coder4hire writes "Like all major programming languages, JavaScript can be extended in functionality through the use of libraries, such as jQuery, which is currently seeing tremendous popularity and enhancement in the Web development community. Designers and developers who want to learn how to use jQuery for creating rich user interfaces through client-side JavaScript are advised to begin their journey to jQuery proficiency by reading one of the many books dedicated to this powerful JavaScript resource — such as jQuery Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for jQuery Developers." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

separsons writes "On May 18th, Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will launch Ikaros, a fuel-free spacecraft that relies completely on solar power. The spacecraft's 46-foot-wide sails are thinner than a human hair and lined with thin-film solar panels. After a rocket brings the craft to space, mission controllers on the ground will steer Ikaros by adjusting the sails' angles, ensuring optimal radiation is hitting the solar cells. If the mission proves successful, the $16M spacecraft will be the first solar sail-powered craft to enter deep space." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Melbourne city council learned the hard way that one man's art is another man's crap on a wall that needs to be painted over. The council hired a cleanup crew to get rid of graffiti on Hosier Lane, a street renowned for its street art. While there, the crew got rid of the graffiti, as well as a piece by Banksy, who is regarded as one of the world's greatest street artists. From the article: "The reclusive Banksy ... painted several stencils in Melbourne during a 2003 visit. His satirical and distinctive art is often directed at anti-war, cultural, and anti-capitalist themes. Banksy in 2005 painted nine images on Israel's West Bank barrier, including a ladder going over the wall and an image of children breaking through to a tropical island. In 2008, a London wall bearing one of his stencils was said to have sold on eBay for almost $500,000." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JavaOne 2010 is just around the corner! Well, sort of. While JavaOne 2010 doesn't actually happen until almost five months from now (September 19-23), the call for papers has already closed. That means, for people like Sharat Chander, the JavaOne Content Selection Chairperson, JavaOne 2010 really is just around the corner. Tori Wieldt recently interviewed Sharat, and has published JavaOne 2010: Interview with the Sharat Chander, Content Selection Chairperson: There's lots of buzz about the content for JavaOne 2010. I took a moment to talk with Sharat Chander, Principal Product Director in Oracle's Application Grid Product Marketing Team, about the content selection process for JavaOne. Tori asked Sharat "what's your role in relation to JavaOne?" Sharat: For the past four years, I've served as the one of Track Leads assigned to review and grade abstracts received during the Call for Papers(CFP). This year, I'm serving as the overall Chairperson for content selection for JavaOne 2010. Individuals can learn more about this year's Conference at: http://www.oracle.com/us/javaonedevelop/062264.html. With regard to the number of submissions received, Sharat says "the community has definitely given us a challenging job in determining what submissions to approve for the event (a nice problem to have!)" The paper/session selection process is similar to what has existed in recent years. Starting in mid-May, emails will be sent out to people whose submissions have been accepted. Some time in June, the final sessions list will be posted to the JavaOne site. Sharat cites three ways you can keep abreast of JavaOne 2010 news:

• Visit the JavaOne web page often
• Subscribe to the @JavaOneConf Twitter feed
• Join the JaveOne Group on Facebook

