Java

Java Database Best Practices 180

Posted by timothy from the makes-perfect dept.
ProfKyne writes "I was excited to read this book when I first noticed it listed as "coming soon" in the Java section of O'Reilly's site back in May. I downloaded and read the sample chapter and waited expectantly for the book to be released. I was hoping that this book would be perfect for me, as nearly all of the Java programming I have done has dealt in some way with database access, though I do not consider myself to be an expert on the subject. The book didn't disappoint; Java Database Best Practices is an excellent high-level guide to writing database-driven applications from Java." Read on for the rest of ProfKyne's review.
Programming

Opensource Code More Refined Than Closed? 270

Posted by CmdrTaco from the no-surprise-here dept.
zonker writes "In this poorly titled cnet story (as opposed to an earlier story stating a similar theme), a company named Reasoning says that at first open source code has marginally worse quality than closed source code of the same maturity, but it tends to become better refined through the open-natured development process than closed source. They mention Apache and Linux as examples, however they don't mention the 'competitors' they tested against by name. ."
Security

A Critical Look at Trusted Computing 278

Posted by timothy from the long-hard-look dept.
mod12 writes "After just attending a two-week summer program on the theoretical foundations of security (one of the speakers was from Microsoft research), I have been interested in trying to find out if the "trusted computing" initiative was still alive. I got my answer today in the New York Times from an article that was fortunately rather critical of the concept."
Programming

The Bug 273

Posted by timothy from the one's-enough dept.
Trevor Stow writes with the review below of Ellen Ullman's The Bug. "The Bug is about a programmer, Ethan Levin, at a software start-up in the mid-1980s, tracking down one particularly irksome bug in his own C code. The longer this bug eludes Ethan, which his co-workers start calling the 'The Jester,' the more destructive its effects on his personal life. The Jester is this story's villain, one that can't talk, eat, get tired, or be reasoned with." Read on for the rest of Trevor's review.
Java

Struts 1.1 Released 23

Posted by Hemos from the building-it-better dept.
Evil Grinn writes "The long-awaited release of Struts 1.1 has finally happened. See the release notes for all of the changes since the last Release Candidate and also since Struts 1.0.2. Many new features are available in a stable production release for the first time today. Congratulations to the entire Struts team."
Encryption

Kerberos Support In OpenSSH 122

Posted by Hemos from the broader-support-a-good-thing dept.
Dan writes "Marshall Vale writes on behalf of the MIT Kerberos team and several other parties interested in the availability of Kerberos authentication for the SSH protocol. Kerberos is a network authentication protocol. It is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography. Marshall says that Kerberos support within OpenSSH may be incomplete and needs more work. In particular, implementing draft-ietf-secsh-gsskeyex in addition to any other Kerberos mechanisms will better serve the needs of Kerberos community. Secondly, he says that they would like to reduce user confusion associated with all of the different options for Kerberos and SSH. He suggests adoption of the GSSAPI key exchange mechanism in the IETF draft (which uses Kerberos to authenticate both parties to each other), in order to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks."
PHP

PHP 5 Beta 1 398

Posted by michael from the php-is-good-for-you dept.
Sterling Hughes writes "The PHP development community is proud to announce the release of PHP 5 Beta 1. Downloads are available in both source and binary form (for Windows users). A full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog. Some of the new features include much improved OO support, completely revamped XML support, and the default inclusion of SQLite."
Announcements

Europe's Largest Linux Event Draws Nigh 126

Posted by michael from the always-wanted-to-use-nigh-in-a-story-title dept.
steman writes "On the 10th of July 2003 LinuxTag begins, the largest Linux event in Europe. It will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany. Four days will be packed with up to 20,000 visitors, over 120 exhibitors (including more than 30 Free Software orientated projects such as FFII, BSD, KDE and Debian), coding marathon and many conferences (including specialist business and government conferences). Best of all, in the spirit of the Free Software Movement, it will be largely free (entrance, and many conferences are free)."
Java

Java 1.4.2 Released 74

Posted by michael from the half-and-half-2.0-coming-soon dept.
peterwilm writes "Sun released Java 1.4.2 today. It includes many enhancements and changes among them the native look&feel for Win XP and GTK 2.0 as well as support for Itanium 2."
Programming

Floating Point Programming, Today? 111

Posted by Cliff from the learning-new-techniques dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm rather new with programming and stumbled across these twe articles: The Perils of Floating Point from 1996 and What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic from 1991. I tried some of the examples in these articles with Intel's Fortran Compiler and g77 and noted that some of those issue reported no longer seem valid whereas quite a few still very much are around. Could someone, please, give me a pointer to some newer thoughts and/or new facts surrounding floating point programming. What has been improved since those articles were written? What is still the same? How is the future, especially with the new platforms IA64 and AMD64? I am most interested in the x86 and x86-64 architectures. Thank you for your kind help."
Microsoft

