Windows 7 is here, and mysteriously, the Vista SP2 download has disappeared from windows update. What does this say about Vista that we didn't already know?

In the world of animation, Apple's web page is "lagging". It's an interesting example of how not to depict a real time event stream in a non-realtime environment.

The REST architecture style includes several points of interest. One of them is a "uniform" or "fixed" API. There is a subtle issue with that. I don't really think that this concept is what REST is all about.

The Java keyword, synchronized, is the simplest form of concurrency control in Java. With the advent of the work by Doug Lea and notible others on the new java.util.concurrent package, there are more tools. When dealing with highly contested resources, distributing the locking is key.

The Java Metadata Interface available in the Netbeans 5.0 and later platform is powerful. But, the API could be simpler. I've been putting together a helper class.

I am finishing up a rather large application that needs some JMX management capabilities. I've got a lot of classes that need to be MBean enabled, and I really don't want to go through and change them to inherit from StandardMBean.

There are several different things about desktop drag and drop that are interesting. I've been using several things in my JiniDesktop class in my http://startnow.dev.java.net project. Here's an extracted example of all the pieces.

We have JSE (J2SE) java.net/java.io, JME (J2ME) connectors and java.nio. It would be great if Dolphin could consolidate things.

Sybase's implementation of PreparedStatement does not use Statement.clearWarnings() automatically on repeated uses. This results in the accumulation of SybSQLWarning and SybSQLResultSet objects, one pair per call use.

I recently noticed in JRE1.5 that HotSpot is yanking loop controls as invariant when not marked as volatile. Have you encountered this?

I've been working on an enhancement to Jini servce lookup in my reef project over on jini.org. I've still got more work to do before getting to the proposal stage. Here's where I'm at.

I've been an active user of Jini and Java for the life of these platforms. The distruption that Web Services is causing in the software industry is amazing. Is this an investment for good, or a cost that we'll wish we'd skipped?

The Python Challenge recently caught my attention and I thought I'd look at it to see what was up. I'm not sure I caught on to the reasoning behind it, but I still played with it, for a while...

Ben Galbraith has a great swing related webcast at JavaLobby which has a lot of good information about swing. He covers my Packer Layout Manager, and I want to reinforce some of the things he covered.

I am finishing up the remote LogManager monitoring facilities in my http://logman.jini.org project and I'd like to share some interesting details about the implemenation.