Can something be considered to be 'open source' if some organization stays in control of the standards that the software implements? In other words, is 'Open Source/Closed Standards' a good idea? Yes, says LinuxWorld editor-in-chief Kevin Bedell, 'I believe this should be fine. It's to everyone's benefit to allow open source implementations of standard APIs while preventing fragmentation of those APIs, he contends. 'For example, if Sun were to want to release Java under an open source license, this may be the type of license it would choose,' Bedell adds.

'Apparently it is popular to bash Sun and J2EE,' notes Rick Hightower. But 'JSF does not deserve it,' he adds. Hightower finds JSF a lot more productive than Struts: 'I was amazed how fast I could crank things out. The only other framework I would consider using instead of JSF would be Tapestry. In short, I dig JSF.'

If methods with the same signatures or member variables with the same name exist in ancestor and descendant classes, the Java keyword super allows access members of the ancestor. But what if you do not use the keyword super in the descendant class? In case of methods, this is called method overriding and only the code of the descendant's method will execute. But when both classes have a member variable with the same name, it may cause a confusion and create hard to find bugs. Recently in one of the Java online forums, a user with id cityart posted a question about a 'strange behavior' of his program, and I decided to do some research on this subject.

For Java developers, Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is the only standard interface to Database Management Systems (DBMSs). As JDBC has evolved, the number of ways to connect have increased. JDBC 2 added capabilities for compatibility with J2EE. JDBC 3 generalized the structure to support Enterprise Information Systems (EISs) other than DBMSs, including messaging services.

It was vicious fighting about standards that slowed the growth of the first railroads 200 years ago. Back then the issue was gauges. The wireless industry is more complicated than railroads ever were, so it is a major boon that every major carrier in east Asia and Europe - the two most advanced wireless regions in the world - uses Java.'For the developers to spend the capital required to deliver innovative applications like mobile wallets,' argues Alan Brenner, 'they need a standardized rail gauge - and that rail gauge is mobile Java.'

We have all read that objects are software representations of real-world entities and that one of the first design tasks is identifying these entities in our problem domains. These entities then become classes of our applications. However, the object-oriented paradigm allows us to model not only entity objects, but any abstract concept for which behavior can be identified.

Mike Jacobs follows up on his previous article 'Bringing Mars Down to Earth with Java3D' with this new exploration of the basics of creating a Java3D terrain world. He looks at possible approaches to creating that world and covers the foundational Java3D data structures suitable for terrains, and how to completely generate landscapes with fractals.

The question 'How will Sun ever make money off giving so much source-code to open source' - as it did in 2000 with OpenOffice.org, has most recently with Project Looking Glass and is about to again with Solaris - is the wrong one, argues Sun's Simon Phipps. 'It's a good question,' he says, but at its heart - he argues - 'lies a misunderstanding about the nature of open source software, and once that's cleared up everything falls into place much more easily.'

It was bound to raise the hackles of Java developers around the world when writer-programmer Paul Graham last month wrote, in a widely circulated essay called Great Hackers: 'Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero.' Here Sachin Hejip responds to Graham's controversial assertion.

The Web Tools Project (WTP) consists of two major contributions, one from IBM and the other from ObjectWeb. The IBM contribution consists of pieces of their development tools for WebSphere while the ObjectWeb contribution is what was known as Lomboz. In this initial article, since Lomboz has great online documentation, Bill Dudney focuses on the IBM contribution.

What do a CNET technology columnist, 95.5 million telephone handsets, and Sun's president and COO all have in common? Answer: they all strongly favor Java. Is it a sign of better times ahead for the language once known as 'Oak'?

Stand by for a week here at LinuxWorld in which Sun and Novell are mentioned in the same breath in all sorts of ways. Both have big bets in place on Linux; both spend a great deal of time and energy engaging open source; plus there's the little matter of the speculation that Sun might even acquire Novell. Unless IBM does so first. There's never a dull moment in the Linux world.

Despite the rather 'rushed' feel to Release 2, the Sun Java Desktop System is slowly shaping up into a serious corporate competitor to Microsoft Windows, reckons Jerason Banes. 'Many managers will probably decide that they wish to stick with their Windows laptops for the time being, but they'll probably drool at the opportunity to replace the rest of their very expensive Windows infrastructure,' he says.

The Geronimo project, which aims to develop an open source, certified J2EE server that is ASF licensed and passes Sun's TCK reusing the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today and adding new code to complete the J2EE stack, will not make its August 6 launch date. Maybe in September, though, says project chair Geir Magnusson Jr.

'There are finally some smart people at Sun thinking about doing things right,' says Daniel Brookshier. With its innovative pricing model, he adds, Sun's Java Enterprise System 'might give JBoss a run for their money.'

Should Java be open sourced? What would the verb 'open-source' actually mean if it were? What would be lost, if anything, in terms of safeguarding the compatability of Java, if Sun moved toward more of an open-source model? What innovation and energy might be lost to Java if it doesn't? These questions were asked and - in part - answered this morning, from multiple perspectives, at 'The Big Question' keynote debate at JavaOne in San Francisco.

Much has been said about the limitations of HTML, coupled with the HTTP request/response model, for delivering the user interface of Web applications. These limitations revolve around the page-centric and stateless nature of the Web, HTML's limited number of user interface components and metaphors, and the absence of smart client-side data manipulation.

Scott McNealy held court yesterday at JavaOne, giving a keynote presentation in which he was more subdued than usual, but which covered every issue from Sun's hardware and software offerings to its position on open source. JDJ editorial board member Bill Roth was there to record his impressions first-hand.

Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of its breakthrough visual development environment, Sun Java Studio Creator. Java Studio Creator is the first Sun product to be released under a revolutionary new subscription model as part of the Sun Developer Network program.