Read the full interview for more details. In other Java Today news, Arun Gupta presents TOTD #130: Invoking a OSGi service from a JAX-WS Endpoint - OSGi and Enterprise Java: Sahoo blogged about JAX-WS Web service in an OSGi bundle. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) provides complete steps to create such an application from scratch. We will create an OSGi service, a JAX-WS compliant Web service as hybrid application, and a JAX-WS Web service client. Lets create an OSGi service first. 1. Create a simple OSGi service as explained in TOTD #36. Generate the maven project as... Dustin Marx compares and contrasts Turn Signals and Coding Conventions: In How Turn Signals Work, Karim Nice writes "Turn signals may be the most underutilized device on a car." I sometimes feel that when I witness drivers who cannot be bothered with indicating their intentions through use of a turn signal. Besides being simple common sense, the importance of using a turn signal to convey intentions to others is documented by multiple groups and individuals including driver safety informational sites, automobile insurance sites, law firms and legal information sites... Coding conventions are much like turn signals in that they are often a preferred and expected form of communication between developers who might not have an easier way to communicate the same information. Unfortunately... David Geary continues his JSF 2.0 article series with JSF 2 fu: Ajax components: Among JSF 2's many new features, two of the most compelling are arguably composite components and Ajax support. But their strength is most apparent when the two are combined, making it easy to implement Ajax-enabled custom components with a minimum of fuss. In this article, I'll show you how to implement an autocomplete component that uses Ajax to manage its list of completion items. In doing so, you'll see how you can integrate Ajax into your own composite components... In the Weblogs, Bruno Ghisi introduces DIME - Dependency Injection for Java ME: My masters colleague, Guilherme Hobold, and his friend, Elinton Machado, have created a very interesting project for helping Java ME applications with dependency injection. Actually, it is not only for Java ME (CLDC), but because of there is no reflection, they have done some magic to make it work in a nice way. The project is called DIME, which means Dependency Injection for Java ME. Basically it has a XML to configure the beans (it depends on kXML lib for parsing), a container to get the beans and the classes have to implemented a Bean interface that provides access to the hash table that is used to set the correct values... Masoud Kalili presents Learning GlassFish v3 Command Line Administration Interface (CLI): Terminals and consoles was one of the earliest types of communication interfaces between a system administrator and the system administration layer. Due to this long time presence, command line administration consoles become one the most utilized administration channel for configuring different software ranging from database engines to router’s embedded operating systems. GlassFish provides several administration channels; one of them is the command line administration interface or CLI from now on. The CLI has many unique features which make it very convenient for command line advocates and new administrators... In the Forums, in the Java SE forum, ksemeks is getting a MidiUnavailableException: Audio Device Unavailable: Hi, so here's the deal. When I try to make a new Sequencer object, java throws this exception: javax.sound.midi.MidiUnavailableException: Audio Device Unavailable Here's the whole error... In the JXTA forum, ariel_ro asks Can someone explain this WARNING: Queue full, dropped one or more elements?: I run a multicast client that sends messages across LAN using JxtaMulticastSocket and Datagrams. When I let the system run for a longer time I get this: Apr 27, 2010 5:13:32 PM net.jxta.impl.util.UnbiasedQueue push3 WARNING:... plato__ posted Java TV - JavaTVapi - javax.tv.service missing: I have installed NetBeans 6.8 and jdk1.6.0_20 and the Java TV api from javatv-developers.dev.java.net. I followed all the instructions and I successfully intergrated the api and the emulator to NetBeans IDE. Althought, when creating a new project, I am... Our Spotlight this week is the NetBeans IDE 6.9 Beta Release: NetBeans 6.9 Beta introduces the JavaFX Composer, a visual layout tool for visually building JavaFX GUI applications, similar to the Swing GUI builder for Java SE applications. Additional highlights include OSGi interoperability for NetBeans Platform applications; support for JavaFX SDK 1.3, PHP Zend framework, and Ruby on Rails 3.0; as well as improvements to the Java Editor, Java Debugger, and issue tracking, and more. NetBeans 6.9 Beta is available in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Simplified Chinese, as well as in several community-translated languages. Learn more: http://netbeans.org This week's java.net Poll asks What is the most important enhancement in JavaFX 1.3? The poll will be open through Friday. Our latest Feature Article is The Match Maker Design Pattern - a New Place for the Actions, by Michael Bar-Sinai, which describes how to add actions to a system without modifying business objects, add objects without changing actions, and still keep things reusable. We also just published HTML5 Server-Push Technologies, Part 2 by Gregor Roth; this two-part series explains the new Server-Sent Events and WebSockets API in HTML5. And we're also still featuring Biswajit Sarkar's Using Styles, Themes, and Painters with LWUIT, in which you discover how to use some of the new and enhanced features in LWUIT version 1.3. Current and upcoming Java Events:

