Java Card 2. So, why are they calling it Version 3.0 instead of calling it Version 2.something (since it's backward compatible with Version 2.2.2)? Sounds like the marketing department's idea, no?

Anyway, it's the Java Card 3.0 Connected Edition that includes all the big enhancements. Terrence calls this edition:

the dramatically enhanced next generation of Java Card technology. The Connected Edition contains a new architecture that enables developers to integrate smart cards within IP networks and web services architectures. It supports extended Java Card applets and servlets to allow for these new capabilities in addition to also supporting classic Java Card applets.

Highlights of the Connected Edition:

JDK 6 compatible VM
Full Java language support
Rich APIs
Three application models and two library models
Servlet Container with Servlet 2.5 support
Size still measured in KBytes
Netbeans plug-in for easy development

See Terrence's post and the Java Card site for the details. There's also a new Java Card project on Kenai.

In Java Today, Java Champion Jim Weaver posted The JavaFX How2 Compendium:

I'd like to make sure that you know about a great new JavaFX resource that Maya Venkatraman, Scott Hommel and others have been working on. This resource, located on the JavaFX.com site, is called the JavaFX How-To's (although I like to call it the JavaFX How2 Compendium because it is a concise, yet comprehensive compilation of how to get things done in JavaFX)...

Geerjan Wielenga posted pics and info about his talk on Lookup as OSGi Service Registry at Devoxx 2009:

Picture of Toni and me at Devoxx, talking about Lookup as an OSGi service registry, which is available from Kenai (here). More pics here: http://picasaweb.google.com/JavaPolis.com/Devoxx2009 In other news. Watch a movie I made at the conference about interesting things learned at Devoxx: http://java.dzone.com/one-thing-from-devoxx...

Josh Marinacci pointed out that Neil Bartlett will be presenting "JavaFX in Eclipse" at Eclipse DemoCamps November 2009/London:

Since April, Neil has been working for Sun Microsystems to advance their tooling for JavaFX within Eclipse. In this demo he will show the current progress and preview some up-coming features. He will also show a demo of using OSGi for runtime modularity in a JavaFX application (based on original work by Johan Vos).

In today's Weblogs, Harold Carr provides his Kynetx Impact Conference - notes - morning day 1:

9:00-9:45 AM: The Intention Economy: What Happens When Customers Get Real Power, Doc Searls, Sr. Editor of Linux Journal, Author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. http://projectvrm.com. I only caught the tailend - stuck in traffic...

Aaron Houston posted DEVOXX Day 3 - JUG BOF with James Gosling - MP3 recording:

Here is a raw recording of the JUG BOF at DEVOXX with James Gosling who was our special host. We had 56 Java User Groups represented at DEVOXX; We had 60 people in the room with James. Detailed list of topics discussed by timing marks in the MP3 recording. MP3 is 19MB to download and is 40+ min long. Here's bits and pieces, so here is the disclaimer: Please Listen to the MP3 before making any judgments/opinions on the accuracy of the transcript...

Cay Horstmann comments on the "tantalizing announcement" at DEVOXX in Closures? In Java 7???:

Today, a tantalizing announcement by Mark Reinhold about closures in Java 7 has made its way through the twittersphere. On the same day, Neal Gafter updated his closure proposal (known as the BGGA proposal, named after the initials of Bracha, Gafter, Gosling, and von der Ahé, and not at all related to the B. G. G. A. organization)...

In the Forums, salwaalkhan_vn asks How to invoke a WS that is only known at the execution time of the program?: "Hi, How to invoke a WS that is only known at the execution time of the java invocation client? Is it possible with WS Java APIs to write a client that can invoke whatever web service? A client that is independent of any particular web..."

bugs318 has a problem where App Mode won't load: "I can run Dev mode, but I cannot get either app mode or a gdm session to run. I worked around some difficulties in installation to get the software installed on Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit. I get the following output when trying to boot app mode: ..."

rapiz needs help with Bidi - Hebrew font's...: "Hi again! I've downloaded the latest code from the SVN in order to use the new Bidi feature. My application mainly targets the israeli market so Hebrew support is very important. I set the RTL flag and so far the RTL alignment..."

The new java.net Poll asks What do you think about closures in JDK 7? The poll will run through Thursday.

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobile Podcast 90: Augmented Reality: Excerpts from the JavaOne 2009 Augmented Reality session with Kenneth Andersson and Erik Hellman of Sony Ericsson.

