Java

Exporting a Manila Site Using OPML

The RSS Advisory Board site now includes all of the articles, weblog entries, and comments from the group's old Manila site, dating back to the group's founding in 2004. I never got a copy of the old site's root file from Harvard, so I collected the content using an obscure but cool feature of Manila: All site content is saved in the discussion board as individual messages, each of which can be downloaded as an OPML file. For example, open this weblog entry from Craig Burton's Manila blog in ... (read more)

2007/04/11

Sun Sees the Light on Java Applets

I'm working on the next edition of Sams Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days, an 800-page monster that will cover Java 6 so thoroughly that all the other Java authors will stop writing their books and pursue retraining for a non-technical profession. (Computer book authors should talk smack like rappers. One of these days I'm going to start an East Coast/West Coast feud with Seattle's Glenn "PC-Diddy" Fleischman.) Ten years ago, the original edition of Java in 21 Days made a big deal out of Java ... (read more)

2006/12/11

NoWomenJustMen: The Roster at Most Tech Conferences

I heard from one of the organizers of the Spring Experience, an enterprise Java conference organized by NoFluffJustStuff that I criticized for assembling a 38-speaker roster than doesn't include a single female. He never responded to my request to run his e-mail in full, but this quote sums it up: We sought out a qualified speaker who was female. She is on your list. Unfortunately, she is in very high demand (as one would probably expect!) and in the end could not commit due to a scheduling ... (read more)

2006/10/07

Settlement Reached with Dave Winer

I've reached an agreement with Dave Winer regarding the Share Your OPML web application. I destroyed his original code and user data along with everything that was built from it and gave up my claim to a one-third stake in feeds.scripting.com. He gave up the claim that he's owed $5,000. I originally hoped one of us would buy the other out and launch the application, but we found a much stronger basis for agreement in a mutual desire to stop working together as quickly as possible. If Share Your ... (read more)

2006/05/02

Handling Numeric XML Entities in a Weblog Move

I'm exporting a Radio UserLand weblog to Movable Type for a client, turning Radio's XML archive of weblog entries into a Movable Type import file. I wrote a Java application that employs the XOM XML library to read Radio's weblog data. Some numeric character entities in Radio's XML data threw me for a loop: â (’), À (¿), Ž (é), ‡ (á) and — (ó). They were transformed -- either by XOM or the Xerces XML parser that it uses -- ... (read more)

2006/04/08

New Book: Programming with Java in 24 Hours

I just launched the web site for Sams Teach Yourself Programming with Java in 24 Hours, my 21st computer book since I began writing them in 1996. I'm not sure how this happened. I went to college to learn interpretive dance. This is the fourth edition of the book, updated to cover Java 2 version 5. I wrote the first in a 17-day haze in 1997, covering Java 1.1 and its class library, which is less than one-tenth the size of the Java 2 class library today. Over the years, the book has grown to 558 ... (read more)

2005/11/29

Displaying XML Data with PHP

I recently finished writing Sams Teach Yourself Programming with Java in 24 Hours, the fourth edition of an introductory book for Java programmers, which comes out in around two weeks. I've been given wide editorial license with the book, so it contains unusual projects like Lottorobics, a lottery simulation applet that demonstrates why "Win the Lotto" is a terrible retirement plan. The new edition adds chapters on XML and XML-RPC that use XOM and Apache XML-RPC, two great open source class ... (read more)

2005/09/21

Keeping Computer Books Up-to-Date

Charles Wright in the Sydney Morning Herald: With the number of blogs increasing at a phenomenal rate, more people than ever will find themselves dealing with the market-leading Movable Type. The Movable Type 3 Bible, from Wiley, gives you a thorough grounding in the complexities of a blogging platform that, on the surface, looks relatively easy to master but repays the effort required to learn about its more powerful features. Increasingly, these books are rendered somewhat out of date with ... (read more)

2005/06/17

Open Source, Insert Foot

As a Java devotee, I grimace whenever language inventor James Gosling expounds to the press on the subject of open source. In a story noting the 10th birthday of Java, Gosling said, "We did do it as close to open source as you could and still be a corporation." Last month, Gosling responded to an Apache proposal to create an open source version of Java with puzzlement: It's often difficult to get a good picture from the open source community of what they actually object to in what we're doing. ... (read more)

2005/06/14

Choosing a Programmer's Editor

A reader laments the difficulty of writing programs in a plain-vanilla text editor: I have a question that I can't seem to frame correctly. It relates to my inability to format nested punctuation (in any language, on any day). I would dearly love to see a quasi-visual editor which replaces the {{ ... }} with nested shading, and bold type used to identify classes, italics for variables, etc. etc. It clearly calls for a different approach to the text-bound, linear approach to coding. What would ... (read more)

2005/05/29

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