Java Today

Bean Properties M1 Release
The bean-properties team is "proud to announce the release of milestone 1 of the bean properties API and implementation as part of our roadmap for a full scale release in 2008. Bean-properties is one of the first and most extensive Java properties implementations that requires no language change or bytecode instrumentation. Bean-properties allows RoR like productivity while maintaining Java's hallmarks of type safety and compiler checking." A Web Start demo of Bean-properties is also available (requires Java SE 6).

Interview With Java Champion Heinz Kabutz
The SDN has launched a series of interviews with Java Champions, with the first installment, Becoming a Better Programmer: A Conversation With Java Champion Heinz Kabutz. Kabutz is best known as the creator of the free Java Specialists' Newsletter, targeted to expert Java developers. Since its inception in November 2000, the newsletter has grown from an initial audience of 80 friends and colleagues to, after 150 issues, one that includes more than 30,000 programmers in 114 countries.

Java, the OLPC, and community responsibility
In a new editorial, Java, the OLPC, and community responsibility, Javalobby founder Rick Ross seeks to rally the troops to help get Java on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computer. An OLPC wiki page says that Java is not to be included due to a lack of a fully open-source, usable version, and Rick says "This is one of those rare moments of opportunity, and we should not let it pass us by. The Java community could make a meaningful contribution to this amazing and worthwhile project. I hope you will think it over and decide to get involved. There are so many times in life when we feel powerless to change things, but in this case your help could make all the difference."

Weblogs

The first "Java Agri-Meeting"...
A few months ago, just returned from Jazoon, a few italian JUG leaders and members started thinking about a strange fact. In spite of a quite large number of JUGs and of the relative short distance among them (usually 100-200km), we keep on meeting only abroad during events such as JavaPolis or Jazoon and we seldom do in our country.  —  Fabrizio Giudici

JXSE 2.5 : What's Cool #6 -- PeerGroup Executor and ScheduledExcutor
The concurrency utilities provide several flavours of task executors. The Executor and ScheduledExecutor classes provide a convenient way to execute tasks without the overhead of the normal Thread lifecycle. For JXSE the use of Executor is a very good fit. —  Mike Duigou

Why ROI vs. SOI (read "REST vs. SOAP") Still Matters
Much to the chagrin of Web service engineers, the REST vs. SOAP debate still lives, and the discussion is not going to die anytime soon. The fundamentals of the debate go beyond superficial rivalry--they are architectural in nature. In order to design a sound Web service API, these principles must be confronted. —  Ryan Heaton

Forums

Re: Nimbus issues
Why does that happen? Because, under Nimbus, an empty JComboBox has a different height than a JComboBox that has at least one item. When you insert a few items, the JComboBox expands its height in order to have space to show the current item, but the dialog doesn't expand along with it. IMHO, the fix for this would be having empty JComboBox'es have the same height as those with at least one item.  — 

Re: Is there any Pie chart widget
Yes there is !!!! We've added plotkit support to the jMaki Charting Project located at https://jmaki-charting.dev.java.net/. I'm still working on some docs and a test app but you can find the work in progress here. I hope to push out a really nice samples and docs within a week. — 

Re: event handlers in jsr 226
The problem, as you've stated, is you need pointer events and so it will work on a touch tone phone. On other phones you need to create your own focus management and synthesize the pointer events. This Picture decorator demo does its focus management, using a cursor. It keeps track of where the cursor is, and gives focus to the element beneath it, when the select button is pressed. The code for this demo is available [here]. —