A few weeks ago at JavaDay 2006, a nice one-day conference organized by Sun, I’ve had the pleasure to meet James Gosling. James is the main creator of Java, and as I’m leading the Groovy project, and that the conference was happening in Versailles, city of the former French kings reknown castle, it’s like two language kings were meeting there!

The picture taken on the left is from Chris, my friend and former colleague. Read his blog, it’s full of great content! Of course, you’ll have recognized James on the left, and me on the right… and not the reverse order ;-)

Remember Floyd Marinescu? The founder of TheServerSide? He’s now working hard on a new community news site which has just been unleashed/unlaunched: InfoQ. InfoQ is a community of communities delivering news, articles, interviews, presentations, opinions, and even mini-books on various topics targeting an audience of software and technical architects, project leads and managers. Currently, five communities (or main topics if you prefer) are available:

• Java
• .Net
• Ruby
• SOA
• Agile

What’s nice about this concept of communities is that you can very easily subscribe or browse only the content you’re interested in. Moreover, those communities are handled by some famous and reknown contributors, like Scott Ambler for the Agile section, or Obie Fernandez for the Ruby part. The personalization goes even further, because you can also select some sub-topics / tags specific like Architecture, Modeling, Domain-Specific Languages, etc. That’s an orthogonal clustering of information. And with all these nice aspects, everything is so… Web 2.0 ;-) Full of AJAX everywhere, but for the best, not just for the shiny and trendy aspect of it.

As a gift for mentoring students for the Google summer of code 2005 around some project ideas for Groovy, I just received a nice tshirt roughly on time for Christmas!

There are often some issues that can waste several hours of your precious time: XML parser incompatibilities depending on your platform and application, i18n problems where several elements of your architecture aren’t configured well to serve correct encoded and localized content, class loader hierarchy nightmares, or even Jar Hell when different libraries you depend on require different versions of the same jar. Today, I’m going to concentrate on the first problem: XML parser issues.

My friend Christopher just told me a very old bug in the JDK has eventually been fixed in Mustang!

UTF-8 encoding does not recognize initial BOM

Java does not recognize the optional BOM which can begin a UTF-8 stream. It treats the BOM as if it were the initial character of the stream.A Utf-8 stream can optionally beign with a byte order mark (see, for example http://www.unicode.org.unicode/faq/utf_bom.html). This is the character FEFF, which is represented as EF BB BF in utf-8. Java’s utf-8 encoding does not recognize this character as a BOM, though; the result of reading such a stream is a set of characters beginning with FEFF.

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We’ve got PIM applications, all sorts of PDAs, rich client GUIs or webapps on the internet or behind the corporate intranet’s firewalls. There’s the MDA approach to generate apps from datamodels, orapplication generation engines that build applications dynamically thanks to the interpretation of a metamodel. All these applications and interfaces to store all kind of data, personal or business related, generally sports a fixed and frozen structure. New developments are always needed for evolving your applications, and costly redeployments and interuption of services are often triggered.

Sometimes, there are some unlogical choices that are being made: JBoss chooses JSPWiki as a base for their Wiki portlet in JBoss Portal. They choose to fork and trim JSPWiki (rather than contributing to it) to be able to embed a Wiki engine in their portal as a portlet. Fine. But why not choosing XWiki? XWiki:

• is a member of the JBoss Open Source Federation,
• can already be integrated in JBoss Portal,
• and moreover can also be integrated in any portlet container (The proof is that the eXo Platform already embeds XWiki as a portlet).

That’s weird, isn’t it?

Okay, Google released its Google Talk client and its related services. This all sounds good and well, but alas, for us, poor corporate users, we have yet to figure out if it’ll ever work through our nasty proxies (with authentication) and firewalls (port 5222 should be opened?). I’ve tried tweaking the proxy settings myself, but it didn’t work. Unfortunately.

On paper, Google Talk certainly looks promising, taking into account the great services Google have come up with so far, but there’s really not much more than other competitors already provide. And in fact, we have yet to see the great features not available anywhere that we all expect from Google. We’ve become pretty demanding users… (and as we say in French “Qui aime bien châtie bien”).

At out last OSS-Get Together meeting in Paris last thursday, we’ve had the chance to have Thierry Templier, a Spring modules and a Jencks commiter, make an introductory presentation of the Spring Framework

On our wiki, he made available two powerpoints in French:

• a big 118-slides presentation on Spring,
• and a specific one on Spring and JCA.

That’s a lot of content to read for those of you speaking Molière’s tongue.

Moreover, on his blog, he’s got a very interesting entry explaining how to inject Groovy beans with Spring or how to access CICS transactions from Spring!

Call me a geek, but I’d really love to buy me one of these little Wifi rabbits. The Nabaztag rabbit is a 23-cm high white rabbit with moving ears, and a set of flash LEDs of different colors. You can pair it with another rabbit so that when you move the first one’s ears, will automatically make the other one move its ears accordingly, even if your in another town or country (as long as you have a permanent DSL connection). Nabaztag can sing songs, or through some service subscription, he can react to the stock market trends, or to the weather, flashing in yellow when the sun is shinning.