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JSP Buzz 04/10/2001 - New designs on the web


***** IN THIS ISSUE ************************************************** 
News
1:XHTML 1.1 Becomes a Proposed Recommendation
2:Java Phones Enter the U.S.
3:BEA's Buzz: Bite the Big Boys
4:Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free
5:Heads Up for Microsoft's 'Hailstorm'

Rambles 
1:Nodes, Nodes, Nodes! Everywhere Nodes

Links 	
1:Purple Technology
2:Combine the Power of XPath and JSP Tag Libraries
3:Breathe Intelligence into Java
4:The End of the Internet
5:The Practice of Peer-to-Peer Computing
6:Uploading Files with Beans
7:A Web Services Primer
8:Best Practices for Writing EJB's
9:Tip: Using JDOM and XSLT

Product Releases
1:Apache 2.0, First Public Beta Available
2:Tomcat Updates
3:SilverStream Server Support

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                        THE LATEST NEWS
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1) XHTML 1.1 Becomes a Proposed Recommendation (W3C 4.6.2001)
Hopefully this means XHTML 1.1 will become an official W3C 
recommendation by early summer 2001. The biggest change is that 
XHTML 1.1 departs from both HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 since it removes 
all features that were deprecated in XHTML 1.0. Since XHTML 1.0 
is still only slowly being adopted, the addition of XHTML 1.1
won't make much difference to speeding up XHTML use on the Internet,
but it might help speed up the adoption of XHTML in non-browser
clients.

2) Java Phones Enter the U.S. (Internet World 4.9.2001)
Phones are now available in the United States which can run Java 2 
Micro Edition. They have been around for a year in other parts of 
the globe. In another cell phone a palm pilot is also being merged
into the phone (I read this detail in another article not listed here).
All this shows the market place for these small but increasingly 
powerful devices to be an ever more interesting place.

3) BEA's Buzz: Bite the Big Boys (ZD Net 3.30.2001)
For the second straight year BEA holds on to the number one spot
as the top selling application server software. In 2000, BEA had 
more than 24 percent of the J2EE market share. 

4) Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free (NY Times 4.4.2001)
Wow, this is interesting and has a potentially huge impact. MIT plans
on placing ALL of its course materials on the Internet for FREE.  MIT 
likens it to the open source software movement but for education.  The 
idea is called OpenCourseWare and it is a 100 million dollar, 10-year 
initiative. The impact of this could be extremely far reaching.

5) Heads Up for Microsoft's 'HailStorm'  (Reuters 4.7.2001)
"HailStorm is pretty important generally ... not so much for what 
HailStorm is but more for where it's going to try to entice the market 
to go."  In other words, we are at the dawn of a new age for the Internet 
-- more extensive and coordinated services provided for a subscription 
fee. Many experts have foretold of this larger trend of which HailStorm is 
merely a herald. 


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                   Rambles by Casey Kochmer
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*************** Nodes, Nodes, Nodes! Everywhere Nodes ***************** 

This ramble is prompted by the following site:

http://www.everything2.com/

Hmm, how to describe this site... In their own words, "E2 can be a very, 
very confusing place at first.  This web site has grown from being a 
very simple user-written encyclopedia (see E1) to a very complex online 
community with a focus to write, publish and edit a quality database 
of information, insight and humor.  When you make an account here you 
join not only a team of dedicated writers but an entire micro-society 
and community with its own pop culture, politics, beauty and blunders. 
It's not perfect.  In fact, it can be pretty messy.  It's cool as hell, 
though."

The reason to mention this site here is not as a technical reference, 
but from a site design perspective. It is an interesting "site of 
expression" where the site is more of a living entity that grows and 
changes to the whims of the users, not necessarily to the site designer's 
plan.  I suspect a site like this will outlive many other sites due to 
the organic nature of the way it is produced by hundreds of users. 

All this leads me to the following thought:  Instead of having "text 
based" nodes, is it practical to have "logical programming" nodes 
maintained by the users?  The majority of web applications I have seen 
are centrally developed and maintained by a dedicated staff.  Why not 
flip this around?  Have the users build the majority of the site to 
fit their needs?  (OK, I know this sounds not very plausible, but it 
just might be possible if we make it easy for the users to be able to 
build nodes.  With JSP, Tag libraries and JavaBeans it is a possible 
architecture.  While for many smaller projects this won't make sense 
(building the infrastructure would be too expensive both in time and 
money), for large web applications it could be a valid method for 
building large, customizable sites.  Instead of having preferences, 
a user could insert their own page nodes which generate exactly the 
results they need.  For example, consider a large company intranet 
where each department could customize or create its own nodes, such 
as specialized reporting modules or personalized time keeping modules. 
Of course, security concerns must be addressed (the ability to insert 
programs into a site would be a nightmare onto itself).  Also, a solid 
infrastructure would have to exist since the users would need centralize 
components to simplify much of the building of the nodes.  In some 
respects, I have seen this being done, but as a group of separate web 
applications being pieced together into a larger framework. So, it just 
makes me wonder...


