Spare a thought for a poor suppressed CEO. Scott McNealy has told reporters that the reason Jonathan Schwartz has become Sun's unofficial blogger-in-chief is that McNealy himself is not being permitted to start one. 'They won't let me start a blog,' he said, referring presumably to Sun...

'It must be the lunar eclipse. I'm agreeing with a lot of statements being made in the industry.' With this opening line, Sun's president, COO, and blogger-in-chief yesterday shared his thoughts on software pricing, on 'multi-core computing' as being the wave of the future, and on inte...

Some of you may remember a time when the world of multithreaded programming was limited to a small set of C or C++ applications. Often the threads were used sparingly and restricted to a specific task or computation or even operating system.

'There are those that persist in trying to draw the industry as filled with binary extremes,' writes Jonathan Schwartz, currently the industry's highest-profile blogger. But it isn't an either/or choice these days, Schwartz argues, in his latest effusion. It isn't open-source or propri...

'I've got the same job, the same big mouth.' In vintage McNealy fashion, that was the Sun supremo's answer to USA Today this weekend when it asked him whether - with Sun president and COO increasingly becoming the public face of the company - he was 'stepping back.' McNealy also said:...

You know how to write good Java code and deployment to a server is no mystery either. But have you ever had to work in large development teams, maybe geographically dispersed (off-shoring...)? Ever had to address the pain of application software updates?

'To call Sun proprietary is as big a lie as you could put in your newspaper,' Sun's CEO Scott McNealy told a reporter this week. 'If I were to say IBM is bankrupt and you were to publish that, that would be the same as saying Sun is proprietary.'

Is the Java certification program offered by Sun really the route to a higher salary and better quality of code for businesses? William Knight has his doubts. In his fifth year of Java programming, after being involved in several distributed developments for large companies, a prospect...

Any business-savvy engineer knows that algorithm improvements come at a price: the engineer's time. But what about asking programmers to be a little more lazy? Warren MacEvoy chews over some of the technology issues of the day and offers his own suggestions.

The PeopleSoft board's worst fear at this point may not be that Oracle buys the company but that it doesn't - or that PeopleSoft won't go for the $21 a share currently on offer. is that why one of its directors testified last week that PeopleSoft might now be open to Oracle's overtures...

In an out-of-court settlement reached this morning, pending the signing of a final agreement, Sun has agreed to pay Kodak $92 million cash, bringing to an end the patent infringement proceedings instigated by Kodak last week, in which Java was declared by a federal jury to breach certa...

At JavaOne 2004 we gave a presentation on Java game development that included general framework information and tips and tricks on using the media APIs effectively. We also showed an application named 'Ping' that demonstrated some of the ideas we discussed.

'Software is more complex than a cotton gin or whatever else you might typically invent in a bricks and mortar world,' argues Groklaw.net Editor Pamela Jones. 'Software and patents don't belong together,' Jones maintains.

Three US patents - 5,206,951; 5,421,012; and 5,226,161 - could end up costing Sun up to $1.06 billion in damages, in the form of lump-sum royalties, if Eastman Kodak Co. gets its way in federal court this week. On Friday Kodak won its patents dispute case - which centers on the middl...

These days Calvin Austin is one of the busiest people in the Java world: J2SE 5.0, that was also known as the 'Tiger' project, is being officially released today! JDJ's Yakov Fain was able to catch Austin, spec lead for Java 5.0, right before the plane from San Francisco to New York wh...

Sun has proposed a new specification that would be based on the convergence of two other specifications, EJB 3.0 and JDO 2.0. The effort is aimed at providing a unified data persistence model for the Java community. What is proposed is a Plain Old Java Objects (POJO) persistence model.

'Thank-you, everyone for developing, deploying, and improving the Internet,' writes Roger Strukhoff. 'Thank-you Tim Berners-Lee for realizing its power. But no thanks to everyone who has overemphasized it, paradigmatically hyperbolized it, obtusely not gotten that it doesn't matter if ...

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...

'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...

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 me...

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 su...

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...

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 te...

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 mode...

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,' ...

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 a...

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 Lomb...

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 ...

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, bu...

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,...

'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...

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 a...

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 im...

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 Fo...

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, univer...

'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). 'M...

'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 opti...