Thursday, March 09, 2006
Redefining Java
O'REILLY NETWORK'S ONJava.com NEWSLETTER
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Greetings...
In previous newsletters, I've mentioned the "What Is" series of articles,
and its corresponding website <http://www.oreillynet.com/whatis/>. A few
weeks back, What Is editor Tara McGoldrick forwarded me a set of recently
received topic requests, including "What Is Java." My first reaction was
that an introductory article wouldn't really suit our established audience
of enterprise developers. And that reaction was right--but a
"re-introductory" article might be useful. After all, Java has changed
profoundly in recent years, and all the old definitions of the language
seem to me to be lacking. They don't, for example, talk about the open
source frameworks like Spring that are as much a de facto standard as EJB
is a de jure standard. They don't talk about running non-Java languages
on the JVM, or hacking the VM with bytecode manipulation, even though this
approach is used by inversion-of-control frameworks, AOP tools, and other
projects. They talk about interpreted bytecode or JIT's, not the modern
era of dynamic runtime compilation epitomized by HotSpot.
Looking at all of this, and in consultation with editor-in-chief Daniel
Steinberg, we saw an opportunity to reframe the discussion, to try to
reset the basic ideas of what Java is--language, VM, or both--and what it
could be. We don't know if we can make a big dent in the public
perception, but if we make one troll hesitate before typing "Java is slow"
on a Slashdot thread, we'll have made the world a slightly better place.
So what is Java? Lazy conventional wisdom spouts catch phrases about
applets, bad performance, Swing appearance problems, and other issues that
either aren't true or aren't relevant (and maybe never were). In "What Is
Java", we try to reframe the conversation for Java's second decade by
separating language from VM and taking a look at what each is and where
they're going, while also noting the profound size and influence of what
is the largest and arguably most underappreciated open source community in
existence today.
<http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/03/08/what-is-java.html>
Sure, you can throw XML data into a database as a run of bytes, but in so
doing, you lose the inherent structure of the data. A database built to
work with XML can offer opportunities to the savvy developer. Deepak
Vohra's "Storing an XML Document in Apache Xindice" introduced Apache
Xindice, an open source database optimized for working with XML.
<http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/03/08/storing-xml-document-with-apache-xindice.html>
Have you ever worked on a day job project that had less discipline and
organization than the open source project you hack on by night? You're
not alone. "Applied Software Project Management" authors Andrew Stellman
and Jennifer Greene write: "It is rare to find a corporate environment
where the project team has anything approaching the level of planning,
documentation, or review found in successful open source projects. For
some reason, as soon as a budget and a deadline are involved, all of the
lessons we've learned over the years and applied successfully to open
source projects seem to fly out the window." They take the lessons of
open source back to the enterprise in the ONLamp article "What Corporate
Projects Should Learn from Open Source."
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/02/27/what-corp-projects-learn-from-open-source.html>
In our feature article from java.net, Jacobus Steenkamp shows you how to
achieve "Better File Uploads with AJAX and JavaServer Faces." "In this
article, we will take fresh a approach and implement an AJAX-powered
component that will not only upload the file to server, but also monitor
the actual progress of a file upload request in 'real time.'"
<http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2006/02/09/file-uploads-with-ajax-and-jsf.html>
Recent O'Reilly Network weblogs of interest to Java developers:
Paul Browne - How to talk to your Boss about Agile
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2006/03/how_to_talk_to_your_boss_about.html>
Timothy M. O'Brien - Maven Project Info Reports Considered Dangerous
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2006/03/maven_project_info_reports_con.html>
Check out more O'Reilly Network Java weblogs at:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/q/weblog_s?x-subject=3&>
Please join us again next week.
Chris Adamson, Editor
ONJava.com
cadamson@oreilly.com
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