| Tuesday, February 8, 2005 |
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| A Developer's Perspective |
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Rick Ross is the founder of Javalobby. He is a frequent speaker at Java-related events and a well-known advocate for Java developer interests.. |
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Yours Could Be The Deciding Vote at JCP
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This past weekend Dr. Janet Newman, a learned woman with vast knowledge of the world of ideas and philosophy, told me about a 20th century German political philosopher named Hannah Arendt. More precisely, she spoke about Arendt's concept that "power arises when groups of people act in concert." Arendt had faced totalitarianism first hand, so her thoughts on political nature and justice were tempered by a clear vision of what had gone gravely wrong before and during WWII. She knew from experience what many of us only know in theory.
Speaking only for myself (although I know some of you will agree) Java technology has always offered the opposite of totalitarianism, with a focus on community development that is a refreshing alternative to the proprietary and monopolistic technology which dominated the software world when Java was introduced. Sun deserves great credit for its efforts to bring meaningful community into the guidance and evolution of a major technology platform. The Java Community Process (JCP) is one of the most innovative and adaptive tools I have ever seen a corporation devise to allow general public participation in the management of a core technology in which it is deeply invested. The JCP isn't perfect and has numerous critics, as any review of Java websites and blogs will quickly prove, but I still feel it has a great deal of merit and potential.
Untapped potential. Seriously untapped potential. Potential which is so dramatically under used that few of us have any business criticizing the JCP at all. In fact, our reluctance, as a community, to participate actively in the JCP verges on total abdication. This must change.
I was shocked and dismayed when I viewed the results of the most recent JCP Executive Committee elections and saw that only 221 votes were cast (29.3% of 755 total eligible.) A mere 62 votes or so had elected Google to the JCP Executive Committee, and only 40 votes was sufficient to elect JBoss to that same committee! The JCP EC is as close as anything in the world comes to the central governing body for the ongoing evolution of the Java platform. It is, in effect, Java's equivalent of the United Nations Security Council. JCP EC decisions affect all of us who use and depend upon Java technology for business, research, pleasure and education. How is it possible that 40-60 votes is all it takes to get someone elected to this vital group? It certainly is not the case that Sun has built obstructions into the process that prevent any of us from participating. On the contrary, Sun has actually spent a good deal of marketing money urging developers to join and become active participants. Here are some key facts:
- Individual JCP membership is FREE
- Individual JCP members are entitled to vote
- Individual JCP members can run for election
- Individual JCP members can view and comment on JSRs
- JCP members are not obligated to attend any meetings
"Power arises when groups of people act in concert." This is an idea whose time has come for the Java developer community - at least I sincerely hope so.
GO JOIN THE JCP RIGHT NOW! Do not wait. Do not waste this privilege you have to participate in shaping and guiding Java's future. It is a unique opportunity, and we should collectively view it as a responsibility. Let's make individual JCP memberships a top priority for anyone who considers himself or herself a member of the Java developer community. It is, after all, the Java COMMUNITY Process! Garnering only 221 votes from this entire community of millions of developers is a shameful disgrace. If Sun's estimate of three million Java developers is correct, then this represents just one vote for every 13,500 developers - a sadly incredible statistic. Join the JCP for free today and help ensure that this never happens again.
Joining as an individual member is slightly tedious, but it shouldn't take you very long. All you have to do is download, print, sign & fax the Java Specification Participation agreement (JSPA) as well as Exhibit B of the Individual Expert Participation Agreement (IEPA.) The JSPA is an 11-page PDF document which may seem too filled with legalese for some of you, but it has been reviewed and accepted by many individuals and corporations who would never cede to Sun any important rights that would prevent them from competing actively in the Java marketplace. I have personally read, considered and accepted the document, and I will be happy to help obtain clarifications about any sincere problem spots you find in it. I'm not saying I will become involved in anyone's personal vendetta or quarrel with the JCP, but I'll gladly try to assist those who need to understand specific issues in the JSPA text in order to decide whether to accept it.
Exhibit B of the IEPA may be irrelevant for many of you joining the JCP as individuals, unless your relationship with your employer (presuming you have one) requires you to seek their approval for your personal acts as an individual. Regardless, it has somehow been determined that Exhibit B is required for membership, so my suggestion is to complete the agreement as "not applicable" and as "self" the same way I did. You can see a sample online here, and we're trying to work with Sun's JCP office to ensure that this approach will be acceptable. If you do have an employment relationship in which such a waiver would be required, then you should go ahead and obtain the waiver. I know that's a burden, but it's a small price for having a material voice and a vote in the JCP.
The 2005 JCP Executive Committee elections will be held online from October 4-31. I hope our community will proudly show itself to be active and responsible by having as many developers as possible cast their votes this time. If we act in concert, then the Java developer community can have a powerful role in the organization guiding Java into its bright future.
