Digital Espresso Digest Highlights from the popular weekly Java newsgroup summary A special to JavaWorld
Digital Espresso (or DE, as we've come to call it) is a weekly summary of all the traffic related to Java in the news groups and mailing lists -- and anything else we can get a hold of. Our readers like to keep track of the discussions and the information provided there without the need to sort out the 2,000 or more messages that roll in each week. This week, we've got stories on making money with Java, a summary of the survey of our readers we have been conducting for several weeks, news about Java for the Mac, and the usual assortment of bug reports, questions, comments, announcements, and other tidbits that make our reports interesting reading for all. We hope here to give you some of the flavor of material you'll find in DE, and hope that you'll visit the full edition (http://www.io.org/~mentor/DigitalEspresso.html). Some of the entries below are abridged.
Stop the press! Java for the Mac has arrived The long-awaited JDK release for the Mac is out! You'll need a 68030 or PowerMac running System 7.5 with at least 8 MB of real memory. (Disk footprint: 7 MB). You can download it from one of the URLs listed in http://www.javasoft.com/JDK-1.0/Mac-Beta1/index.html. There are, of course, some known bugs. One of the more glaring ones is the lack of sound support (though method stubs are there). Another seems to be related to memory use: It takes more than it uses, and it doesn't deal gracefully with low memory conditions [crash, bang!]. More when we know more... Features The $64,000 question hawkins@onramp.net asked if there was anyone actually making money writing code in Java. javaprog@best.com says that he's been getting lots of requests from people asking for free applets. In his opinion, there's all too much free Java work out there. A couple of people replied that Java will be huge so give it time, etc. Surprisingly, there was only one positive reply. Are all the Java programmers too busy writing code to talk about it? We're curious, so send us mail if you'd like to tell us how you're benefiting from Java now (especially it it's making money!), and we'll write up a summary for next week. We promise to be discrete. The Digital Espresso survey of the Java community Some time ago, we asked our readers to let us know who they were and what they liked or didn't like in Digital Espresso. The results make interesting reading, especially if you believe as I do that the readership of DE is typical of the Java community as a whole. First, they seem to think we're doing a pretty darn good job, with precise and accurate summaries -- not too fat, not too lean. Announcements, bug reports, and feature items are most popular, with FAQ candidates and discussions close behind. The readers themselves are well-educated and well-heeled. 84 percent hold a university degree, and 44 percent of these hold a Master's or Ph.D. Over half (53 percent) of all respondents earn $50,000 (US) per year or better, and half of these earn $75,000 per year or better. Almost three-quarters of DE's readers live in North America (64 percent in the US and 8 percent in Canada), but a healthy proportion of our readers live elsewhere: 5 percent in Australia, 3 percent in the UK, 3 percent in Germany, and the rest in various other parts of the globe. About a third consider themselves adepts or even experts. Most (62 percent) are interested in developing Java applications, but some are interested in investment or in studying Java academically (about 15 percent each). Three quarters see Java being used to develop tools, while just under half see it being used to develop entertainment applications (and the same goes for education or marketing). That about 40 percent see Java's principal use in tool construction should therefore not be surprising. What does this mean for Java? Some of it merely satisfies our curiosity, but it's interesting to see that Java is not seen principally as a mere extension of our entertainment industry, for one thing. For another thing, it's comforting to see that the people most likely to influence where Java goes (the people who read DE) appear to know what they're doing (if education is any guide). Columns Announcements The source release for JDK 1.0 is now available. You can get ftp instructions right away if you already have Beta source and a Fax on file - just send email to licensing@java.sun.com telling them you want a 1.0 license and that you already have Beta source. They'll email you if there's a problem. If you haven't yet signed a source agreement follow the instructions in http://java.sun.com/source.html. Discussions Memory requirements ericg@unixg.ubc.ca was unhappy with the final Netscape Navigator 2 release, since it uses 6 MB of virtual memory on a machine with 8 MB of real memory (and therefore crashes a lot). He observed that most new PCs still come standard with only 8 MB (this having only recently been increased from 4 MB), and thinks that this is the wrong foot for Java to start off on. k-hamer@uiuc.edu reports a totally different experience: no serious problems with 50 Windows and Sun machines (though there are regular crashes with a PowerMac). He adds that 8 MB is certainly too little, and that this is merely an instance of manufacturers foisting underpowered machines on an "unsuspecting public" (i.e., they'll have to upgrade for decent performance anyway). chapman@grizzly.cs.washington.edu notes also that "Netscape is swappy on a 16 MB [Windows] 95 machine." blawley@ix.netcom.com uses N2 on a PowerMac, and finds that it is reasonably stable. Two more discussions you may find interesting include "Trojans and virii?" and "Sun's Java Chips." Bugs and warnings A couple of interesting bugs this week: one in Netscape and one in the Java compiler: fred@wipinfo.soft.net reported what appears to be a nasty bug in the compiler. It seems you can declare a variable and a method with the same name if they're in a certain order (variable, then method). The compiler complains about a "Duplicate variable declaration" if you reverse the order of declarations! [As I understand the specs, a name should uniquely refer to a variable or a method, but not both.] Thus, class Foo { public int foo = 10; public int foo() { return 20; } } will (incorrectly) compile. Swapping lines 2 and 3 causes the compiler to produce an error message. Chuck McManis (cmcmanis@golfweb.com) says Netscape has a bug having to do with forms. Apparently putting an applet and a form with a "choice" box on the same page drives Netscape crazy -- it never finishes rendering the choice box. [I've had the same problem on a Windows 95 machine, and I thought it was the JavaScript I was writing. BTW: This is still a problem with Netscape 2 Gold Beta.] li@deming.jpl.nasa.gov says the problem does not appear on Suns. Comments elincoln@onyx.idbsu.edu reports that the US Presidential home page "uses a Java program to wave a flag on either side of the central whitehouse picture..." Neat! At last, Sun has commented on the concerns about intellectual property that the net has expressed. The Java Cup International's FAQ now includes a statement about these rights, and why Sun wants you to sign over your rights to them, rather than waiving them. Apparently, some of the 41 countries in which the contest is available make it difficult for the rights to be waived, so the assignment is required instead (where possible). Of course, the immediate response from the net was "why not make explicit in the contest rules that Sun will make the code and applets available to all, for free?" Still, the implication that this is tantamount to placing the code in the public domain is unmistakable. For complete details about the confusion surrounding Java Cup, see the February SunWorld Online article Tempest in the coffee pot. Queries Martin Alley wants to have a ServerSocket applet that will listen on a specified port number of the client machine. He would use the SecurityManager to restrict connections to this port to only those from the host machine. He's getting a security exception when he does a listen(). He asks, "Can you see what security risks would be incurred by allowing this?" Arthur van Hoff (avh@netcom.com), who recently left Sun to help form a yet-to-be-named startup company, says this sounds like a reasonable thing and has submitted an RFE for this. New applets, services, and products Team Java has posted its first "Java the Hut" featured applet, which is an online casino. Eric Ries, the author, is looking for help in improving the user interface and would like develop a mechanism to save a player's status for return visits. The organization Jade has been created to promote and protect the interests of Java developers. The primary goal: Help Java developers create licenses for their applets. Neville Franks is looking for a few serious Java developers to beta test a Java IDE for Windows 95 and NT. Send him a note describing your Java interests, what assistance you can offer, and what country you're in. FAQ candidates Why does the interpreter print junk when I use DataOutputStream.writeDouble()? (or .writeFloat(), ..., .writeType() generally.) Simple. Each of these functions is intended for efficient interchange of information with another program or system, and so the information output is in binary form. To output the data so that a human can read it, use System.out.println() or one of its friends, such as double foo = 2.345; System.out.println("foo is "+foo); Class exchange paul.haggerty@corp.gdc.com is looking for classes that implement SNMP management functions in Java. He'd also like to correspond with people interested in network management uses/issues.

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Digital Espresso is prepared by:
Mentor Software Solutions, Wm D. Clendening, Mike Shaver, Rehan Zaidi, R.E. Fikki, and David Robinson.

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Last updated: 15 February 1996