A nameless submittor dropped this in my inbox: "I've heard people comment that Java Servlets are better than Perl CGI scripts. I've also heard the counter comment that while Java Servlets beat Perl, Mod Perl beats Servlets. I don't want to start a flame war, but I'm like to see the meat of this debate. Which is the better tool for server side web development? This is an area I'm about to get into and I'd like to see the pros and cons of each." I won't comment, if I did it would show my obvious Perl bias.

In celebration of Y2K, the PHP Project has released the long awaited latest version of PHP: 3.0.13. Included with this release are loads of additions and fixes. Now that's reason for a toast!

gark writes "The Java Lobby has a weblog on Java success stories. Many of the successful applications are servlet based, and several use Apache JServ. Perhaps WORA [write once, run anywhere] really has been achieved, at least for server apps."

EmilEifrem writes "A JavaLobby member asked RMS ^[?] about his opinion on Java and GPL. Interesting, as always." I think my favorite quote is the intro: "It is strange to argue for ensuring compatibility in Java by keeping implementations non-free. Even if you accept the choice of values (compatibility above freedom) this idea is based on, which I don't, it simply won't do the job."

Khalid pointed us at a LWN story that talks about a member of the Blackdown team resigning from the Java Porting effort following all the recent craziness surrounding Sun and Java and Blackdown. Kevin B. Hendricks is a tenured professor who was working on the project for fun, announced his resignation, and pointed out several problems with the way Sun handled this whole thing. Its a good bit to read to get a more inside perspective.

Swordfish asks: "Despite the avid discussion of the merits and vulnerabilities of the GNU lincense, almost no one discusses the Perl Artistic License in slashdot. Why is there so little discussion of the Artistic License? It seems to me that the GNU License allows forking, but all forks must be free. The Artistic License seem to allow commercial, closed-source forks. But if preventing forks is important, GPL doesn't seem to stop it. So why not just use the Artistic License? Then the authors can some day make money out of a commercial fork if they need to pay the bills!"

LinuxGrrl write to us with a ComputerWorld.Com story regarding the recent hoopla of the Sun/Inprise JDK. Sun has apologized to the Blackdown team.

ZioPino writes "JBuilder Foundation is a free, fully functional Java IDE. It's available for download now at the Inprise Web site. This version is 100% Java and runs on Linux, Solaris and Windows. There is also a very cool debugger. "

An anonymous reader pointed us to a story over at ZD Net about Sun withdrawing Java from the ECMA Standards body. They say they want to protect the "Integrity" of the company's investment in Java.

John Regehr sent us an excellent review of Mastering Algorithims with Perl, another O'Reilly & Associates effort. Written by Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi, and John Macdonald, this is a book designed to take your Perl to a new level of wizardery.

An anonymous submittor droped this in the inbox: "A Linux Today story talks about how Sun repackaged Blackdown's porting of JDK 1.2.2 and called it their own. Even the script wrappers for this thing are the ones Steve Bryne wrote for the Blackdown effort and even have the name of the Blackdown developers in it. This is ridiculous! Is this what happens when corporate meets open source?" We all knew something like this was going to happen eventually. Hopefully Sun and Inprise will realize their mistake and take steps to correct it. If they do not, though...what steps can the Blackdown team take to protect their work?

A reader wrote to let us know that Sun has announced Release Candidate 1 of the Java 2 Platform. It's the 2nd Edition, v 1.2.2 for Linux. It was co-developed with Inprise and supposedly includes all of the features in the Java2 SDK for Solaris and Windows. Note: You have to be a member of the Java Developer Connection to get the download.

Thanks to Arjen for sending a review of O'Reilly's Perl CD Bookshelf. The bookshelf is a collection of O'Reilly's well-known Perl books, complete with searchable information.

Linuk writes "The following message from the Visual Studio product manager says that MS has not sold VJ++. It's all a mixup with the Visual Studio integration program." We ran this story on the subject. Others ran similar ones. Please hit the link; it'll clear everything up.

Nathan Frund asks: "VIM has been my mainstay for writing code/HTML/config files etc for a long time. But VIM doesn't hightlight JSP syntax. I've become accustomed to the syntax highlighting and can't go back to not having it. I've tried various modes for VIM but none of them really do the trick. XEmacs doesn't support it either (I haven't found where it does or even the resources to make it highlight jsp syntax) and I really don't have the time to become a VIM or an Emacs expert to write the modes from scratch. My question to all of you, What editor(s) are you using to write Java Server Pages? "

Several people submitted this, but Nate Williams was first. In his own words: "As head of the current FreeBSD/JDK porting development team it's been difficult to finish our JDK2 efforts due to lack of help from Sun. In order to try and make JDK2 on FreeBSD a reality, we are lobbying Sun using a RFE (Request For Enhancement) on the Java Developer network to demonstrate to them the number of people interested in seeing FreeBSD as a supported Java platform.". Read on if you're interested in seeing more complete Java support on FreeBSD.

Quite a number of you have written in with the word that IBM has released Visual Age for Linux v3.0. As well, a number of you noted that v3.0 came out for Linux before certain other OSes *grin*. As for obtaining it, you can't get it for free but you can come pretty darn close - get on VADD for $50 to get VAJ for Linux. Happy Coding.

John Kenneth Grytten writes "Be and Sun have announced that they will be working together to bring Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition and PersonalJava to BeOs." They expect to have betas ready by the end of the year, with shipping versions going out 1Q 2000.

Long-time reviewer Jason Bennett has sent a review of the official Sun tutorial on the new Swing GUI package called, not surprisingly, The JFC Swing Tutorial. If you are learning Java, use Java or want to learn Java, click below to learn more about this new book.

at0m asks: "Perl seems to be the language that most people use for CGI programming. But is there a good reason for it? Sure, it's easier to use Perl than a lower level language, but programs would be more efficient if C/C++ were used. Programmers don't sacrifice this efficiency when programming applications, so why is it the standard to use a higher level language for CGI, when one wouldn't use one for other programs? I've been using Perl for all my CGI projects, but for my next one I'm contemplating using C++ to make it more efficient. did I make the correct assumption?" Most CGI apps prefer development speed over the complexity inherent in C/C++, which is why Perl and other scripting languages are used. Your thoughts?