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Tuesday Oct 29, 2002

Triangle Dot-Net Users Group.

Last time I checked, it appeared that the Triangle Dot-Net Users Group was stillborn. But now, Tri-NUG appears to be cookin'. Recent speakers included Jeff Prosise and Jeffrey Richter, names I remember well from the bad old days of MFC and Windows API.

Eclipse tour de force.

The RTP Websphere Users Group meeting meeting tonight was great. Eclipse Product Manager John Kellerman gave an excellent talk on Eclipse and covered the Eclipse history, philosophy, capabilities, plugin architecture, and future plans. He went into great detail in his presentation and in his demo before he ran out of time. I've been using Eclipse heavily, both at home and at work, for over a month now and he was still able to point out lots of features that I had not even noticed. Great stuff. Go IBM!

RTP-WUG Eclipse presentation tonight!

Those in the Triangle area, don't forget the Eclipse presentation at the Websphere Users Group meeting tonight.

Carlos on Roller 0.9.6

Carlos likes the new Roller start page and suggests a much needed enhancement: a spellchecker. Also, Carlos noticed that cut-and-paste do not work in the Ekit HTML editor. You can fix that by putting the ekitapplet.jar in your JRE's lib/ext directory so that it is trusted and thereby allowed to cut-and-paste.

Wow, freeroller has been upgraded! I love the latest front page. . Finally, I can see at a glance which webblogs have a lot of viewership. As expected Rickard's one is on the top of the list. Speaking about improvements to Roller, I saw the otherday Jazzy an LGPL spellchecker written in Java. oh no...looks like this editor blew away what I was writing, furthermore, cut and paste doesn't seem to work.[Carlos E. Perez]

I'm not sure why Ekit blew away Carlos' writing, but I have noticed that the Java plugin can be pretty unstable. On my work machine, Mozilla locks up just about every other time I post with Ekit but on my home machine (same OS, same JVM, and same Mozilla versions) I never see this problem.

Java licensing changes.

Granted that I have not really been following this story since the Apache Sun relationship first blew up, this sounds like an important story:
"Starting Tuesday, it will be mandatory that licenses provide for the possibility of a clean-room implementation," said Onno Kluyt, manager of the JCP Program Office. "A specification leader must offer a test suite independently of the reference implementation. It is required, going forward, that the test suite be available free of charge so that organizations like Apache don't face the hurdle of a license fee." [eWeek: Java Licensing Changes Will Open Door to Open Source]

Java's advantages.

In response to Russell's dot-net rantations, Kevin O'Neill and Rafe Colburn listed some advantages of Java and J2EE over C# and Dot-Net.  I agree with many of the points on those lists.  I think that Java's cross-platform portability and huge collection of competing open source and commercial dev tools, runtimes, and servers give Java a tremendous advantage.  Even with this advantage, Sun is going to have to push Java hard, fix the problems and open things up even more.

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Copyright 2002-2007, David M Johnson (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org)

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