Please do your part. Join the JCP for free right now and vote conscientiously at every opportunity. As I have always said, your individual participation can make all the difference. Fewer than 10 votes would have changed the outcome of this year's JCP Executive Committee election. One of those votes could be yours!
Until next time,
Rick Ross
rick@javalobby.org
AIM or Yahoo Messenger: RickRossJL
PS - Please feel free to join me in discussing this issue at Javalobby. |
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Matthew Schmidt
is the man behind the scenes at Javalobby. If you have questions
or concerns, feel free to email him at matt@javalobby.org. |
Get JetBrains IntelliJ For Free!
Today was a great day for IDEA fans who work on Open Source projects. JetBrains (the creators of IntelliJ IDEA) announced that they would give a free one year license (including upgrades) for developers who can verify that they have contributed to an active OS project.
I think this is a great way for JetBrains to create more interesting in their most excellent IDE. They are in an intense competition with Eclipse and NetBeans right now who are offering a very compelling alternative for free and I hope that this turns the tide a little in JetBrains favor.
JavaPolis 2004 Online Updated
As most of you know, at the beginning of the year we deployed the first half of the JavaPolis conference online at Javalobby, completely free for Javalobby members. This week, we're proud to announce that the content has been updated with over 10 more great presentations. Some of the great new content includes presentations on Eclipse, JBoss Cache, NetBeans 4.0, Making More Money, and many, many more. In addition, we've also added a "View this in Full Screen Mode" feature above each video. This will give you the presentations in a format that is much closer to their original size should the demos be too small. The feedback about JavaPolis 2004 Online has been great thus far and we're looking forward to deploying the next few presentations. Check out the new ones that we've deployed this week and stay tuned!
Why is SSL such a pain in the…
Making sure that your web application is secure is an important part of any developer's job and part of making sure that you don't let the bad people snoop on your data is using SSL for your connections. Unfortunately, sometimes its not as easy as we may like. To enable SSL on your appserver, you generally need to add a connector (or something similar) that listens on an SSL port and then you need to specify a keystore that holds your security certificate. This generally works 'ok' if you're only looking to provide secure connections through the web browser. More problems arise if you're trying to connect over secure sockets to something like a Hessian service. My main issue is that without a trusted certificate (which we don't have just yet), Java in JDK 1.5 won't let us connect from any host other than the host that we put into the certificate on the server. While I can understand the logic behind this, it's frustrating that I'm only able to test from a local client and not another client in my Lan. Would we be able to get around this by generating a key with OpenSSL on the server and adding it to our truststore in the client? Any help you guys can provide would be much appreciated.
Java Windows - Always on Top
This weekend, I was working on some client work and I added visual notifications to my application. After messing with Windows specific balloon notifications, I finally settled on the PerkUp library. PerkUp is a nifty little library that lets you do sliding notifications ala Thunderbird in your Java applications. Unfortunately, it required JDK 1.5 which caused problems as I'm trying to reach OSX as well as Windows and Linux. Fortunately, PerkUp is open source and I was able to rip out the small piece that required JDK 1.5 in the main library - a call to window.alwaysOnTop(). It’s a useful function no doubt and one that I'm finding out is very hard to find in a cross-platform way for JDK 1.4. My question to the Javalobby members is this - have you solved this problem before? How do you make sure that other windows in your operating system don't cover a specific window? One brute force method I can think of would be to have a thread that sits and calls toFront() on the window every few milliseconds. If you can think of better solutions, please let me know!
FishEye - CVSWeb on Steroids
To end this week, I want to give a quick mention to a tool that we just started using this last week at Javalobby HQ, Cenqua's Fisheye. As your team grows, it becomes more and more useful to have quick an easy visual access to what was checked in and how the files changed. Fisheye provides an awesome view of your CVS repository, showing you colored diffs, letting you search all your files and changes, view the branches in your CVS and even gives you an RSS feed of recent changes. We've only been using it for a few days, but I've been impressed with what I've seen so far. All in all, FishEye is very well done and my only complaint is that you can't deploy it as a WAR file in an existing server. Check it out, and give them some feedback before they hit their 1.0 release.
Until Next Time,
Matthew Schmidt
matt@javalobby.org
Yahoo IM: mattschmidtjl
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Erik C. Thauvin maintains a blog, as well as one of the web's first and most popular linkblogs, which he updates daily with the latest Java and technology news. |
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A recap of
some of the most popular and active Javalobby.org
discussions this week. |
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Is Groovy losing the groove?
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A series of blogs report that groovy is not only in serious risk of being canned as a JSR, but the language itself is also in trouble.
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Full Discussion
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Posted By: Sebastian Ferreyra - (26 Replies)
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No Duplication of Effort: 100% Desirable?
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Often we read about what a waste of time it is to reinvent the wheel once more. But even real wheels, although round, come in many models themselves, and many times these are fully redesinged.
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Full Discussion
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Posted By: Sebastian Ferreyra - (16 Replies)
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Product and
service announcements for Java developers. |
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Perspective
