Greg Luck writes his impressions of OSCON 2005, in Portland, Oregon, USA.

At OSCON 2005 there was a lot of interest in Ruby. Ruby is the hot new? language popularised by Rails. Rails is derived from/inspired by Basecamp.

What was more surpising to me, as a Java developer, was the way Java has come in from the cold. There were lots and lots of Java sessions. The daily keynotes discussed Java. Last year there was little Java and the year before that none. Two open source Java stacks, gcj/classpath and Apache Harmony had sessions and generated a lot of excitement. The Apache Geronimo guys announced Geronimo M4 which passes the J2EE 1.4 TCK, and is open source. Java seems to be front and centre. In many other sessions constant comparisons were made with Java. Java is the reference language…

Read Greg’s complete report:
Greg Luck’s WebLog: OSCON2005: Ruby is hot, Java is cool, C# is neither

IBM releases XML toolkit for Java providing native XML features to the Java EE 1.4.

IBM XML Enhancements for Java, part of their Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK), has released a tool for providing language extensions to J2EE 1.4 to support XML, XML Schema, and XPath in Java.

This is unique because it uses a Java language-based approach to developing XML applications. Through integration of Java and XML, the extensions simplify the development of XML-based applications and enable developers to reuse existing Java libraries when developing XML code.

Integration with XML at the language level is a feature supported by Groovy, and currently being debated by Java heavyweigts for inclusion in Dolphin. (JSE 7)

XML Enhancements for Java 1.1 released

/. prostoalex writes “It’s been ten years since the official introduction of Java - a programming language combined with virtual machine and a class library. ZDNet published an interview with James Gosling, the creator of Java, who talks about the project’s past, present and future.”

* Slashdot | James Gosling on Java

Also see:
* News Focus: Sun serves Java

[tss] Joseph Ottinger wrote: “Timothy Cramer, Director of Engineering for Netbeans, was interviewed by TSS, focusing on Netbeans’ adoption rate, positioning, future capabilities, and - of course - comparison with Eclipse“.

* Interview with Netbeans Director of Engineering Timothy Cramer | TheServerSide

Michael Urban wrote “One of the biggest frustrations with GUI design in Java is struggling with layout managers to get complex forms to look good. However, that will all soon be a thing of the past. ”

“…Think he is using absolute positioning? He’s not. That’s a new feature called Matisse. What is so magic about it? Matisse lets you design your form as if you were using absolute positioning. You simply drag your components to where you want them and set them to the size you want by dragging. NetBeans takes care of figuring out what layout managers are needed, and of writing all of the code for you to make your form look the way you design it using ‘Drag, drop, and stretch’…”

See example Flash demo and get more info on the Matisse GUI Designer at Javalobby at the link below.

* Coming Soon: Magic in NetBeans Form Designer. | Javalobby.org

Also see:
* Project Matisse is coming! | Netbeans.org