A few weeks ago, reviewer honestpuck looked at Head First Java , comparing it to O'Reilly's Learning Java, 2nd Edition. Now wcbrown writes with a review that starts on the other foot; he reviews Beginning Java Objects: From Concepts to Code in comparison with Head First Java. Read on for his review.

gstein writes "The ASF has announced the launch of the "Geronimo" project. Geronimo will be an Apache-licensed implementation of the Java J2EE specification; further, the ASF is committed to getting it certified as J2EE-compliant. The project is looking for developers interested in helping to carry this ambitious effort forward. See the original invitation that was sent out to many J2EE communities."

honestpuck writes "In the world of Perl there was once only the 'camel book,' held in perhaps as much reverence as 'K & R' among C programmers. It certainly appealed to roughly the same audience, those who wanted a short, sharp introduction to a programming language. It was with a problem that needed solving and a copy of the camel book that I started as a Perl programmer." Read on for honestpuck's review of another book he regards at least as highly.

An anonymous reader writes "The Open Palmtop Integrated Environment (Opie) project has announced its first 1.0 release. Having been forked from TrollTech's Qtopia environment, Opie has evolved into the most sophisticated free and open graphical user interface for Linux based embedded devices and PDAs. Opie features a sophisticated personal information (PIM) framework as well as several other productivity apps, extended multimedia capabilities and document model, networking and communication tools as well as multi language support for more than a dozen languages. Based on common industry standards like XML, Obex, IrDa et. al. Opie is capable of interacting with lots of devices ranging from cell phones to server backends. Opie is highly optimzed for mobile devices and tries to support the user with shortcuts and ease of use."

waieitch writes "A long-waited new version of the scripting language, Ruby 1.8.0 has just been released. You can download from here, and the changelog is available. With many new libraries, say dRuby, ERB, REXML, this version is doubled by 1.6.8 in size."

James A. A. Joyce writes "The title says it all. There's a tiny blurb over at dev.perl.org. Download Perl 1.0 here, for all of those nostalgics in the Slashdot audience! It's only 263KB, so why not give this piece of 1980s computing history a try?"

Mark Wielaard writes "The gcj team created a natively compiled build of the Eclipse IDE. The resulting binary starts up faster then with any traditional JVM since there is no virtual machine to initialize or slow byte code interpreter or just in time compiler involved. This means that gcj got a lot better since the last Slashdot story in December about gcj and Eclipse. Red Hat provides RPMs for easy installation. Footnotes has screenshots by Havoc Pennington of the Eclipse IDE with GTK+ widgets."

irabinovitch writes "Andrew Morton (Linux 2.6 kernel mantainer) and William Irwin will be speaking at SCALE 2x. You may remember last year's SCALE conference from a previous Slashdot posting ." SCALE will be taking place on November 22 of this year.

An anonymous reader writes "We're constantly hearing how the source based nature of the Gentoo distro makes better use of your hardware, but no-one seems to have really tested it. What kind of gains are involved over distros which use binary packaging? The article is here."

WildFire42 writes "The W3C has released their W3C WCAG 2.0 Standards (that's World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) for a request for comments before it becomes a standard. I've discovered quite a variety of geeks here that may access web content in a variety of methods, from screen readers, to Braille displays, to open captioning on streamed videos, etc. Web accessibility is still in its infancy (relatively), but is becoming a concern for more people every day. Once the WCAG 2.0 becomes a recognized standard (probably sometime in 2004), it will most likely be a concern for web developers, but the W3C still wants input from the public, to get a feel of the kinds of disabilities that have not received enough focus in the 1.0 standards. More information on the Interest Group is at the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative page. Your input and insight is needed!"

