This past week's java.net poll shows that, while DEVOXX is considered to be a great Java conference, JavaOne is still consided the premiere Java conference by most people who express some knowledge of both conferences. A total of 223 votes were cast. The exact question and results were:

Is DEVOXX now the premier Java conference?

• 24% (54 votes) - Yes
• 42% (93 votes) - Only if there are no more JavaOnes
• 4% (10 votes) - No, another conference is more important
• 26% (59 votes) - I don't know
• 3% (7 votes) - Other

The results of the (unscientific) survey reflect the prominence of both DEVOXX and JavaOne within the Java developer community, with JavaOne having the edge in terms of importance. The voters consider DEVOXX to be the second most important conference. No one who disagreed chose to name a conference other that JavaOne that ranks above DEVOXX in importance.

The high "I don't know" vote is not unexpected, since it's difficult to appraise the importance of conferences you've never attended. You can guess, certainly, based on reading reports from the conferences, and assessing the significance of the major news events the emanate from each conference; but, a more conservative approach is to select "I don't know" is you really don't have personal experience with one or both the conferences in question.

New poll: NetBeans IDE 6.8

Our new poll asks: "Do you plan to upgrade to NetBeans IDE 6.8?"

NetBeans IDE 6.8 was released yesterday.

In Java Today, the java.net NetBeans community announces NetBeans IDE 6.8 Now Available :

The NetBeans team is proud to announce the availability of NetBeans IDE 6.8!

Download NetBeans IDE 6.8

NetBeans IDE 6.8 offers best-in-class support for the entire Java EE 6 specification and the GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 platform. Simplify Java application development with Java EE 6 language features: less XML configuration and more POJO-like development; easily target and deploy to GlassFish v3...

The java.net Java User Groups community announces: Silicon Valley JavaFX JUG hold its First Meeting w/Richard Bair:

The very first JavaFX JUG meeting in Silicon Valley was held on Dec 9th, 2009. http://www.svjugfx.org/. We had a special guest speaker in Richard Bair who gave an introductory talk on JavaFX. Also, Josh Marinacci happened to be in town from Portland, Or. Stephen Chin plugged Josh into the talk line-up before Richard. Josh commented that he was the "appetizer" before the main course...(i.e. Rich's talk). Josh showed-off his Project MaiTai (an open source tool for building interactive artwork-written in JavaFX) and he also demo'd the Java Store...showed how easy it is to get involved and perhaps make a little $$ on the side...

Mark Reinhold's proposed OpenJDK Project Lambda has been approved:

The goal of this Project is to formulate a proposal to add first-class functions, function types, and lambda expressions (informally, "closures") to Java, and to implement a prototype suitable for inclusion in JDK 7 so as to enable broad experimentation. If all goes well then this will serve as the basis of a language-change JSR which will, in turn, be proposed as a component of the eventual Java SE 7 JSR...

In today's Weblogs, Eileen Loh posted her first java.net blog, JRuby Performance on Glassfish V3 -- Part 1:

One of the new features of Glassfish V3 is directory deployment of ruby applications.  This makes is much easier to develop and deploy ruby applications on Glassfish since developers no longer need to package ruby apps as wars using goldspike or warbler as was required for Glassfish V2.  However there are other good reasons to run your rails applications on Glassfish V3.  One of those reason is performance...

Cay Horstmann writes about Running PHP Apps on GlassFish:

For the upcoming semester, I want to run a learning management system into which I can integrate an experimental feature for evaluating student programs. It needs to be open source so that I can modify it. I was first going to go with Sakai, which is based on Java, but just about everyone else is going to Moodle, and there are reasons for that. The problem is, Moodle is written in PHP, and I am not a LAMP guy. I run Java, PostgreSQL, OpenSolaris, and GlassFish. (Thanks Sun for donating the server!) What's a JPOG guy going to do? ...

Wouter van Reeven also posted his first java.net blog, Java EE 6 and GlassFish 3.0 released!:

In the past few month several Java EE 6 related JSRs (Java Specification Requests) have been finalized. The final ballot for them ended on November 30 and all were approved. Today, December 10, 2009, Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3, THE reference implementation of Java EE6, are released. Four and a half year after the release of Java EE 5 we enter the next Java EE era. GlassFish v3 is the first application server that fully supports all Java EE 6 technologies. The list of supported technologies includes, but is not limited, by...

In the Forums, rsoika has a problem with Glassfish v3 - EAR/Web Service deployment failed?: "Hi, I have a question about the right deployment of EARs with shared libs. My EAR which deploys successfully in Glassfish v2 can not be deployed with GlassfishV3. I got the following error message during deployment: ..."

shlee4851 wonders How to captual http request header using java proxy: "I write a java proxy to intercept all the request from apache server to tomcat server. I need to capture all the request header to do some filtering and redirection. I face an issue is BufferedInputStream don't know when the end of file. at..."

And aliatis finds that JVoiceBridge not works at all. JProvino, please, take a look.: "I have disabled user password of asterisk (user name is 37) and tried to call outside my network to PSTN. That doesn't work. Where is place to put my username in softphone or jvoicebridge?. Office's ip network works fine..."

Our current Spotlight is parts 2 and 3 of the Chris Wright and James Weaver article series "What's New in JavaFX 1.2 Technology." Both articles were published in November on the Sun Developer Network. Part 2 covers RSS, Storage, and Charts. Part 3 covers JavaFX Charts in greater detail. Thanks to Janice Heiss for pointing us to the latest additions to this series.

The new java.net Poll asks "Do you plan to upgrade to NetBeans IDE 6.8?" Voting will run through next Thursday or Friday (depending on where you live).

Our Feature Articles include Jeff Friesen's new article Learn about JavaFX's APIs for Reading RSS and Atom Newsfeeds, which introduces you to the RSS and Atom APIs in JavaFX 1.2. We're also featuring Sanjay Dasgupta's in-depth article Simplify Native Code Access with JNA.

The latest Java Mobility Podcast is Java Mobile Podcast 91: MIDP 3.0: Excerpts from the JavaOne 2009 MIDP 3.0 session with Angus Huang, Roger Riggs, and Paul Su.

Current and upcoming Java Events:

• December 11-12: 4th IndicThreads.com Conference On Java Technology, Pune, India
• January 11: Java Training Philippines
• January 15: Spring Grails Asia 2010
• January 25: Developing Java Web Applications
• March 17-19: TheServerSide Java Symposium 2010

Registered users can submit event listings for the java.net Events Page using our events submission form. All submissions go through an editorial review before being posted to the site.

Archives and Subscriptions: This blog is delivered weekdays as the Java Today RSS feed. Also, once this page is no longer featured as the front page of java.net it will be archived along with other past issues in the java.net Archive.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media