JDesktop Network Components (JDNC) has been released by Sun as an open source project, so that the technology is available to the community early enough to allow it to directly shape the vision, the feature set, and even the code. 'There is still a lot of work to do,' says Sun's Amy Fowler, 'the JDNC feature set is far from complete and there remain rough edges, especially in the API, which has not had extensive usage outside of unit testing and markup-driven use-cases. But, that is exactly why we need your involvement.'

Might Eclipse one day soon make OSes irrelevant? Thought of until now as being a Java-centric initiative, the Eclipse Foundation under its new executive director releases Eclipse 3.0 today, with its ambitious sights firmly set on making it not just an IDE but a language-neutral, universal application integration platform. 'If you have not been following the milestone releases of Eclipse 3.0, it's definitely time to download a copy and get started,' says JDJ's Eclipse Editor, Bill Dudney.

'I don't view this informal querying of a job aggregator to be the end-all absolute truth, nor do I really view it as a scientifically sound study,' writes Brandon Harper as he makes public the results of an job-market survey using data from indeed.com (an aggregator for job sites). 'Mostly I found it interesting that I was able to search a large percentage of the jobs available in the US and wanted to compare some various technology related keywords.'

'I was sick of hearing people say Java was slow,' says Keith Lea, 'so I took the benchmark code for C++ and Java from the now outdated Great Computer Language Shootout (Fall 2001) and ran the tests myself.' Lea's results three years on? Java, he finds, is significantly faster than optimized C++ in many cases.

Just recently Gartner reported that IBM has overtaken BEA in application server market share. The interesting thing is that Gartner's expression of market share is in a single number, dollars. While dollars are certainly an important factor in declaring a market leader, is this an accurate measure of market lead? If it is, where does that leave open source offerings such as Jonas and JBoss?

If you do not really enjoy the process of creation of Web applications with JavaServer Pages, try Sun Java Studio Creator (JSC), which at the time of this writing is available as an Early Access release. There are several general reviews of this product on the Internet, but I'll show you how in less than an hour you can create a Web application with a logon page that performs database user authentication, and displays the main application page for a valid user.

Over the last several weeks I've received a few questions about remote debugging with Eclipse. I posted about this on my other article back in February but with not enough info for others to follow.

BEA confirmed today our exclusive reports from this morning, by formally announcing that it was open-sourcing, under the Apache License 2.0, the runtime to the WebLogic Workshop application development framework.

How can Swing be made more tenable to a broader range of developers? Amy Fowler, a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems and one of the founding members of the Java Swing GUI Toolkit, discusses Swing, JSF, and the Java Desktop Network Component project. 'Swing is indeed broad and fine grained, she says. 'This was intentional. We didn't want to limit the kinds of GUIs that could be developed in Java.'

How do five of IBM's most highly-placed executives, the five GMs of its Software Group, see the future unfolding in areas like grid and autonomic computing, security, systems management, application development, and SOAs? What's the current story with DB2, how do Tivoli and Lotus fit in with everything, and what's the role of Eclipse in the next generation of software and systems development? JDJ meets the upper echelon of IBM's management.

We've all heard the news: JBoss has received $10 million in funding and now it's time to sit back and mull it over. Without a doubt this infusion of capital is a signal of confidence for JBoss Group. But is this investment a good thing for open source? Not an unimportant question for those of us who have decided to use open source in our enterprise applications.

In what may or may not be just a high-tech April Fool, Google says it's launching a free e-mail service, leveraging Google search technology to automatically organize and find messages, and coming with a free gigabyte of storage.

The CEO of The Middleware Company - not surprisingly, in the circumstances - begs to disagree with Sun's Jonathan Schwartz. 'Saying that middleware is history is like saying our nation's highways, railways, and waterways are history,' he retorts. 'On the contrary,' Deshpande adds: 'Middleware is the future.'

Sun has just released J2SE 1.5.0 Beta1, calling it 'a major feature release' - new features since 1.4.0 include new language updates, a new JVM monitoring and mangement API, and improved out-of-box performance, says Sun's official announcement.

As Jason Bell pointed out in his editorial 'A Modern Day Cinderella' (JDJ, Vol. 8, issue 9), the spotlight is on J2EE and as a result many programmers are ignoring the foundation of the JDK. J2SE is the Java equivalent of C/C++ standard libraries. Here we deal with the lower-level entities, like the Number types, Integer, Long, Float, and Double.

In the world of IT, outsourcing - also known as 'offshoring' - is either the dirtiest word you can utter or a brilliant one; it's all about who says it to whom and where it is said. No matter who uses it, it is a word most often said in private.

Sun Microsystems, Inc has released today the following Open Letter to the Eclipse board and membership, pointing out key challenges that Eclipse will face, and suggesting a 'more serious' mission that would encourage Eclipse to work in concert with the Java Community and Javatools.org to make the Java platform a better, broader base for tools.

When the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, successfully landed on Mars on January 3, 2004, Java was there too. The Mars Rovers devices, developed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) development team in conjunction with Wind River, use the Java platform as a low-cost, easy-to-use option for the program controlling the Rovers' operating system.

'Network computing is at a tipping point, as the race to connect everything of value is driving widespread adoption of innovations like Java technology, and hundreds of millions, and soon billions, of devices get on the network and need to share information securely and reliably.'

As a follow-up to his knighthood, just received, read what Tim BL had to say about Java back in 1996...

In 1994 he founded World Wide Web Consortium at MIT, and in 1999 he became first holder of the 3Com Founders chair. Time magazine once named him one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th century. Now Queen Elizabeth II, his monarch, has made him a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Arise, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee!