Javalobby To Help Provider of Free J2EE Hosting
(I'd like to welcome BEA as a new sponsor of the Javalobby News this week. Clicking this link and registering for the Java tools they want to give you is a fine way support your Javalobby and keep it always free. Thanks for helping.)

It made me sad this morning to read about the ending of the free J2EE hosting service (which I had not previously heard of) provided by mycgiserver.com to more than 26,000 people during the past four years. I have long believed that our community needs a convenient place for potential developers to gain hands-on experience with servlets, Java Server Pages, and other Java server side technologies. Not everyone has their own servers or access to accounts on someone else's, and certainly not everyone has the time and expertise required to make a servlet container and database work in order to get a simple web application online. The sense of achievement one gets from doing this for the first time is meaningful and can inspire a new Java developer to want to learn more.

Horst Reiterer, who founded the mycgiserver.com project and has put himself into some financial difficulty in order to personally cover its mounting costs, recently posted an appeal for support. I couldn't help noticing with some regret that Sun had refused to help his project in any way. Mycgiserver.com is a tremendous on-ramp to server-side Java for many developers. In my opinion, it would be wrong for Java's real advocacy community, Javalobby.org , not to step up to the plate and assist this struggling service through its moment of difficulty. Last year, when the largest Java-focused blogging network was at risk, we were lucky to be able to help it stay online and achieve stability. Since then JRoller.com has grown by over 500% and has become an even more outstanding resource for Java developers. Thanks to your continued support Javalobby may now be able to help this free J2EE hosting service in a similar way. When we say Javalobby is " 100% Pro Developer " we really mean it, so I hope I can safely speak for all of us when I thank Horst for keeping his highly proactive and Java-positive service alive. You have our full support, Horst, and Java developers really do care! (Pssst, please send him a note!)

Javalobby has immediately acquired new server resources for Horst to use, and as soon as technical challenges can be addressed the 100% free "mycgiserver.com" project will be back in action as the newest member of the Javalobby network. I hope that many of you will enjoy and benefit from it.
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Eclipse Passes A Major Milestone
I'd like to congratulate IBM and all the other organizations and individuals who have contributed so much to the growing success of Eclipse . The consortium is about to pass a major milestone as it separates from its corporate parent and benefactor. I have been pleased and fascinated to watch the ever-successful IBM come to recognize the valuable synergies that are possible in its complex relationship with the developer community. In Eclipse they initiated something that benefits us all, supported it through its youth, and now that it has grown up sufficiently they have the wisdom that all caring parents should have and are allowing it to become independent. My oldest daughter, Natalie, turns twenty in just about ten days, and my second daughter, Lizzy, turns sixteen on Thursday. You can believe me when I say that I understand the challenges a parent faces. Without ever losing focus on what is good for its shareholders, IBM has recognized that the time is right to let its grown child take control of its own destiny, and I have no doubt it will continue to be a formidable success. What interesting times we are fortunate to live in, and I cannot help wondering whether there's something here for Java's parent to learn from IBM's example?
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Innoopract Offers Visual Approach To Creating Web UI's
Matt and I had a good conversation this week with Innoopract founder and president, Jochen Krause, and managing director, Eric von der Heiden. The new Innoopract W4T plug-in for Eclipse provides a potent method for the visual development of web interfaces. Jochen describes the company's "WWW Windowing Toolkit" as a set of web widgets that provides an extensible api similar to the Java AWT. These widgets have state, use listeners and support an event-driven model that will be comfortable and familiar to most Java developers. He told us that programmers don't have to worry about the foibles and idiosyncrasies of various browsers because the rendering kits in the Innoopract runtime layer already take care of that. It works with any Servlet 2.3 container, and there's a free version available for developers which is limited only in the number of objects you can create with it. Many will wonder how this fits together with the upcoming Java Server Faces framework, and Jochen made clear that his team is keenly waiting to make W4T work smoothly with JSF. Eric added that this technology is not only for experienced web developers, but also (particularly with the highly interactive Eclipse plug-in) that it will present opportunities for people who are currently comfortable with Visual Basic. Check out this 2-minute video and you'll see why.
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The Master of Linkblogging
I had some truly exciting conversations this week with my new friend, Erik Thauvin, whose The Truth Is Out There blog is one of my Java favorite reads every day. Erik is a master of an art called "linkblogging", in which he very briefly captures interesting items from over 1600 different sources and pushes them several times per day to his blog. You'll quickly get a sense of how broad his view is if you visit his site a few times. He and I spent several hours on the phone hashing out a design to improve the process and server tools for managing such a linkblog, and I hope we'll be able to put together a service that you can all use to share your perspectives on what is interesting on the Wild Wide Web. There's so much more out there than Javalobby - LOL! Stay tuned for more developments.
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Until next week,
Rick Ross
rick@javalobby.org
AIM or Yahoo Messenger: RickRossJL

PS - In case you've been needing a new .NET resource, TheServerSide has just opened one . For those who have asked, it'll be a cold day in hell before Javalobby ever does.
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A View From the Front

Balancing power with simplicity
It seems that each day we hear of a new web framework that springs out of the ground claiming to make web-side application development easier than with all the rest. Each one promises to bring true MVC to the web tier along with a plethora of other acronyms such as IoC and others. On Javalobby, there has been a discussion on the merits of Tapestry , certainly no “Johnny Come Lately” to the web application framework space, in comparison with the new “standard” from Sun, Java Server Faces. With the introduction of JSF, will there be a place for these other framework that claim to provide MVC? It seems to me that a space that is already crowded will only become more crowded as Sun's own framework will likely come packaged in the next version of Java Enterprise Edition. Fortunately, I think there remains a place for nearly all these existing frameworks. Each one provides something unique to the space and all of them go for simplicity while providing power at the same time. The simplicity comes from the various ways of configuring and developing them. Using simple XML files and JSP tags, you can get things accomplished with each of these frameworks in short order. According to the thread on Javalobby, this is one of the primary differences between JSF and Tapestry. With JSF, apparently you need the tools provided by Sun (Project Rave) to really be productive. So what framework do you use? Do you plan to use JSF when it becomes more mainstream? I would love to hear what everyone is using, so let me know !

Growing by leaps and bounds
Sometimes it's a great feeling when you see that your hard work has paid off. Day in and day out the team at Javalobby works hard to make changes (some you see, some you don't) that hopefully help to improve the “Javalobby Experience.” Each week, we get tons of emails from various website visitors and newsletter subscribers thanking us for the hard work that we put in to provide Javalobby to the masses. This past week, we saw another sign that we're making the right changes: Javalobby membership increased by nearly 1000 new members – the largest single week increase without us offering any specials. We love to see the number of members increase because the more members we have, the greater our collective voice will be. As Javalobby grows, so will its influence in the Java community. Maybe its time we had some Javalobby membership cards designed so we feel like a real organization?

Java in the embedded space
One of the areas of research that has always interested me is using Java in the embedded space. As most people in the embedded world know, Assembly, C, and Basic seem to rule. What Java chips that do exist are generally priced way too high to be useful in smallish projects. In addition, these chips often are running Java 1.1 or some subset of Java that leaves out some of the most interesting innovations in the Java space that have come with Java 2. Fortunately, one company is trying to prove that Java is useful in the embedded consumer space. Their HomePod product uses Java 1.3 to play the music you have stored on your PCs wirelessly anywhere in your house. One blogger even described how he was easily able to change the interface to correct what he felt was a defect. I would love to see Java be more of a player in this space. The embedded consumer market is huge, but due to the cost of getting Java to run on normal embedded hardware or using a Java chip, we are often kept out the market. So I put the question to our readers: can Java be used effectively in the embedded space? Are there other cool Java devices out there (please not the Java-powered phones)? Let me know what you think.

'Till Next Time,
Matthew Schmidt
matt@javalobby.org

I was really delighted the other day when I asked my 7 year-old daughter, Lucy, if she'd like to learn how to program? Her immediate answer was a resounding, "yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!" with the enthusiasm that comes so easily for the very young. She's been actively using computers since before she could speak, so it's no real surprise that she'd like to learn more about how to make them function.

I began to think about how one would start teaching a motivated and intelligent child how to program in Java? I'd love to find a book aimed at teaching rudimentary programming concepts to schoolchildren using Java, but I don't think such a book exists. It occurs to me that I cannot be the only one who would like to have my Java advocacy achieve results in my very own home, so I decided to pose the question here.

What resources exist to help teach Java programming to younger children, and what experiences do JL members have that might help me introduce the art of programming to Lucy? Thanks in advance for your insights.

I've come to the point now where its time to start investigating scripting engines/languages. After a fairly in depth search I was only able to find three reasonably viable approaches to scripting Java. The three approaches that I will start evaluating are: Bean Scripting Framework, BeanShell 2.0, Jython. If anyone wants to chime in with their experiences with these scripting approaches or any other, insert 2 cents into slot.

Although there are many people implementing web services today, most times it is the wrong technology for the job. This blog entry provides more information about it.

What do you think? Do you think that web services are the best strategy for integration nowadays? If so, then I think you should reconsider it, really.

