At the last JavaOne I did a walk-on talk during the AMD keynote where I talked about how incredible HotSpot’s performance had become – beating the best C compilers. I ended my talk with a joking comment that “the next target is Fortran”. Afterwards, Denis Caromel of Inria came up to me and said “you’re already there”. He and some colleges had been working on some comparisons between Java and Fortran for HPC. Their final report Current State of Java for HPC
has been made available as a Tech Report and makes pretty interesting reading. There are a lot of HPC micro benchmarks in it which look great. Thanks!

I’m a web developer who has design and programming experience. So, VB, ASP, PHP, Coldfusion, Perl, even C and C++ I have in my belt. I also use Dreamweaver and/or do a lot of my HTML/XHTML/JavaScript coding by hand. So, the DOM, DHTML, etc, all good to me and even OOP thinking and design I have when I code. And I even have MySQL and other databases, again, not an issue here. So, my weak point is — Java — I see so many jobs out there with J2EE, Hibernate, Eclipse, Netbeans. Beside the obvious, which is to learn Java the core language, I don’t know where else to go from there. There is so much! What should I read? in what order? What software do I require? UML? Swing? I mean, what is the curriculum required for someone to say they are a solid Java developer? Even assuming I have to go through Java itself, what are the good books out there?

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Nicros writes “I work for a publicly traded biotech company that happens to write software that is, in fact, kind of critical for the business — without it no data would ever be read from our instruments, and no analyses would be performed on that data. The problem is that as a ‘biotech’ company, we are not taking software quality seriously. We have no senior management with any history of commercial software development — our C level has really no clue whatsoever what software really is, much less what is going on in software development. All of our quality processes are related to manufacturing our system (not software), so we are constantly forced into ad-hoc development since there is no real process for our development. Repeated requests to hire someone with some real commercial software development experience have gone unanswered. I have been to the CEO directly one-on-one and although he agreed this was an issue, thanked me, and said he would look into it, that was the end of it. He has bigger things to worry about. So the question: Is this just a fact of life and I need to deal the best I can? What else can I do to get some attention on software quality in the company?”

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Here’s a list of the Ajax components available for the Sun Java Studio Creator 2 IDE with brief descriptions of each component and, where applicable, graphical examples. You can run the Flower Store sample application to see the Ajax components in action.

A 15-minute video series of interviews with experts from Sun and elsewhere to explore how Ajax and Java technology converge to simplify the creation of auto-complete, form validation, data refresh, and other dynamic Web application functions.

Find out how a new feature in JavaServer Faces 1.2 supports multiple render kits in a single application.

The W3C’s Web API Working Group is chartered to develop standard APIs for client-side Web Application development and is working on documenting the existing XMLHttpRequest interface, a core component of what is commonly called AJAX. Read about it.

Do Ajax apps present more of a server-side load? The question is dangerous because it’s meaningless and unanswerable. Read an article on sys-con about the provocative weblog entry by Sun’s Tim Bray.

Gosling Outlines the Trouble With AJAX
Q&A: James Gosling believes Sun is leading the way to enabling developers to incorporate Asynchronous JavaScript and XML components into web applications. But building those components is another story. In an interview with eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft, Gosling discusses some of Sun’s highs and lows in the software business. Read
the article.

These components leverage the Dojo Toolkit and make use of the JavaServer Faces PhaseListener approach for serving up JavaScript files and handling Ajax requests on the JavaServer Faces server. This approach was innovated by the Blueprints and JavaServer Faces teams and generalized in the Shale Remoting library, which these components leverage to great effect.