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JSP Buzz: Vol. III Issue #14

JSPBuzz -- August 17th, 2002

08.17.2002

Table of Contents
  1. Servlet 2.4 Specification in Proposed Final Draft
  2. Open Source's New Weapon: The law?
  3. XHTML 2.0 W3C Working Draft
  4. Sun Snubbed in Web Services Spec Effort
  5. Sun to Fund Open-Source Java Efforts
  6. Wandering Penguin Finds a Flock
  7. Next Up for J2EE: Web Services, JCA 1.5
  1. State of the Union
  2. More on Servlet/JSP Specs
  1. JSTL 1.0: Standardizing JSP, Part 1
  2. Interview with Stefano Mazzocchi
  3. 10 Reasons We Need Java 3.0
  4. JSR 109: Web Services Inside of J2EE Apps
  5. XML Processing Measurements using XPB4J
  6. Where Scott McNealy's Wrong About the Economics of Open Source
  7. Using the Mozilla SOAP API
  8. Hard Core Tech Talk with Marc Fleury
  9. Java and MS Office
  10. Simplify Web development with Tea
  1. SpamNet
  2. Jakarta Commons Releases
  3. Struts 1.1 Beta 2 Released
  4. JavaTM XML Pack: The Summer Edition.
News
Servlet 2.4 Specification in Proposed Final Draft
Sun August 9th, 2002 
The title says it all. The Servlet 2.4 specification is officially baked and ready to go. Soon it will be deemed final, but, until then you can use this draft to get a very good idea about what will be in the new specification.
JSP and Servlet Proposals
Open Source's New Weapon: The law?
CNet August 9th, 2002 
Named the "Digital Software Security Act," the proposed legislation would make California the "Code Free or Die" state when it comes to software. If enacted as written, state agencies would be able to buy software only from companies that do not place restrictions on use or access to source code. The agencies would also be given the freedom to "make and distribute copies of the software."
XHTML 2.0 W3C Working Draft
W3C August 5th 2002 
The working draft for XHTML 2.0 has been released recently. Of course no one is going to be implementing XHTML 2.0 soon, but it is good to see it moving forward. For a list of changes to expect, check out the following article from Kendall Grant Clark giving a quick overview of the changes within the XHTML 2.0 release.
XHTML 2.0: The Latest Trick
Sun Snubbed in Web Services Spec Effort
InfoWorld August 9th, 2002 
More SOAP Opera and more snubbing of Sun to be excluded from various Web service specifications. This time it's the BPEL4WS (does it really matter any more what the initials stand for??) effort. In the end, just part of the battle for world domination being played by the major players. It would be fun if a small upstart company could take the lead and leave everyone else in the dust while the infighting is going on. Of course not likely to happen, but who knows?
Sun to Fund Open-Source Java Efforts
CNET August 13th, 2002 
Sun will provide 3 million dollars over three years. The money is mainly aimed at helping Open Source projects pay for Sun's test suites to verify the Java Standards with the Open Source implementations.
Wandering Penguin Finds a Flock
ZDNet August 16th, 2002 
Efforts to prevent Fragmentation of Linux are moving ahead. There now exists a Linux Standards Base with which to help give guidelines and keep the various implementations of Linux from fragmenting too seriously. While not a perfect solution, it does help. News items like this are nice as it indicates the growing strength of Linux.
Next Up for J2EE: Web Services, JCA 1.5
 August 15th, 2002 
The final draft of J2EE is out and the review period over. The actual final version of J2EE 1.4 should be released as a final recommendation in the first quarter of next year. The big changes in J2EE include the full inclusion of JAX technologies, a strong embracing of Web services, JSP 2.0, jdbc 3.0 and an upgraded Java Connector Architecture.
Rambles
State of the Union
Casey Kochmer 
This ramble is sparked by the following review of the tech industry
Tech workers: From Penthouse to Doghouse
I haven't done a State of the Union examination for one reason: not much has changed in our industry for the average programmer. The outlook is pretty much the same as it was eight months ago. Things have bottomed out (well except for the stock market) and we are staying at the bottom. No doubt it could be much worst, and things could crash to a deeper low if something happens to shake confidence. However, that is outside the ability of anyone to predict.
Jobs are still hard, but not impossible to find. Many people are still leaving the tech field to find work in other sectors. On the flip side, I am seeing more signs of work and interest in finding good programmers. So in balance, we are still at bottom of the market with a slight ebbing back and forth of bad and good signs. Jayson and I both see a small but consistent sign of improvement in the Java and Internet development market. However, these positive signs are more than offset by the Telecom busts and Stock market plunging currently going down. In one release IBM is laying off 15,000 workers, in another announcement Microsoft is planning on hiring a similar number. All in all, still time to hunker down and be careful.
I find one point in the article interesting, it predicts in 2010 things will break apart with a repeat of the great programmer shortage seen in the late 90's. Who knows, however, I am more concern about six months from now to worry about 8 years in the future.
More on Servlet/JSP Specs
Jayson Falkner 
The proposed final drafts of the JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4 specifications are out!
JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4 Specifications