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              Links of Interest
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[Site] Purple Technology 
This site just rocks! Purple is indeed royal and the site lives up to 
it.  This site is a JSP/XML/JDOM-driven web site. Even better, the 
owner of the site (Alexander Day Chaffee) has made the source code for 
the site available for download.  It is well worth the visit in my book.

[Article] Combine the Power of XPath and JSP Tag Libraries   
   (Stanley Santiago  1.2001)
This article examines the XPath custom Tag library for JSPs. It also
has examples on how to use Xpath within a JSP path. Finally, Stanley
covers the pros and cons of using the XPath Tag library.

[Article] Breathe Intelligence into Java (Lane W. Sharman 4.1.2001)
Ever wanted to add some AI (artificial intelligence) to your Java code?
This article examines the basic concepts to show you how to create a 
smarter application. It would be interesting to apply these techniques
to build a self updating JSP web site, which optimizes its layout 
relative to user traffic.

[Site] The End of the Internet
The Internet is not limitless, despite the fact that search engines
only catalog under a tenth of the Internet. Google alone has cataloged 
over a billion pages with no apparent end in sight (or is that site).
Ah, but an end has been found.  Be warned, the end of the Internet may 
not be what you expect!

[Article] The Practice of Peer-to-Peer Computing (Todd Sundsted 3.2001)
An introduction to and history of P2P computing, the article also 
provides Java code examples on the basics of P2P.  The first in a 
series of articles, this promises to be an interesting series.

[Article] Uploading Files with Beans (Budi Kurniawan 4.5.2001) 
This is worth checking out if you ever wanted to build your own file 
upload process in Java for a Servlet or JSP application.  The article  
discusses, in depth, how HTTP works and then walks a programmer through 
building a bean to handle file uploads.  Considering that uploading a 
file is a common task required in many projects, this article is sure 
to be a hot.

[Article] A Web Services Primer (Venu Vasudevan 4.4.2001)
This is a review on web services.  A web service is a web application
which is used by other applications.  A web service can be simple as
a set of centralized functions, or as complex as a full blown business 
system for gathering and maintaining data.  Web services are part of 
the new "invisible web" that is being developed to connect businesses
and other web applications together.  The key is the ability to expose 
pieces of the web service so it can be called from anywhere on the 
Internet. This article reviews the technologies that a web service 
must use in order to communicate with the world.

[Article] Best Practices for Writing EJB's (4.6.2001)
This article outlines how to best use and build Enterprise JavaBeans 
(EJBs) within the J2EE BEA WebLogic Server.  While the article 
concentrates on EJB design, elements of design truth can be found 
for other Java solutions.

[Article] Tip: Using JDOM and XSLT (Brett McLaughlin 3.2001)
Brett McLaughlin shows us how to use XML, XSLT and the JDOM API. You'll 
learn how to take a JDOM document representation, transform it using the 
Apache Xalan processor, and obtain the resulting XML as another JDOM 
document.  An EXCELLENT article if you want to use XSLT and JDOM.

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                     Product Releases
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[Web Server] Apache 2.0.16 First Public Beta Available.
Reading through the specs, I especially like the following fun fact:
"Apache 2.0 is faster and more stable on non-Unix platforms such as 
BeOS, OS/2, and Windows. With the introduction of platform-specific 
multi-processing modules (MPMs) and the Apache Portable Runtime (APR), 
these platforms are now implemented in their native API, avoiding 
the often buggy and poorly performing POSIX-emulation layers."
Very kewl.

[JSP Container] Tomcat 4.0-beta-3 Released (4.2.2001)
		        Tomcat 3.3 Milestone Released (3.17.2001)
Tomcat 4.0-beta-3 is an update to the Tomcat 4.0-beta-2 distribution 
that was released in March 2001.  It fixes a further security 
vulnerability that was not completely repaired in the beta 2 release.  

The Tomcat 3.3 Milestone is the latest version of the JSP 1.1 reference 
container.  

[J2EE] SilverStream Server Support	(4.9.2001)
While this is not a new release, the current release of the SilverStream 
J2EE server has just been certified to support AIX, Windows NT/2000, 
Solaris, Hewlett-Packard's UX, and Red Hat's Linux. This heralds the 
ability of J2EE servers to truly support multiple environments. 

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