• April 26-30, Pasig City, Philippines: JavaEE Training Philippines
• April 29, Istanbul, Turkey: Istanbul JUG April Event
• April 30 - May 2, Reston, VA, US: 2010 Northern Virginia Software Symposium: Spring Edition
• May 3-8: JAX 2010
• May 10-14, Redwood City, CA, US: Android Training
• May 15-17, Redwood City, CA, US: Android Application Development
• May 17-21, Cambridge, MA, US: Boston "Web Services and SOA Programming" 5-day Instructor-led ("face to face") Codecamp By Sang Shin
• May 21-23, St. Louis, MO, US: 2010 Gateway Software Symposium
• June 4-5, Dallas, TX, US: 2010 Lone Star Software Symposium: Dallas Edition
• June 7-11, Redwood City, CA: Java Training
• June 14-17, Denver, CO, US: UberConf 2010
• June 22-25, Pasig City, Philippines: Spring Training Philippines
• July 7-9, Pasig City, Philippines: Struts Training Philippines

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site. Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive. -- Kevin Farnham O'Reilly Media Twitter: @kevin_farnham

If you like to pass the time playing minesweeper, or checking your Facebook updates while piloting a 900,000-pound aircraft 400 mph, you won't like the latest FAA decision. The agency has asked airlines to create policies to minimize cockpit distractions, including pilots' use of personal electronic devices. "There is no room for distraction when your job is to get people safely to their destinations," said DOT Secretary Ray LaHood. "The traveling public expects professional pilots to focus on flying and on safety at all times." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stoobalou sounds another death knell for Flash video. He says "Another heavy user of Adobe's video streaming software Flash is now pandering to the all-powerful iPad. Everybody's favourite waste of time, social notworking monster Facebook, is now streaming user videos to Apple's second coming of the portable computer with no sign of Flash in sight." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was only a matter of time before ISPs began doing more than just redirecting failed DNS requests to their own pages. An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the largest ISP in Hong Kong has started bypassing search results from Firefox's location bar (which typically uses Google), forcing their own search provider (yp.com.hk) onto their users ... Can an ISP just start re-directing search traffic at will?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

osullish writes "People have been proclaiming the death of the floppy for years, yet millions are bought around the world. Who is buying them?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Raul654 writes "In March, the jury in the Novell/SCO case found that Novell owns the copyright to Unix. Now, SCO's lawyers have asked judge Ted Stewart to order Novell to turn over the Unix copyright to them. 'SCO contends the jury did not answer the specific issue before Stewart that involves a legal principle called "specific performance," under which a party can ask a court to order another party to fulfill an aspect of an agreement.'" Over at Groklaw, PJ is deep into a community project to annotate SCO's filing. It's for the benefit of future historians, but it makes amusing reading now. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "Mozilla has launched a 'pre-alpha' version of Firefox for Android smartphones. The mobile version of Firefox, codenamed Fennec, has until now been restricted to Maemo Linux handsets. But following a surge in developer effort, Mozilla has unveiled a build for handsets running Android 2.0 or above. Mozilla is making no guarantees about the browser's stability. 'It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot,' writes Mozilla developer Vladimir Vukicevic on his blog. 'Memory usage of this build isn't great — in many ways it's a debug build, and we haven't really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Hill spotlights a study released by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which concludes that companies relying on fair use generate $4.7 trillion in revenue to the US economy every year. The report claims that fair use — an exception to the copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted materials — is crucial to innovation. It adds that employment in fair use industries grew from 16.9 million in 2002 to 17.5 million in 2007 and one out of eight US workers is employed by a company benefiting from protections provided by fair use (PDF). Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) says the reasonable fair use of content needs to be preserved; otherwise, content owners will control access to movies, music, and art that will no longer be available for schools, research, or web browsing. Lofgren tied the copyright issue with the question of net neutrality. Without net neutrality 'content owners will completely control and lock down content. We're going to be sorry characters when we actually don't see fair use rights on the Web,' says Lofgren. 'If we allow our freedom to be taken for commercial purposes, we will have some explaining to do to our founding fathers and those who died for our freedom.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On April 15th, Microsoft terminated Xbox Live support for the original Xbox console, marking the end of online multiplayer for many older games. However, a group of Halo 2 players have refused to give up online play by leaving their consoles on and connected since then. Overheating consoles and dropped connections have taken their toll, but at present, 13 players are still going strong. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Do you remember the email you got to tell you that your jre had a vulnerability? No? What about the fact that Java 5 is in an end of life phase. Given the time it has taken for Java 7 to appear its has somewhat slowed the normal EOL pace of the Java platforms. You may not know that Java 1.4.2  for business will be supported commercially until April 2018,  which is kind of mind-boggling. Thats like offering support for Windows 95 even now. At some point you should move and I would recommend most developers to be at least on Java 6 as its going to be around for a while. Normally when your team releases your own applications as long as things are working the only reason to change exist underlying or dependent software is either to take advantage of new features or due to forced obsolesence by the provider of that software. Its difficult for an engineer or project lead to provide evidence as to why you need to update an application or what are the steps required to even upgrade if you wanted to. How quickly does your AMI , VMware or Azure image get out of date, who is even checking it? If I look at the Java platform itself and really many of the main platforms, PHP, Ruby, .NET , perl, python etc, the pace of innovation has slowed. There obviously is still growth but its still chasing smaller footprints with apis in quick fixup mode after the first set of developers have released products. My team has created a free service based on some technology we released over 5 years ago to check your Java platform and application and provide recommendations on what would need fixing and what you need to do next. It basically is a 5 minute scan and the reports are available to print out to show your boss. if you are interested head on over to http://quality.spikesource.com .

