Welcome to Java Geeks

Purpose

UPDATE: Well, it was going to be a freely-available forum for discussion, at least when I started the site up in 2000, but time pressures (and the fact that lots of other sites stepped up to do what I wanted to do but never got around to it, like TheServerSide or JavaLobby) sort of nixed that idea. At that point, the site became more or less a place for me to host my Java papers and content, but as I got more involved with the .NET community, my content was sort of split between here and its .NET sister site. Then, I decided, since the original flavor of the site wasn't going to be there, and since I was getting more and more into interopability content (which sort of defies the platform- based segmentation of the two sites), it was better to unify the two, hence the decision to create my personal home.

I'm in the process of migrating stuff off of the site, though I'll try to preserve deep links and keep the existing content in place. Be warned, though; all of these links are officially now deprecated, and you should switch your browser hrefs over to equivalents over at neward.net.

Note that this has nothing to do with the "Sun cease-and-desist" effort that they recently embroiled me in; if you're a regular reader of my weblog, you knew I was going down this direction anyway. I still want to hold on to the domain name, just in case, but for now, this site will slowly turn into a facade with nothing behind it.

Original Purpose

This site exists as a freely-available forum for discussion amongst experts on the Java^TM programming language and platform. It believes that only through the free exchange of information among experts can software development as an industry move beyond "art" into "science".

The "free exchange of information" concept espoused by this site should not be taken to be synonymous with the Open Source movement currently sweeping the industry; whether a decision is made by an industry professional to release source code for a project he or she has worked on is a personal (or professional) one. We believe that no person should be judged by the decisions they have made so long as they are willing to abide by the consequences of that decision. Instead, this site promotes the active discussion of concepts, ideas, patterns, and, where made available by the principals involved, code, in order to better all involved.

You can browse the papers, or get the online supplement to Server-Based Java Programming (as well as check out the book's official publisher website).

JavaGeeks

What is a Java Geek? A JavaGeek is somebody who spends way too much time working, writing, and exploring the Java^TM programming language and platform.

Who are the Java Geeks? A collection of individuals who contribute to this site.

What are the Java Geeks working on? A whole slew of interesting things; some of them include:

Attributes in Java: Java needs to expose a custom metadata facility. Ted and Anthony were working on just such a beast, under the auspices of the Java Attributes paper, but we're happy to report that the code (which has been languishing due to lack of attention) has been picked up by Mark Pollack and turned into an open-source project. See attrib4j at SourceForge for more details. Note that Joshua Bloch, of Effective Java fame, is heading up a JSR to do exactly this (JSR 175), and Ted is a member of the Expert Group.
SourceCheck: Anthony is working on a source-level semantic analysis tool, very much in the same sense as lint for C. Note that this is precisely the kind of tool that begs to be integrated into a check-in/check-out process, or even invoked directly as part of an Ant build.
Enterprise Jini: Another of Ted's pet projects is to work out the kinks in using Jini for enterprise systems (as opposed to EJB). Jini services would replace session beans, and entity beans would be supplanted by some other persistence scheme (such as raw JDBC, or else something higher-level, like SQLJ or JDO).
When Giants Sleep Together: Believe it or not, Microsoft's ASP.NET is entirely divorced from IIS, and offers a fully-public, documented (sort of) interface to creating an ASP.NET AppDomain. Ted is working on integrating Tomcat with ASP.NET so Tomcat could serve as the web front-end to ASP.NET pages, and possibly even share session state.