Java Archive

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.

Eclipse version 3.1 is now available. New features added in this release: full support for Java 5.0 and improved support for developing rich client applications.

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.

Sun will release this week components of its Java Enterprise System technology stack to the open-source community under the Community Development and Distribution License. To be released are Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Enterprise Service Bus implementations, based on the community's Java Business Integration specification, and its Java Systems Application Server.

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

With "only a little Java code and a third-party product," Bob Reselman was able to make Windows pay attention to the goings-on of a Macintosh server. Here's how he did it.

Sun Microsystems has fixed a pair of security bugs in Java that could be exploited by attackers to take over computers running Windows, Linux and Solaris.

The executive committee for Java SE/EE has approved the new JSR-275 to add units/quantities to the Java platform (see JSR-275 results). Although the early specification/implementation of the units package provided by the wide-ranging JScience open-source project has to be simplified significantly according to Google Inc. executive member.

The recent announcement from Apache regarding their plans to embark on their own J2SE implementation called Harmony has re-ignited the long-running Java/OSS debate. James "Father of Java" Gosling reacted in an unexpected way by giving a misleading view of what open source is really all about. Now that the dust has settled a little bit, it's time for an article that is not championing the cause for the relicensing of Sun's implementation under more permissive, open source terms, but simply a look at what could (and could not) happen under the open source model.

Following on from my previous article, the Java platform has an even greater image problem that is more than skin deep. Coming under yet another two-pronged attack, you'll typically hear complaints falling into the two camps:

The Eclipse open-source development platform has far outdistanced Sun Microsystems Inc.'s NetBeans in terms of developer and vendor support, but Sun has vowed to continue to innovate around NetBeans while practically everybody else in the Java world is supporting Eclipse, says eWeek.

Java Swing comes with "pluggable look-and-feel technology", which essentially boils down to the fact that interfaces can be "skinned" (although this is simplifying a tad) and is therefore, extremely flexible. By default, Java ships with a cross-platform look-and-feel (LAF), which means your apps can look consistent across all platforms, or LAFs that mimic the look of a specific platform, say Windows, for example. However, one of the chief complaints of Java desktop applications is its "look". It basically stems from two issues:

An updated version of the popular Java IDE Eclipse is released.

The open-source Netbeans IDE version 4.1 has been released. Many improvements and bug fixes. The infamous Scanner class error which plagued earlier versions seems to be fixed.