Raible Designs

Waterton Switchbacks

Sunrise rides are awesome. :-D

Sunrise Ride

It's gonna be a good morning!

RE: java.net's weblogs

Mike Clark does a little to answer my earlier questions regarding java.net's weblogs.

In addition to this personal blog, I'm also writing a blog on java.net, unveiled today at the opening of JavaOne.

How to maintain two blogs? Duplication is icky. So frankly, I'm not sure how this will work out yet. There will be entries on this blog that aren't relevant to the java.net audience, and vice versa. Javaish things are a subset of the entries on my personal blog. At any given time I'm fiddling with multiple languages and tools. I may actually post all blog entries here, then copy relevant entries to the java.net space. Better yet, I suspect that eventually java.net will be able to automatically slurp specific RSS category feed.

What I do know is that this will be my primary blog. If I write something on java.net, I'll let ya'll know. You can also snag my java.net RSS feed just to keep me honest.

Hmmm, java.net's weblogs seem to have some pretty good authors. They get a real big thumps up from me now that I see they have a Native Montanan blogging there!

Update: More good answers were left in a comment by James:

Some answers to your questions on both the Java.net site and on my blog.

Just the answers I wanted to hear I might add!

XUL vs. Sun's JNDC

Gerald Bauer wrote an interesting e-mail to the XUL-Announce mailing list a few minutes ago. I think it's a good read - and I'd agree - XUL should be the next generation of web-based UIs, not Java. Java has succeeded on the server-side - let's keep it there.

RE: Java Java Java

From the other Matt:

I dig the java.com site - the layout/look is very cool IMO. Christina must be making a bundle from Sun, eh?

JavaScript: removeChild HOWTO

I experienced a small issue this morning when trying to remove all the children from a <td> using the following:

// cells[i] is a td in a table
var kids = cells[i].childNodes;
for (j=0; j < kids.length; j++) {
    cells[j].removeChild(kids[j]);
}

This (for some reason) doesn't work. So, in the interest of helping others and getting picked up by Google, here's the solution (actually found via Google).

while (cells[i].childNodes[0]) {
    cells[i].removeChild(cells[i].childNodes[0]);
}

HTH!

java.net's weblogs

So Java.net has weblogs. Boring ones I suspect. Why? Because this seems to be a "corporate" portal and I doubt that these folks are going to wite about how cool their kids are or how nice their mountain bike ride was (a.k.a. stuff that's interesting). But that's the nature of weblogs - some are good, some aren't. Let me qualify that by saying that some weblogs are interesting to me, and some aren't.

After writing this, I did a little investigating and there are some good bloggers over there (James Duncan Davidson, RSS). There are a couple questions I have. Is the content moderated? Can these bloggers speak their true feelings (can they cuss) - or will Sun remove their posting. Secondly, will they maintain this as their primary blog, or will personal ones continue to be updated. Are we enterering the world of your work blog and your home blog?

Truth is, I probably won't even read them unless they get an RSS feed for all new postings like java.blogs has. I gotta agree with Mike, I'm not changing any bookmarks. But I would like to be convinced otherwise. Hey, at least they're trying - you gotta give them credit for that.

JavaOne: Java.net: The JCP alternative?

This is why observers are saying that Sun's new Java.net open source portal, which the company will unveil at JavaOne this Tuesday, may prove to be a strategically important move as Sun seeks to remain a vital force in Java standards development. O'Reilly, whose company is codeveloping the network of Websites in partnership with Sun and collaborative tools maker CollabNet, said that in Java.net, Sun is creating "a space that they don't completely control," in the hope of encouraging other vendors to become more involved.

As the focus shifts to Java.net, however, the JCP may become less important, O'Reilly said. "The community is to some extent routing around the JCP, and this site will to some extent accelerate the process," he explained. [Full Article]

[ANNOUNCE] Struts 1.1 Release Candidate 2 released

The Struts team is proud to announce the release of Struts 1.1 Release Candidate 2. This release includes some new functionality, but mostly just fixes for a number of bugs which were reported against earlier versions. The Struts Team believes that this release is ready for prime time, hence its designation as a release candidate.

The binary distribution is available at:

http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/struts/binaries/

and the source distribution is available at:

http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/struts/source/

In addition, the library distribution, which contains updated binaries without the sample applications, is available at:

http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/struts/library/

Details of the changes in this release are available in the Release Notes, which can be found here:

http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/userGuide/release-notes-1.1-rc2.html

I'll be updating both Hibernate (to 2.0 Final) and Struts (to 1.1 RC2) today, so I'll let you know if I find any issues.

Update: I found two issues. One is that Hibernate identifies itself as "Hibernate 2.0 beta 6" in its logging (should not have beta 6). The second issue is that the commons-logging.jar file that ships with Struts 1.1 RC2 is missing some .class files. I replaced the commons-logging.jar file with one from a nightly build of Struts I was using and everything seems to be fine. Without the update, I get no logging. I also found that Hibernate no long includes jdom.jar in its distro (it used to be there), the lack of it doesn't seem to impact anything (all my tests run).