The J2EE 1.4 specification is due to be finalized in the first quarter of 2003, however, many of the individual specifications which are part of J2EE 1.4 are already in JCP Proposed Final Draft form. Namely the JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4 specifications are now ready for viewing. While not officially final, these versions of the specifications are intended for developers and container vendors which want to get a jump-start on the new versions of the technologies.
Check out the specs! This is your chance to comment on the new changes and provide feedback to the expert groups. You can find the reference implementation, Tomcat 5
Tomcat
Check out the specs! This is your chance to comment on the new changes and provide feedback to the expert groups. You can find the reference implementation within the Tomcat 5 release. The Tomcat 5 developers will soon be providing nightly binary releases of the code, however, you can grab one now at the book support site for
Servlets and JSP; the J2EE Web Tier
Links
JSTL 1.0: Standardizing JSP, Part 1
Hans Bergsten August 14th, 2002 
This is a review of the JSTL Tag libraries being released to the benefit of all JSP programmers.
Interview with Stefano Mazzocchi
Stefano Mazzocchi August 2002 
An interview with the creator of the Cocoon Framework. It is interesting to read if you want to get some flavor of Cocoon.
10 Reasons We Need Java 3.0
Elliotte Rusty Harold  July 31st, 2002 
Very good article about how to improve Java for the next major Java version.
JSR 109: Web Services Inside of J2EE Apps
Al Saganich August 7th, 2002 
An overview of how to JSR 109 attempts to make web service access easier and occur in a standard way in J2EE implementations.
XML Processing Measurements using XPB4J
Pankaj Kumar  May 30th, 2002 
Interesting examination of the various XML parsers and performance results. The test checks examines the different parsers, different JVM's CPU speed, file size and other factors. Even better: the code is available to be downloaded so you can perform the tests for yourself.
Where Scott McNealy's Wrong About the Economics of Open Source
Nicholas Petreley August 7th, 2002 
Interesting commentary about Sun, Scott McNealy and Open Source. Worth reading if you are into the open source at all.
Using the Mozilla SOAP API
Apple/Mozilla August 2002 
The Apple developer connection has an article which introduces the Mozilla SOAP API and uses it to do queries on Google's search engine. This is interesting and opens up the possibility of popular web browsers to be used as SOAP clients instead of putting this functionality on the server-side. Replacing a round trip and a SOAP call to your server in favor of a few lines of JavaScript is appealing. Check out the article and check out Mozilla.
Hard Core Tech Talk with Marc Fleury
TheServerSide August 15th, 2002 
This link will take you both to the commentary and the link to the interview. Marc Fleury currently serves as the President of the JBoss Group. In this interview, Marc talks about the current state of JBoss and the open source landscape. He looks at JBoss' microkernel design, client interceptors, fault tolerance in JBoss after 9/11, and the reasons for open source J2EE licensing. He describes the open source way of life, how JBoss functions as a business, and gives his take on .NET.
Java and MS Office
JavaLobby August 12th, 2002 
A question we get every once in a while is how to interface Java with one of the MS Office products. This link will take you to two examples of this. One a link to an older article interfacing Excel and Java, and the other a link to the Jakarta POI project found here: http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/. If for nothing else reading the POI page is worth a few laughs and I should have listed this as a Humor link in reality.
Simplify Web development with Tea
IBM August 2002 
I find it interesting that Tea is still around. Tea is simple Java template language for building dynamic Web sites. This is a introductory article on Tea and how to use it in practice. Personally I haven't used Tea so you will have to judge yourself on if it is a good solution for your project.
Products
SpamNet
CloudMark September 2002 
I hate spam, really hate it. So while not a Java or XML topic, when a tool like this comes around, its kewl to mention. SpamNet is a Spam filtering tool that uses you and an active community to block spam. Its a neat idea and seems to work very well. Currently the tool interfaces only with Outlook. However, the company is expanding the tool to work with other email clients.
Jakarta Commons Releases
Jakarta August 13th, 2002 
For those of you unfamiliar with the Commons it is a place that the Jakarta projects use to store commonly needed Java components. Some of which match functionality of the JDK, such as the Logging API, but, most of them are really helpful bits of code. One of my favorite is the DBCP project which is the API Tomcat uses to pool database connections.
Struts 1.1 Beta 2 Released
Jakarta August 12th, 2002 
The Struts team is proud to announce the release of Struts 1.1 Beta 2. This release includes significant new functionality, while retaining full backwards compatibility with earlier versions of Struts. It also incorporates fixes for a number of bugs which were reported against earlier versions.
Since all of the components in the commons are under an Apache-style license the code is great to both use and learn from. Cheers to that, and thanks to the Commons developers for all the hard work!
JavaTM XML Pack: The Summer Edition.
Sun August 5th 2002 
This version contains: Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM) v1.1_01, Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) v1.2_01, Java API for XML Registries (JAXR) v1.0_02, Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC) v1.0_01, SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ) v1.1_02

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