J2SE
Today, a tantalizing announcement by Mark Reinhold about closures in Java 7 has made its way through the twittersphere. On the same day, Neal Gafter updated his closures proposal. Here are some use cases and my unbiased opinion on this proposal. No lambdas have been harmed in the writing of this blog article.
EJB
In the relentless fight against configuration boilerplate, JSF and Glassfish have taken yet another small step forward. As of Glassfish v3 build 68, you no longer need to declare the faces-servlet in WEB.XML.
<servlet>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping...
Education
The next edition of my CS1/Java book is going to print soon. At the last minute, we decided to put the real estate of the inside covers to good use and include a “cheat sheet” with the most important Java control structures and libraries. Since it would be particularly embarrassing to have a typo here, I am hoping to enlist the aid of the community.
PDFs for the inside covers are...
The latest version of Alice, now in beta, can be programmed in Java. In this blog, I describe the process that I use for producing Alice assignments for my CS1 class. Students program in Java using Netbeans, and instead of seeing boring console output, they bring the Alice characters to life.
Blogging
I just learned how to make Flash screencasts on my Linux system and deliver them (with GlassFish) on a server that the computer science department received as a donation (thanks Sun!!!).
Why am I doing this? My publisher wants me to develop screencasts for my books, and I thought it could be useful for my students if I record my lectures. I use a smart board for the lectures, and a screencast...