Current and upcoming Java Events:

November 26: JavaEdge '09, Israeli Conference for Java Technologies
December 1-4: 2009 JSF Summit
December 1-4: 2009 Rich Web Experience
December 3: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Melbourne
December 8: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Sydney
December 10: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Auckland
December 11-12: 4th IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology, Pune, India
January 15: Spring Grails Asia 2010
March 17-19: TheServerSide Java Symposium 2010

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media

Hard times for JavaFX?

George Lawton@nospam.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:04:46 -0800

Steve Anglin said that RIMs decision to go with Adobe might just spell the end of JavaFX as a viable mobile platform. For many, the framework showed promise for developing GUIs on mobile devices, but it has gained little ground while competitors flood the field.

LogDigger Server 1.0 Released

Martin Wertheimer@nospam.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:03:18 -0800

LogDigger Server 1.0 collects your servers logs, tracks application usage and offers fast bug reporting to an external issue tracker.

JavATE 0.4 The domain driven framework

Andrea Mattioli@nospam.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:25:33 -0800

JavATE 0.4 has been released.It is a set of Java libraries that enables application development using the domain driven methodology.

Registration for TheServerSide Java Symposium Las Vegas now open

Bree Matturro@nospam.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:59:07 -0800

Register now for the TheServerSide Java Symposium Las Vegas taking place in March, 2010. Visit the event website to register and for more information.

Poll Result: Impact if Java User Groups Is Substantial

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:17:44 -0800

This past week's poll suggests that Java User Groups have a substantial impact and play an important organizational role within the Java developer community. A total of 293 votes were cast in the poll. Here are the exact question and the results:

Do you belong to a Java User Group?

22% (65 votes) - Yes, and I actively participate

26% (75 votes) - Yes

5% (15 votes) - No, but I sometimes attend JUG-related events

3% (10 votes) - No, but I follow JUG-related news

12% (35 votes) - No, there is no local JUG where I live

31% (90 votes) - No

1% (3 votes) - Other

Among those who chose to vote in the non-scientific survey, 56% either belong to a Java User Group, attend JUG events, or follow JUG-related news. Among the people who stated they do not belong to a JUG, about a quarter have no local JUG they can participate in where they live.

Almost a third of voters selected the "No" option, which implies that they could participate in a Java User Group, but currently choose not to do so. That's a fairly low fraction, in my view.

The poll elicited four comments. rdelaplante and jwenting commented that the JUGs in their areas have too many commercial presentations by companies and vendors. rdelaplante said:

I think my local JUG should be renamed to SUG (Spring Users Group) since we've recently had 3 presentations from SpringSource, and some of the other vendors that give us their sales pitch focus on Spring too like GigaSpaces. Why isn't Sun out here pitching GlassFish and Java EE 6? I guess it can be challenging for JUG leaders to find a constant stream of speakers, and companies like SpringSource are eager to take full advantage of the opportunity to give their sales pitches in every major city.

jwenting commented: "From what I've seen around here the JUG(s???) seem mostly to exist for the purpose of companies presenting whitepapers and giving commercial presentations of products. Not very useful at all."

To these comments, JUG co-leader fabriziogiudici responded:

Co-leading a JUG and attending some meetings from others, I can say I've never seen any whitepaper, any commercial presentation or any speech by a big company representative - with the exception of some specific events (e.g. the IDE shootout or the Application Server shootout) where representative from the various producers were invited - in any case, the talks were exclusively technical. JUG Roma is the one capable in Italy to organize the largest single-day gatherings (1200+ attendants) and, again, no white papers or commercial stuff at all. In normal cases, speeches are mostly held by JUG member themselves and arguments decided by means of the mailing list - usually they are the guy's direct experience with a technology, which also gives good hints for a discussion. I wonder whether there are big differences in how JUGs are managed in various parts of the world.

Meanwhile, ipsi finds "very little promotion of the local JUG":

I'm vaguely aware that it exists, but there's very little promotion of it, and I had to do a Google Search to find the webpage. I don't think it was mentioned to me at all during my University studies (which mainly focused around Java). The country-wide discussion list seems to have ~120 members, which is pretty pitiful.

So, it seems like the size of the Java User Group matters a lot, along with the location; and probably there are also some differences in management. A big JUG where enough members live nearby probably has a much easier time with having technical presentations by the members themselves. Whereas, smaller JUGs, or JUGs in regions that are not all that metropolitan, will have fewer attendees at the JUG meetings. And, a smaller pool of active members translates into a smaller pool of potential presentations from the members themselves. So, in order to have something interesting and at least somewhat relevant, vendors are called upon. Surely some vendors are more adept at presenting a genuine technical talk, while others will present mostly their standard marketing spiel.