Appeals Court Sides With Microsoft On Java 517

Posted by michael from the sweet-and-light dept.
burgburgburg writes "Reuters reports that the three-member federal appeals court in Virginia ruled today the U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz erred when he ordered Microsoft to include Java with the Windows operating system. Fortunately, Dell and HP, the top 2 PC makers, have already decided to ship Java on the PCs that they sell. Apple, Red Hat and Lindows have also agreed to include Sun's Java." The ruling is available.
Java

Building a Stable and Clustered J2EE Environment? 43

Posted by Cliff from the sharing-sessions-between-multiple-machines dept.
royles asks: "I am working with several J2EE Application Servers and all seems fine until I start to scale and cluster. The goal is to ensure a web and EJB session is maintained across a pool of Application Servers. The level of complexity to achieve this straightforward requirement is proving too much. It quickly becomes evident that vendors claims of 'robust and scalable' go straight out the window in favour of extortionate support and consultant costs when the installation becomes large. Anybody else experienced this type of problem? What are other peoples experienceâ(TM)s in this area? Any recommendations on Application servers that âdo what they say on the tinâ(TM)? Any good online resources for achieving a highly scaled and robust solution?"
Hardware

AudioScience GPLs Hardware-Abstraction Layer 22

Posted by timothy from the making-noises dept.
Rob Dye writes "According to an article at RadioWorld Online, AudioScience has GPL'ed their hardware abstration layer that allows access to the DSP power provided on their audio interfaces. Stating that 'Linux is becoming more important to the broadcast and professional audio industry,' they also released full documentation for this code and intend to release ALSA drivers for their boards. This is terrific news for professional sound under Linux, especially considering the reluctance of video card manufacturers to open their HAL's."
Programming

ICFP 2003 Programming Contest Starts June 28th 33

Posted by timothy from the warm-up-your-swedish dept.
mvw writes "The web pages for the ICFP 2003 programming contest are online! It starts Saturday, 28th June 0:00 GMT. As the time zone hints, this year it is organized in Sweden." From the rules page: "All programmers are invited to enter the contest, either individually or in teams. The contest offers direct, head-to-head comparison of language technology and programming skill. We have a range of prizes for the winners: cash awards, books, invitations to the conference for students, and, of course, unlimited bragging rights. The prizes will be awarded at ICFP 2003 in Uppsala this August."
Java

Industry Leaders Discuss Java Status Quo 390

Posted by michael from the two-lumps-with-cream dept.
prostoalex writes "JavaPro magazine published a wrap-up report on Java discussions at the recent JavaOne. If you missed JavaOne, the video Webcasts of McNealy, Schwartz, Gosling et al. are available from this site. The round table mentioned above gathered people from Sun, Oracle, Borland, Novell, Motorola and others. The discussion topics included: Java vs. NET, integration issues, the impact of open source and top problems that Java is facing today."
Java

Red Hat Plans Open Source Java 422

Posted by simoniker from the jump-java-and-wail dept.
sthiyaga writes "According to a ComputerWire article, Red Hat is in discussions with Sun about launching an open source version of the Java platform. 'There's always been an interest in an open source implementation of Java developed in a clean room that adheres to the Java standards,' Szulik told ComputerWire. 'We're in discussions with Sun. We'd like to do this with their support.'"
Perl

Perl Design Patterns - Free Book 17

Posted by Hemos from the learning-more-about-it dept.
Scott Walters writes "Perl programmers and Java programmers have a lot to learn from each other. Perl 5 is providing more and more optional stricture, and Perl 6 is expected to provide stricture by default and other goodies as type safety. Perhaps better named "Stupid Perl Object Tricks", Perl Design Patterns proves that a little design, a little computer science, and some style are nothing to fear. This is dedicated to all of the newbies screaming, "The code is fine! Just tell me what the bug is!", and to all of the talented programmers who think Perl deserves a better reputation. Object::PerlDesignPatterns on CPAN is updated less often but has a fatter pipe."
Linux

Linux Router Project Dead 835

Posted by timothy from the hand-of-fate dept.
An anonymous reader submits: "The Linux Router Project is no more. This single-floppy distro was a great tool for building a number of simple super-low-cost network devices. The maintainer has a lot of bitter words about its demise, and it is sad to see it go."

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