Otiose Cognitions

For those of you that are playing around with the JDK 1.5.0 Alpha release and were puzzled (as I was) about the mysterious mailing list that was mentioned without any instructions as to how to go about joining said list, it now appears as though the list is up and running. Instructions are now posted on the early access page. Better late than never.

I really find the new linux.java.net more than a little strange. Sun really seems to be trying to tie Linux and Java together but I don't see anything concrete beyond their own distribution and a lot of marketing fluff. If Sun really wants to leverage Linux & Java together they're going to have to relax their restrictions on the distribution of the JREs. How many free Linux distributions come with a JRE/JDK installed? Of course, this is partly because the JRE is not open source but another big reason is the requirement to license the JRE in order to distribute it which quite likely involves money changing hands. Not exactly something within the reach of someone creating a free Linux distribution. Strangely, I think Microsoft's .net is more likely to find a home on Linux than Java is by virtue of the Mono project. OSNews has an interesting article on this very subject. Sad.

Thanks to Blue Sky On Mars I discovered another Swing data binding and validation framework called JForm. The website, as with most (all?) projects hosted at java.net, leaves somewhat to be desired. The biggest ommission at the moment is javadoc. To be fair though, the author states that JForm is a work in progress. Does java.net not allow projects to stick a link to javadoc in the left-hand sidebar menu?!? Why do they have to waste a bunch of space with the useless Summary, Categories, License & Owner(s) table at the top of the main page? (This again, appears to be a java.net requirement, and not the fault of the author.)

I have to say I'm impressed by the new changes implemented over at java.blogs. It's great to be able to see a snippet of the actual post to better judge whether it's worth reading or not...