New poll: closures in Java 7

The new java.net poll asks What do you think about closures in JDK 7? If you've followed the DEVOXX news, you'll have heard about the surprising and tantalizing coin flip decision that was revealed in Mark Reinhold's presentation at the conference.

In Java Today, Bill Venners interviews Stephen Colebourne in Java To Get Closures in JDK 7:

At the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium, Sun's Mark Reinhold announced that closures would be added to Java in JDK 7. In this interview, Stephen Colebourne, coauthor of the FCM closures proposal, gives his perspective on this surprise announcement.

One year ago, Mark Reinhold, Principal Engineer at Sun Microsystems, announced At the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium that the next major release of Java, JDK 7, would not include closures. At the same conference this year, however, Reinhold announced in a surprise turn around the Java would be getting closures after all in JDK 7. I sat down with Stephen Colebourne, project lead of joda.org and coauthor of the FCM closures proposal, to discuss his perspective on the reason for this change of plans...

Joe Darcy wrote about Project Coin: Milestone 5 Language Features in NetBeans:

To go along with the language changes available in JDK 7 milestone 5, the NetBeans team has created a developer build of NetBeans supporting the same set of language changes, including improved integer literals, the diamond operator, and strings in switch. In addition to just accepting the new syntax, the NetBeans build has some deeper support too. For example, when auto-completing on a constructor with type arguments, the diamond operator is offered as a completion...

Java Champion Stephen Chin has posted his Devoxx University Slides:

My Devoxx university session yesterday was packed, which was awesome! It was 3 hours of hard-core JavaFX knowledge, and almost everyone stayed for the duration. Aaron Houston got a great shot of the venue (more on the Java Champions site). I posted my slides on SlideShare, so check it out when you get a chance. Special thanks to my co-authors, Jim, Weiqi, and Dean for help with the content.

In today's Weblogs, Harold Carr provides his Kynetx Impact Conference - notes - morning day 1:

9:00-9:45 AM: The Intention Economy: What Happens When Customers Get Real Power, Doc Searls, Sr. Editor of Linux Journal, Author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. http://projectvrm.com. I only caught the tailend - stuck in traffic...

Aaron Houston posted DEVOXX Day 3 - JUG BOF with James Gosling - MP3 recording:

Here is a raw recording of the JUG BOF at DEVOXX with James Gosling who was our special host. We had 56 Java User Groups represented at DEVOXX; We had 60 people in the room with James. Detailed list of topics discussed by timing marks in the MP3 recording. MP3 is 19MB to download and is 40+ min long. Here's bits and pieces, so here is the disclaimer: Please Listen to the MP3 before making any judgments/opinions on the accuracy of the transcript...

Cay Horstmann comments on the "tantalizing announcement" at DEVOXX in Closures? In Java 7???:

Today, a tantalizing announcement by Mark Reinhold about closures in Java 7 has made its way through the twittersphere. On the same day, Neal Gafter updated his closure proposal (known as the BGGA proposal, named after the initials of Bracha, Gafter, Gosling, and von der Ahé, and not at all related to the B. G. G. A. organization)...

In the Forums, shankar_vn wonders about a Circle Layout in LWUIT: "Hi all, I know there is no Circle layout, but does any one tried placing some 'n' number of images in a circle a format. Something like this: (Ignore the dots)..."

bernard_horan announces Clickable Link now in stable modules: "fyi I've just moved clickable link into the stable modules, and it will now be included by default in the list of capabilities. If you had previously been using/working with clickable link from the unstable modules, please update..."

hellofadude is getting an Unknown file type error (.jsp file): "Hi Im running windows vista on an M1330 (dell) with netbeans/glassfish bundle. Netbeans 6.5 and glassfish v2.1. when I try to run the guessNumber examble, I get a system error saying unknown file type with options to download from..."

Our current Spotlight is Josh Marinacci's new JavaFX open source Project MaiTai: "What is MaiTai? MaiTai is an open source tool for building interactive artwork. You create interesting sketches by wiring different blocks together with lines. There are blocks to produce graphics, process mouse and keyboard inputs, connect to webservices, and perform complex graphical transformations. The end result is limited only by your imagination. MaiTai can export a Java Webstart application or a QuickTime movie..."

The new java.net Poll asks What do you think about closures in JDK 7? The poll will run through next Thursday.

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobile Podcast 90: Augmented Reality: Excerpts from the JavaOne 2009 Augmented Reality session with Kenneth Andersson and Erik Hellman of Sony Ericsson.

Current and upcoming Java Events:

November 16-20: Java Power Tools - Wellington
November 20-22: 2009 Rocky Mountain Software Symposium: Fall Edition
November 26: JavaEdge '09, Israeli Conference for Java Technologies
December 1-4: 2009 JSF Summit
December 1-4: 2009 Rich Web Experience
December 3: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Melbourne
December 8: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Sydney
December 10: Testing and TDD for Java Developers - Auckland
December 11-12: 4th IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology, Pune, India
January 15: Spring Grails Asia 2010
March 17-19: TheServerSide Java Symposium 2010

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media

Mule Data Integrator released for graphical data transformation

Mahau Ma@nospam.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:27:15 -0800

One of the biggest challenges in implementing SOA is figuring out how to handle the data. Data can exist in relational databases and in various file formats. To address the issue, MuleSoft has released Mule Data Integrator. It includes an Eclipse-based designer that is fully integrated with Mule IDE.

DEVOXX Surprise: Out of Nowhere, Closures in JDK 7!

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:29:54 -0800

Conferences typically include some surprise announcements, usually by corporate sponsors of the conference. But a great many developers were astonished by the unexpected news from DEVOXX '09 that JDK 7 will include closures. Here's an image (resized smaller) that I found in Alex Miller's post Closures after all?

Mark Reinhold at Devoxx: Closures in JDK 7

Alex isn't at DEVOXX, but I think he speaks for a great many developers in his opening commentary:

I can't say what to make of that really. For years Sun has been saying that there is no consensus on closures and delayed the formation of a JSR or expert group on the subject despite having three proposals, all with prototypes.

Fabrizio Giudici is appalled by the apparent coin flip nature of the emergence of closure in JDK 7:

after a few weeks that the final word of Java 7 had been said with Project Coin (the famous final five or so), somebody changed his mind all of a sudden. What kind of decisional process is this?

Fabrizio goes on to say "I fear Java 7 could be the most chaotical Java release ever..."

Remi Forax considers Lite closure in JDK 7 to be good news, but he hopes "such closure will be on top of JSR 292 method handle."

Geertjan Wielenga noted (and wondered):

A second interesting, yet odd, thing was the surprise announcement out of nowhere that JDK 7 is going to have closures after all. Great news and maybe best if no one asks too many questions about how that process ended up throwing up this solution! First, we have a whole bunch of proposals, all of which get lukewarm reception. Then, suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, we have "simple closures". (I wonder if any of the existing proposals are called "complex closures". Isn't simplicity the whole purpose of closures in the first place?) OK, the closures will be simple in the sense that there will be no non-local return, no control statements, and no access to non-final variables. Still, how was that decision made?

As for me -- I see people whose expertise I respect on both sides of the issue. With respect to the language, I find closures to be acceptable as a programing option. But, with respect to development of the type I've done throughout most of my career, I'd consider the implementation of closures in high-availability operational systems overall a negative. Why? Because I believe that this type of programming makes code more complex to the uninitiated than it has to be. It may simplify things for the original developer, but when that person departs the organization, and someone else has to modify or enhance that code -- that becomes a real problem!

I've worked for a long time in an environment where we're building back-end infrastructure that has to be rock-solid and enduring. The development team historically has had a greater turnover than the software. When Joe, Alexei, Marina, and now Peter have worked on the same piece of code, it's problemmatic if the code is not readily understandable. I as manager have a budget for each needed mod or enhancement.

In all of my experience working in languages where, in essence, functions can be passed as arguments -- I've found that the code is difficult to work with once a new developer receives the assignment to maintain or enhance the code. This is a loss of efficiency -- not something most companies can afford during our present (or any?) economic times.

I can see how making closures available can make development more efficient during the design and initial implementation phase for new projects. But, overall, I think for a language like Java which has enormous amounts of operational high-end infrastructural code already in existence, the formal addition of closures poses a danger. The original developers of the legacy code may have moved on. What if a new developer improperly wraps a legacy function, effectively making it a closure, to simplify the task at hand -- might that create potential new security risks? In addition, of course, to making the code difficult to understand for the novice developer who takes over the maintenance of that code 18 months from now, after our clever closure function developer has moved on...

I suppose that making closures more formally and readily possible in Java isn't necessarily a problem. You can say it's just another programming option. We all like more "options" when we go shopping, right? But, in the back-end high-availability operational infrastructure realm that I work in (which, I think, is clearly the most important realm, since if that fails, all client apps are useless), as development manager and architect in this environment, I'll demand that my developers completely shun their use.

The bigger question people are asking right now, though, is: how did closures suddenly become a to-be-implemented part of JDK 7? Where was the community process in this? Where was the closing open debate? This announcement at DEVOXX surprised pretty much everyone!

In Java Today, Alex Miller comments on the surprise JDK 7 announcement at Devoxx, in Closures after all?

Apparently Mark Reinhold announced that closures would be added to JDK 7 at Devoxx today... I can't say what to make of that really. For years Sun has been saying that there is no consensus on closures and delayed the formation of a JSR or expert group on the subject despite having three proposals, all with prototypes. Neal Gafter's BGGA closures proposal is easily the most fully baked and has a fairly complete prototype and all of the necessary specification changes. I would have to guess that Mark's announcement must be based primarily off the ideas in Neal's work, but we'll know more soon I guess...

Danny Coward posted Devoxx 09: JDK 7, Java EE 6, JavaFX, Java Store and more:

The Janitor is here at Devoxx, just down the road from Neelie Kroes ! Her influence was on show at the Oracle keynote, which began with a legal disclaimer saying something about forward looking statements about products not being indicative of anything. One has to be sympathetic as the commission's wheels grind on, but it was a bit like hearing that the tenor has a sore throat before the opera starts. Happily, Roberto and Ludo were more melodious, announcing the imminent December 10th release date for Java EE 6 and Glassfish v3 and a demo of deploy-on-save in Eclipse (it could equally have been in NetBeans), re-deploying deployment descriptor-free servlets and EJBs to Glassfish v3 in about a second. Adobe gave an engaging keynote, and although the Janitor didn't love the smell of all the multistep automagical conversion to massage an app developed in the flash tool into something allowed to run on the iPhone (pretty sure Apple doesn't either), the image-to-widget tool in Adobe Catalyst demoed very well. Something to think about for the JavaFX Production Suite...

Geerjan Wielenga posted his notes on Devoxx Day 3: Conference Day 1:

The conference proper started today. Up until now, there had been a lot of very long sessions, lasting 3 hours or so, i.e., university sessions. Now, not only did the sessions become shorter (i.e., more presentation-like and less lecture-like), but several big guns from the world of programming (e.g., James Gosling, as well as Oracle guys) turned up.

Before continuing, let me reveal that I am the Devoxx conference for one reason only: the El-Menoufiya JUG in Egypt gave me their ticket, since none of their members could make it. Hamada Zahera and the rest of the guys there: you rock and I am honored to be an honorary Egyptian. (Here's a pic of the whole group, me included.) ...

In today's Weblogs, Fabrizio Giudici finds that Now I've understood the meaning of "coin" in Project Coin:

It seems that at Devoxx it has been announced that closures will make their way in Java 7, after all. I don't want to discuss whether it's a good or a bad thing (you know I think it's bad). I'm only appalled that after a few weeks that the final word of Java 7 had been said with Project Coin (the famous final five or so), somebody changed his mind all of a sudden. What kind of decisional process is this? Ah, I got it - it's tossing a coin, now I get where the project name came from. I fear Java 7 could be the most chaotical Java release ever...

Remi Forax comments on Lite closure in JDK7:

It seems that "lite" closure will be in JDK7. I really don't care about the surface syntax but I hope that the runtime of such closure will be on top of JSR 292 method handle...

Felipe Gaucho is Testing PDF files with Canoo Webtest and Maven2:

This week I received one of that lovely and tricky tasks: to learn Canoo webtest, test it and prove its usefulness to the project in three days - convincing the managers that it should be part of the project. The goal of the project is to produce a finance report with ~200 pages and that report should be validated through a zero-errors acceptance tests. Several tools were considered, including Selenium and others, but Canoo was choosen due to its PDF test features...

In the Forums, ciaodiego wonders about import world wfs from wonderland 0.4 to 0.5: "hi, i've create a world wfs in wonderland 0.4 called universita-wfs.
how i can import the old word in wonderland 0.5? there is a tutorial? ..."

treeniap has a Need to change LWUIT Designer screen size: "Hi, I've got LWUIT the lwuit resource editor to act as a kind of wsywig layout editor for my designers. It works great but i really need to change the default resolutions available in the theme preview. How can I add screen sizes..."

bernard_horan posted Simplified Chinese Locale... please test: "Thanks to Qingjiang Yuan, we now have a Simplified Chinese locale (zh_CN). So, if you are a Chinese-speaking developer currently using one of the other Locales, please take a moment to switch to the new Locale and test it out. Let us know of any issues..."

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