Jonboy X writes "CNet has an article detailing the resolution of a long-standing feud between open-source J2EE server vendor JBoss and Sun. It seems they've decided to break down and shell out the clams to be certified by Sun. Quoth Bob Bickel, JBoss's vice president of corporate development and strategy: 'Our core base of developers, a lot of them say they don't give a damn...But the reality is that a lot of big companies who are using this are moving into production.' JBoss gives away its server software and survives on support contracts."

steelem writes "The Washington Post is running a story about how the F-22 Raptor's software requires in-flight reboots. Apparently the 2 million line software project is 93% done. Knowing most projects I've been on, it'll stay that way for another few years."

leighklotz writes "The W3C has announced that XForms is now a Proposed Recommendation, after certification of one full implementation (open source Java XSmiles from Finland) and two more implementations of each feature (the Internet Explorer plug-in FormsPlayer and the Java standalone Novell xPlorer). XForms is the next generation of forms for the Web, and uses an XML-based three-layer model: data model, data, and user interface. XForms uses CSS for device independencence and is designed for integration into XHTML 2, SVG, and other XML-based markup languages. A host of other implementations are available or in progress, but my pick for most interesting is DENG, which is an XForms to Flash compiler written in Flash. DENG supports XForms, SVG, RSS, XHTML, and CSS. XForms is in consideration for other standards as diverse as Universal Remote Controls and the UK Government Interoperability Framework, and was developed with the participation of IBM, Oracle, Xerox, Adobe, Novell, SAP, Cardiff, PureEdge, and a host of other companies, universities, and invididuals."

An anonymous reader writes "Performance. It's the one aspect of the Java platform that continually takes abuse. But the overwhelming success of the platform on other fronts makes performance issues worth serious investigation. In this article, Intrepid optimizers Jack Shirazi and Kirk Pepperdine, Director and CTO of JavaPerformanceTuning.com, look at compilation speed, exceptions, and heap size tuning."

objectboy writes with a review of Chris Fehily's SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide, writing "This book teaches ANSI SQL-92 programming to database beginners and intermediates. The publisher, Peachpit Press, publishes mostly end-user and novice titles that usually go unnoticed by professional programmers. Its Perl and PHP books, for example, are of little practical or tutorial use to an experienced developer. In fact, I noticed this SQL book only because a junior developer was using it for a course. The book's table of contents, index, and a sample chapter are posted on Amazon.com. The book's official web site contains errata and other information." Objectboy's review continues below.

Rob Flickenger writes "While poking around on the Linksys WRT54G (one of the new Linux 2.4.5 based APs) at a SeattleWireless Hack Night session, we noticed a number of binaries in their firmware (including Zebra, PPP 2.4.1, and iptables to name three) that are released under the GPL, some of which are obviously modified. The question is, where is the source code to Linksys' modifications? Their "GPL Code Center" has the packages, but they are the pristine distributions, without any changes whatsoever. I've asked Linksys for clarification, but given Linksys' customer service reputation, I highly encourage other interested parties to ask them as well. More details are up on my weblog on oreillynet.com."

Yogijalla writes "SGI and OpenGL ARB just announced the OpenGL 1.5 specification, introducing support for a new OGL Shading Language. Also, check out the new Java bindings to OpenGL. OGL 1.5 is a step towards the OGL 2.0, already suggested 2.0 by 3DLabs." Also worth pointing out that OpenML SDK has been released as well.

proclus writes "The GNU-Darwin Distribution was founded to leverage the open source development dynamic and build the infrastructure for scientific computing on a new platform. Now GNU-Darwin is a major free software project, and the infrastructure, such as parallel computing and molecular graphics software is available to everyone via the web and on digital media discs. Check it out. Also, Apple has written up a story about it."

Joe Riedel writes "The first of a number of articles about the Abducted Engine is now up at JoeCodeGood. The site will be doing in-depth discussions and analysis of the Abducted Engine. The first of this series has some source code from this 3D game engine, including the NV20/NV30 backends, and vertex programs."

ctrimble writes "A bunch of folks on the pragprog Yahoo! Group have banded together to design and implement a 'pragmatic' programming language. Ostensibly, the language is informed by the principles in Hunt and Thomas's well-received book, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master but the purpose of the language is to help ease some of the pain of development and bridge the impedance mismatch between the academic aspects of a programming language and the discipline of software engineering. The design is still very much in flux. If you're a programmer, this might be a language you'll be using in a few years (or earlier). This is your chance to get in on the ground floor. What kind of features do you want the language to have? What are your PL pain points? Where could this language do better than existing languages?"