Java Archive

In part I of this series, you get introduced to Eclipse, the Eclipse SWT, and the JFace GUI tool kits to construct Eclipse and stand-alone rich GUIs. also introduced the basic label, text, and button GUI controls, and the composite, group, and shell container types. Part 2 shows you how to create simple Standard Widget Toolkit applications using Java technology, Eclipse, and the SWT and JFace libraries.

IBM has begun participating in open-source Java project Harmony and intends to contribute code to the initiative, according to a Big Blue executive.

The new version of Cacao called "Tomclipse" relesed. This GPL-licensed JVM uses GNU Classpath 0.16 as its class library. You can find it here and here are some screenshots. Also, JTree of GNU Classpath made good progress. Have a look here.

When it was first introduced, Sun Microsystems' Java software for cellular phones was supposed to let developers write a single program that could run on any handset. A half decade later, Sun's Java for cell phones, called the mobile information device profile, or MIDP, is used in half the world's 1.4 billion phones for downloading other bits of software. But writing a program that can run on any handset still isn't possible.

Workplace Designer is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment that gives you an easy way to use document-oriented programming without requiring a comprehensive knowledge of Java. Workplace Designer pre-release supports several database platforms, including IBM Cloudscape, DB2, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. For more in-depth information, take a look at this introduction to Workplace Designer article.

Can't move to JDK 5.0? Many of the J2SE 5.0 language features would be just as useful for older JVMs, but the compiler that implements these features generates code that requires JDK 5.0 or later. Fortunately, there's an open source project that bridges the gap between J2SE 5.0 and older JVMs -- Retroweaver.

Sun may have streamlined its Java development process and intensified its marketing around the openess of the programming language and platform, but some smaller partners are still not happy.

Project Harmony is seeking code donations from commercial vendors of Java Virtual Machines to kick-start the development of its new open-source Java project.

Sun on tuesday released its first Java platform that offers real-time capabilities. The platform, Java Real-Time System 1.0, implements the Real-time Specification for Java (RTSJ), a blueprint for how Java can be extended to support real-time application programming.

Ten years ago, Sun Microsystems publicly debuted Java, software that initially helped establish the company's forward-thinking reputation and that later spread to most corners of the computer industry. James Gosling is the man behind the technology, interview here.

"Today, we are open-sourcing Sun's server side implementation of Java," Schwartz told an audience of about 10,000 software developers and Sun partners. "This is the first step in open-sourcing all of Sun's Java software assets." It will be released under Sun's CDDL.

Gary Benson (Red Hat) has made available Jonas in the Fedora Java development list (screenshot). Along with the large number of free and open source Java packages made available in Fedora Core 4 already, more are being added to rawhide compiled with GCJ. These include Lucene, additional Jakarta components, and more. You can read the rawhide reports in Fedora Test to track the rolling development updates.

In the next release of Java (Code named Mustang) user interface will use more native GUI components. Dimitri from Java2D team announced that in the latest relase of Mustang (Build 42) Gnome native widgets are used for rendering. You can see the related bug, change list for Build 42, and download the latest binary snapsot and code.

Updates to come in the company's next version of the Java, code-named Mustang, include language-processing, security and networking feature.