Tag: java

In the current trend of reducing J2EE application development to the simplest possible form, Plain Ordinary Java Objects, POJOs, the Wicket project is aiming to allow Java developers to build web apps also using POJOs.

Wicket’s feature list is pretty impressive. The approach to development is that the HTML pages are just that, plain HTML, and the Java supporting the pages are POJOs.

From looking throght the examples though, there is still some package and super class hierarchy dependencies on the Wicket framework, so I wouldn’t say that the Java code is pure POJOs, but it does look a lot cleaner than Struts.

I didn’t know Limewire was still around (I had a look at it out of curiousity quite a while ago), but Hans Muller in his blog on the java.net site mentioned that this Java app is picking up a lot of momentum.

It’s currently up to 1.4 million downloads a month – thats a huge number for any app, but its a truely massive number for a Java application. Hans mentions that on download.com, it’s currently 3 times the downloads of WinZip, 10 times RealPlayer, and about 20 times Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Java 1.5/5.0 introduced a new pacakge of concurrency utilities (based on Doug Lea’s Oswego package) that offer far more granular control over threads and their synchronization. java.sun.com have an interesting article that introduces these new features.

James Gosling and Graham Hamiliton introduced modifications to the Java platform’s licensing structure and terms on Wednesday. The main change is the introduction of the JRL, Java Research License which is geared to supporting contributions to the Java language from the community. It’s still not open source as Sun is still in control, but it’s opening the door for some flexibility at least.

I personally don’t think that Sun should release Java as open source – to do so would introduce the possibility of the language branching in many different directions. Although initially this may seem like a good idea to encourage innovation, at the same time you would end up with a platform with many incompatibilities, and the great benefits of Java (write once, run anywhere) would be gone.