David Herron .com

 Last week Apple released their latest product destined to change the world (the iPad).  At least that's what they want us to believe.  Perhaps the biggest controversy over the thing is the lack of Flash capability.  However this being java.net I have to wonder out loud, where is Java capability, and more importantly why isn't as much controversy being raised over Java being missing? But I think we all can enumerate some reasons for both being missing.  And it's worth it for the Java community to ponder this issue.

Unit Testing in Java provides a rather comprehensive introduction to using JUnit as a test framework to assist writing unit tests for Java code.

I'm drawing on several threads of thinking in several presentations and conversations this week at JavaOne, and am thinking the Java Community Process (JCP) no longer serves the needs of the Java ecosystem. I'm not the first to say this, not the last, but here's a few thoughts anyway.

The JavaOne opening keynote is still a fancy rock & roll show with fancy stage and the like. It's always exciting to see what they have to say, and they do a good job of spinning a story that Java is Everywhere.
The overall message is to convince developers that the Java platform is compelling, that Sun is providing this compelling ecosystem for developing applications, and that the developers can become uber-rich by developing applications for the Java platform.

This session is conducted by a pair from SonyEricsson, and they're discussing Java based rich user interfaces for "mobile" devices. As always the word "mobile" is overly constrained to mean "cell phone" which is to me a misnomer because "mobile" could clearly mean other kinds of devices than cell phones. There are lots of portable electronics devices which would do well to have a light Java stack but for some reason the JavaME community focuses on cell phones only.

So, hmm, Oracle+Sun. Interesting twist from the IBM+Sun matchup earlier. There has been numerous rumors over the years about SUN+xyzzy mergers such as Fujitsu, IBM, SGI, Apple, etc. And it's finally come to Oracle. It seems there's a lot of scratching of heads over what this will mean for the open source software projects run by Sun, and of course the back of my mind has been pondering the effect on the OpenJDK.

I've been gone from Sun for a little while now but of course I'm still interested in Java, and thankfully still have access to this java.net blog. Anyway the recent news about IBM pondering buying Sun has piqued my interest.

To me the potential hookup seems like a bad idea. Sun plays a useful role in the computer industry as an independent company, that would be lost if woven into IBM. And the tremendous overlap between Sun+IBM leaves me scratching my head over what they could be thinking.

We've been working legal ropes for awhile to get this result: Sun Approved: Merge from BSD Java to OpenJDK. There was a funky little legal snarl in that the BSD Java team has been working on Java ports to xyzzyBSD...

Neil McAllister asks Java is free at last. Now what? and seems to take the position that while Java is a very successful technology that since "The Linux community, in particular, has long viewed Java with ambivalence" that perhaps achieving...

Ted Neward on the demise of Java applets is an interesting look back in history (interview on the Sparkling Client podcast). The Java Applet was the first of the RIA platforms, long before Flash became the king of RIA, long...