On his JRoller.com blog, Fred Grott challenges JDJ to cover claims about poor MIDP 2.0 performance he saw referred to on Russell Beattie's blog, which referred to a review of J2ME MIDP 2.0 devices by Steve Olechowski at his burningdoor.com blog. (Phew, the chain of blog indirections can be dizzying!)

Steve's review of Sony-Ericsson and Nokia MIDP 2.0 devices is level headed. Sony-Ericsson gets a C+ and Nokia gets a C, not too impressive IMO. Russell amplifies some of the unhappier observations with anecdotes from his own unpleasant experience, and he warns that we're headed into a new phase of write once, debug everywhere unless Sun gets its act together on compatibility testing requirements. This quote was particularly alarming to me:

"That PDF of issues from Nokia is an embarassment to them and to Sun. This is Nokia's *flagship* phone, and its Java support blows chunks."

OS News did some benchmark comparisons between Java, .Net languages and complied c/c++ code. Java performed extremely well. It's posted on slashdot as well, maybe....finally, some of the slashdot kiddies will give Java some respect. You do get tired of seeing the "hmmmm.... Java, isn't it really slow?" posts.

JCache Open Source is an OS implementation of the JSR-107 JCache API. Its aim is to provide an open source alternative to

The IBM BeepLite Networking Layer is a Java implementation of BEEP (RFC 3080, RFC 3081), a generic application protocol kernel for connection-oriented, asynchronous interactions. It supports dynamic, pluggable application protocols for peer-to-peer,

With W4T Eclipse Plug-In, Developers Script Only in Java and See What the User Sees When Creating the Presentation Layer

What is Mule?

Mule is a robust and highly scalable ESB framework. It is a light-weight, event-driven component technology that handles all the donkey work needed to set up common processing components and manages all communication with

The popular Java hosting community mycgiserver, which provided a free environment for the development and deployment of Java-based web applications to more than 26,000 users in an aim to contribute to the growth

Atlassian, the creators of JIRA, have released Confluence 1.0b3, a professional J2EE wiki designed to make it easy for a team to share information with each other. Confluence's makes knowledge management practical with simple and handy editing and site

This long overdue release adds improvements to case type creation. The case type API was simplified a bit and now we support self loops. Also new to this release is the support of XML export of the history andother minor

Cool stuff.

Would you believe it, Nasa has written software that runs on Linux, Solaris, MS, and Mac.
Guess what language they used?

(This is the first such post on Javalobby)

The RMI plugin for Eclipse and WSAD is the easiest way to automatically generate remote stubs and skeletons by invoking the RMI compiler (rmic) that comes with the Java SDK.

Jigloo enables Java Swing and SWT GUIs to be built and maintained quickly and easily with the Eclipse IDE. The full-feature version is free for non-commercial use. Jigloo creates and manages code for all the parts of the GUI as well as code to handle

I've decided to release two MIDP 2 games I have developed recently. So, if you are lucky owner of cell phone with MIDP 2 support you welcome to download the midlet suit. Just type in the HTML browser of your cell phone:

What is OrindaBuild 4.0?
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OrindaBuild™ is a utility that automatically writes Java™ code to access tables, stored procedures, packages, functions and sequences in Oracle® databases. OrindaBuild also takes files

In 1997, I did something rather stupid. I created a 32-bit Windows program to disassemble Java class files. Why not write the disassembler in Java, you ask? I was learning both Windows programming and the Java virtual machine at the time. Even though my

TrackStudio is a hierarchical Java-based issue tracking and bug tracking system. It includes per-project workflows, user role specific actions, filters, notification rules, subscriptions, access control lists, and reports. Both hierarchical

I've published a stable preview of the Forms 1.0.3.
You can download it from the file sharing section at

Coldbeans Software announced the major new release of Coldtags suite. This suite provides 160+ custom
JSP tags for common programming tasks faced by JSP developers. And now this suite includes custom tags
similar to web controls in .NET

Quartz is an open source, enterprise-class job scheduler for integration with stand-alone java applications and full-scale J2EE applications. Advanced features include clustering and participation in container

Version 1.1.3 is now available.

Summary of changes in this release:

* Embedded space support.
* Memory usage added to the stats interface.
* Debugging tool.
* Better disk utilization.

Excelsior JET is a Java VM implemented as a combination of three major components: optimizing ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler, Caching JIT compiler, and high performance runtime. It supports

Obinary updates free Java-based Enterprise-Content Management System (CMS) to include high-performance caching and server-side image resizing templates.

Two months and 10’000 downloads after the first public release of Magnolia, Obinary is proud