Two months after Java 6 update 10 was released, Sun has just released update 11. For many users the new version will automatically be detected and installed, but you can always get it from the Sun Java site.

Sun has now decided to cease funding for the SwingX project altogether, as announced via a post to SwingLabs' forum by Jeanette Winzenburg . This has angered many in the Swing development community where there is a growing view that the core Swing APIs are being relegated to a supporting GUI library for the newer JavaFX technology

I’ve seen many newcomers to Java language has been discussing this topic with themselves when they are given training in HTML and web design.For many of those folks, JavaScript is the another name for a nightmare. Few tips from my side for those people.

In order to modularize JDK 7 in the next year or so, and in order better to inform the work of JSR 294, Sun will shortly propose to create Project Jigsaw within the OpenJDK Community. This effort will, of necessity, create a simple, low-level module system whose design will be focused narrowly upon the goal of modularizing the JDK. This module system will be available for developers to use in their own code, and will be fully supported by Sun, but it will not be an official part of the Java SE 7 Platform Specification and might not be supported by other SE 7 implementations. If and when a future version of the Java SE Platform includes a specific module system then Sun will provide a means to migrate Jigsaw modules up to that standard. In the meantime we’ll actively seek ways in which to interoperate with other module systems, and in particular with OSGi.

The idea of network attached shared memory makes me want to re-think the whole scheme of data persistence. I'm tired of blindly using a RDBMS when another option could be much better.

JavaFX SDK 1.0 will be released tomorrow, December 4th, 2008, so while we're waiting I thought you might want to learn more about the history of JavaFX and the "contrarian mind" behind it. Al Riske wrote an excellent piece in Sun's "Contrarian Minds" series in which he interviewed Chris Oliver, delving into Chris' background and his role in founding JavaFX. By the way, Chris is the guy on the left in the picture above, presenting JavaFX with Dr. Gosling :-)

In order to modularize JDK 7 in the next year or so, and in order better to inform the work of JSR 294, Sun will shortly propose to create Project Jigsaw within the OpenJDK Community.

The JCP has long come under fire for the insularity and high fees associated with its process. In this report from a QCon panel on open standards development, new executive committee member Rod Johnson explains why he decided to join the organization he once "likened to a commissar in Soviet Russia." Other panelists quoted include Bill Venners, Cay Horstmann, and Michael Van Riper.

How to write Java programs to do things like: * Remove redeye from a photographic image. * Distort the human voice. * Display one image inside another image. * Do edge detection, blurring, and other filtering operations on images. * Insert animated cartoon characters in videos of live humans. If you have ever wondered how to do these things, you've come to the right place.

Having had a front seat to the mania that was the SWT v. Swing debate, clearly the broader question of why IBM has almost never seen fit to enhance what was in Java is not a new topic. Doing PDE dev, you are confronted with the obvious need for reflection to do anything serious, after all, this is metaprogramming, ergo, metadata/metamodel is going to be required.

We all know that source control, effective build scripts and continuous integration (CI) are all vital to a successful project at work. However, what about personal projects? I'm looking to find out what others are doing for personal development. What are your thoughts?

OpenSolaris 2008.11 provides a time slider for moving back into the past...

Steema Software is pleased to announce the release of version 2.0 of TeeChart for Java. TeeChart v.2 for Java Charting Library ships with 100% sourcecode in Swing and SWT formats. Version 2.0 includes new Series styles, more Functions ( Downsampling options, CurveFitting models with Linear Regression, Histogram function) The new version further extends TeeChart Pro's inherent featureset to offer the developer many new properties, methods and events for existing classes, many more example forms and improved help.

Cedric Brun and Laurent Goubet from Obeo are presenting the Eclipse EMF Compare project 0.8.0 features released with Ganymede and the modeling package in a webinar on December 10. There will be a demo showing what can be done with the advanced features and a preview of the 1.0 (Galileo) release demonstrating, among other nice things, the EMF Compare integration with graphical modelers. Register to attend!

Statistics about Wicket.

For the past several months I've been toying around with a project called JavaBuilders. It is a library that allows you to define layout, binding, and validation in a YAML file to produce Swing (and as of today SWT) frames, panels, etc. It uses MigLayout, which I love. The binding has to date been ok, but not great. The reason is because for binding to work in Swing your JavaBeans need to be real JavaBeans. That means property support. Adding property support isn't a painful process but it is tedious. The bigger problem is if you are using a library or a system where the domain objects already exist and you can't modify them then you can't get true Swing binding.

The JDK is big—and so we ought to modularize it. Doing so would allow us to improve the key performance metrics of download size, startup time, and memory footprint.

Dear Spring Community, I'm pleased to announce that we have released Spring IDE 2.2.1. This version is mainly a bugfix and maintenance release but has some significant user level changes as well. Get more information at the Spring IDE blog Watch out for more tooling related announcements from SpringOne during the upcoming week.

It's tempting to think its all about JavaFX this week. The team is prepping for the launch party (when not commenting on blogs), which starts this Thursday December 4th at 6pm Pacific Time. You can follow the Janitor's blow by by blow account live here.

Last night Rod Johnson kicked-off the 2008 springOne conference with a keynote emphasizing the new SpringSource slogan "Weapons for the War on Java Complexity." During the first day of the conference, no technology fit that billing more than Grails.

The time has come finally for a release of the Groovy Eclipse plugin. The plugin has been published to the update site. There are a few notes to make. First off there is now refactoring support inside the plugin for your Groovy Code. To see this demonstrated head over to this wiki page. Besides documentation there are some pretty cool flash demos of the features which should entice. Second, the groovy plugin now supports the 1.5.7 version of Groovy.

It is a fact that we need a persistence solution. Most of applications are database-driven and need to access tables, modify data. Although there are many questions about persistence frameworks, we need them a lot when developing applications. Otherwise SQL codes scatters across applications causing an ugly and unmanageable application. Persistence frameworks build a database layer and separates concerns. Java Persistence solutions are divided into two branches. One is Java standard solutions; JDBC, EJB, JDO. The other is ORM (Object-relational Mapping) frameworks; Hibernate, Toplink, Enterprise Object Framework, iBatis etc. Let me ask the basic question that everybody somehow asks himself “Isn’t there any other solution to persistence problem simpler and more powerful?” I have been reading many problems about this issue. Last one was Sun’s attempt to simplify EJB. In fact, this is why new frameworks will never end.

Simple Java code to open browser in windows or Linux environment

Did some RPC tests over the wire and got some interesting results. Hope that someone could do something similar and verify. I run three RPC client/server combination (see links to source code): 1. Protobuf as the protocol over a simple TCP/IP client/server java sockets. 2. Protobuf as the protocol over a HTTP where the client is using Apache HTTP client (reusing connection), and the server part is a servlet in a War on Jetty v6. The server side (protowar) implementation is very basic and ment only for benchmarking. 3. Spring RPC, the war container is Jetty v6. Not posting the source code for this one, but its basically the same as in the protobuf example, using java serialization and spring.

If conferences like JavaOne are a High School Pep Rally, then “No Fluff, Just Stuff” is skipping out on the rally, and smoking in the parking lot with the Cool Kids. While at the J1 keynote Rich Green envisions “Java on all the screens of your life”, at NFJS, Stuart Halloway declares without ceremony that “Java is dead”.