An anonymous reader writes "As well as taking an active part in OFCOM's code of obligations in regards to the ill-conceived Digital Economy Act (the UK three-strikes law for filesharers), niche ISP Andrews & Arnold have identified various loopholes in the law, the main one being that a customer can be classified as a communications provider. They have now implemented measures so in your control panel you may register your legal status and be classed as such." Another of the loopholes this inventive ISP sussed out: "Operating more than one retail arm selling to customers and allowing customers to migrate freely with no change to service between those retail arms, thus bypassing copyright notice counting and any blocking orders." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "ArenaNet studio head Mike O'Brien has posted his vision for a new type of MMORPG, which they used in developing Guild Wars 2. Quoting: 'MMOs are social games. So why do they sometimes seem to work so hard to punish you for playing with other players? If I'm out hunting and another player walks by, shouldn't I welcome his help, rather than worrying that he's going to steal my kills or consume all the mobs I wanted to kill? ... [In Guild Wars 2], when someone kills a monster, not just that player's party but everyone who was seriously involved in the fight gets 100% of the XP and loot for the kill. When an event is happening in the world – when the bandits are terrorizing a village – everyone in the area has the same motivation, and when the event ends, everyone gets rewarded.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

siddesu writes "Large retail stores in Japan were ordered a week ago to stop selling Apple products online (Google translation; Japanese original). The comments in the Japanese business newspapers suggest that Apple believes online shopping confers an aura of 'cheapness' on their products; but surely killing the Apple store's competition must have entered into the calculation. As of today, most of the largest retailers have notices on their Apple catalog pages asking you kindly to visit the shop if you want to acquire a piece of magic. It seems that for the moment the campaign is aimed at the big fish, as smaller shops still seem to be selling Apple products." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dragoniz3r writes "Activision has been served a lawsuit from 38 plaintiffs, including present and former Infinity Ward employees, demanding up to half a billion dollars. The plaintiffs are seeking compensation for 'unpaid bonuses, royalties, profit sharing and future profits from games such as Modern Warfare 3 and punitive damages.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FESI Research Program Overview FESI is the Free and open source software Enterprise Solutions Institute. We are a research program designed to study tomorrow's internet technologies as a means to teach folks in the local workforce how to use technologies our customers will likely want to implement.  We also perform this research to prepare local engineers with the knowledge and skills to help introduce newer technologies into existing enterprises.  Finally, the integration code we create will be uploaded to java.net and available to everyone under the GPL. To achieve these goals, we will roll out our initial research in three phases: phase one we will complete setting up the research program and introduce members to some of the core technologies we work with, phase two we will construct a web-application using well established technologies, and phase three we will begin replacing the well-established technologies with cutting edge (but proven) technologies. To get involved please email me or send an e-mail to fossesi.md@gmail.com Phase one Phase one is currently under way.  This blog will be where we tell the world how things are going.  Java.net will be where we host our project and source all of our completed code.  Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook will be used to further help promote our efforts.   We will also use this time to recruit more researchers to FESI. We will invite new members into our program to use the Camel tutorial introducing them to many of the technologies we will be using.  Once we have established all of the administrivia, phase one will be complete.  Phase two Phase two is a planning and rapid implementation process.  We will create a sample application using a well-proven existing technologies. To do this we will:

