It's hard to find great Java applications.

Next month's JDJ contains our Editors' Choice Awards, and so far for me it has the feel of a repeat - even though I decided to focus on applications I've been using day-to-day outside my own personal development environment. That's frustrating.

I think that we - the Java developers - are creating programs and environments that are good across the board - but rarely great. I try to reserve my awards for those things that I don't consider "adding" to my development or deployment environment - they are my environment. They're the standard things I run without thinking about it.

That said, I tried to reevaluate everything from the viewpoint of someone who wasn't used to having my particular toolset at hand, by stepping back and saying, "Would I really like this tool so much if I hadn't been using it for so long? What would I think, coming in as someone unexposed to these programs?"

The results aren't encouraging. To be sure there are a few standouts, and a few programs that sort of come close, but picking three packages that need no qualification or justification is very, very hard. The problem, as I see it, is that Java creates applications that are typically above average...and that's it. To use a sports analogy, Java applications would almost always place in the top five, but rarely win the championship.

That doesn't mean Java isn't worth working with by any means. Placing in the top five consistently would be a marvelous thing, to an organization like the Atlanta Hawks or the San Diego Chargers, both typically woeful teams. It still begs the question, though: How do we get Java over that hump, to create programs that really shine, not just from a user interface perspective but from the user's perspective?

Plenty of people have tried, and it's always getting better to be sure, but I don't know if the attempts made so far quite have the "it" Java needs.

We need to find a way to inspire passion for and with Java - apart from the invective hurled in all directions over SWT and Swing, JDO versus EJB versus Hibernate versus SDO, and Sun's licenses.

On other topics, I'd like to welcome Karl Avedal and Calvin Austin to the editorial troupe at JDJ.

Karl is a longtime acquaintance and one of the two founders of IronFlare, the company that created the Orion Application Server. He left IronFlare a year ago and is now working on a research project on creating and using domain-specific languages. In addition to all this, he's served on several expert groups within the J2EE field and has co-authored two J2EE books.

Calvin, no slouch himself, is the J2SE 1.5 specification lead and the lead engineer on Sun's Java on Linux port. He's been at Java Software since 1996 (before I even started using Java!) and co-authored Advanced Programming for the Java 2 Platform (Addison-Wesley).

Both of these guys are great assets to JDJ and I'm looking forward to working with them. I think they'll be able to contribute quite a bit to the magazine as a whole, and both have seemed happy to be able to serve in an editorial role.

Think long term, and enjoy. :)