• implement a schema, triggers, stored procedures and views on a relational database (either MySQL or Oracle),  
• employ a middleware product to serve numerous java servlets, and old-school struts applications,
• use hibernate to act as a bridge between the database and the middleware tier, and
• use the web as our presentation layer. 

Phase two should not last more then a couple of months, as the folks who are interested in FESI will already have experience using these technologies. Phase three Phase three will be spent planning the conversion of the servlets and struts applications into a series of endpoints. To do this we will:  

• replace the struts router with Camel routing and mediation,
• convert all of the EJB's into endpoint applications,
• replace backend RMI with JMS,
• replace the middleware product with Apache Felix,
• replace the relational database with Cassandra, and
• move all stored procedures, triggers and views into Java Pojos.

Conclusion The hands-on approach of actually performing the work on a sample application will teach the skills necessary to fill positions that are opening up at many of our local customers, and will provide the knowledge necessary to help steer the customers in the direction of technologies that work.  Our integration code will be available to the general community, and hopefully will serve as the basis for similar conversions. This is the initial plan subject to changes based on the desires of the research participants. I expect this program it to take the better part of a year to complete. 

My masters colleague, Guilherme Hobold, and his friend, Elinton Machado, have created a very interesting project for helping Java ME applications with dependency injection. Actually, it is not only for Java ME (CLDC), but because of there is no reflection, they have done some magic to make it work in a nice way. The project is called DIME, which means Dependency Injection for Java ME. Basically it has a XML to configure the beans (it depends on kXML lib for parsing), a container to get the beans and the classes have to implemented a Bean interface that provides access to the hash table that is used to set the correct values. The XML file uses the same notation as Spring. Here is some sample code that I got from the project page. XML file (also supports map and other types).                                                                   element1                         element2                                                                         movies2.txt                               Make a bean: import java.util.Hashtable; import org.dime.Bean; import test.collection.FooList; public class Foo extends FooAbstract implements Bean {       private String filename;       private FooList fooSet;       public String getFilename() {             return filename;       }       public void setProperties(Hashtable properties) {             filename = (String)properties.get("filename");             fooSet = (FooList)properties.get("fooSet");       } } Load the XML file and get the bean: BeanContainer container = new ClassPathXmlBeanContainer("file.xml"); Foo foo = (Foo)container.getBean("Foo"); System.out.println(foo.getFilename()); Very nice job! Take a look in the project page for more information. Take a try! http://dime.dev.java.net Cheers, Bruno Ghisi

On April 28th, 2010, we will be kicking off the first phase of FESI's research.  This where we set up the project, and start to get our hands dirty. Attached is the flyer we will use to promote FESI and what we're trying to accomplish.  Hopefully it will help us get the word out to the local community. Also as the kickoff, we'll be participating with a networking group that meets monthly.  I honestly dont' think a ton of folks will sign up for FESI tomorrow night, and that's really not the point.  The kickoff is the start date of FESI.  We can look back on this date in years to come as the birth, the place where it all began, and a date to celebrate our accomplishments in the future. Good luck, and we're looking forward to seeing you there!