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After listening to JavaPosse Episode 79 , I realised that I wasn't the only one to think that the new Java 5.0 language features are scary and challenging. The section was called "Were the Java 5 features a bad idea?" and the related links are : Shai's Weblog : Java 5.0 languages features were a bad idea JavaLobby: Java 5.0 language features ServerSide: Autoboxing and NPE My knowledge is still around Java 1.3.x level, and I'm learning slowly about the new features. Asserts look like a good Java 1.4/5.0 addition. The Java 5.0 additions that look good to me are : - for each syntax - handy and I wonder if faster due to the compiler knowing the bounds and not needing the array bounds checking ? Enums - they look really useful printf format - looks really good and powerful, better than the C one StringBuilder more robust collection framework not sure about boxing/unboxing - although at first glance looks okay generics - looks horrible & as complicated as C++ tem

The excellent NetBeans IDE version 6.0 has been released. "The NetBeans IDE is a free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. You get all the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web and mobile applications, in Java, C/C++ and even Ruby. The IDE runs on many platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris; it is easy to install and use straight out of the box. The 6.0 release includes significant enhancements and new features, including a completely rewritten editor infrastructure, support for additional languages, new productivity features, and a simplified installation process that allows you to easily install and configure the IDE to meet your exact needs." NetBeans 6.0 NetBeans 6.0 - Features NetBeans - News announcement NetBeans Team: "What is your favourite NetBeans IDE 6.0 feature?"

An interview with Thomas Fitzsimmons about Fedora & Java Iced Tea. eweek: Open-Source Java: One year later Sun talks about the open-sourcing of Java and what's to come in the future.

NetBeans.org 6.0 Release Candidate 2 It's getting exciting that this excellent product is closer to final release.

Java 5.0 (1.5.0_14) released Release Notes It looks to be a much bigger update than 1.5.0_13. This update contains a lot of bug fixes.

Sun: Java SE 5.0 Performance Sun: Java SE 6 Performance

Building a Java applet-based game -- why don't we see more of them? Chet Haase's Blog : Move It ! - Java Timing Framework Dummy’s guide to drawing raw images in Java 2D Playing nice with the GNOME desktop Pushing Pixels Blog

Lightweight Java Gaming Library v1.1.3 released. Lightweight Java Gaming Library lwjgl: More info and release notes here

NetBeans.org 6.0 For some unknown reason I cannot install it on Ubuntu 7.10 at the moment. I get this : /usr/share/themes/Human/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:71: Engine "ubuntulooks" is unsupported, ignoring /usr/share/themes/Human/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:242: Priority specification is unsupported, ignoring followed by a blank window. So I'll stick with the excellent Beta 1 until I get this resolved. UPDATE: I resolved the problem. The issue was that when using JDK 1.5.0 the install gives a blank window. I switched to JDK 1.6.0 and everything worked and installed :-) It looks great so far.

jMonkeyEngine 1.0 released. jMonkeyEngine JavaLobby: jMonkeyEngine 1.0 Released

NetBeans 6.0 making me a keyboard junkie Pushing Pixels: Swing links of the week Starting Java SE on (almost) raw iron - the Java OS IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 Adds Spring/Hibernate Support, Eclipse Interoperability, and Maven Integration JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 7

Try the new Direct3D 9-based Java2D pipeline in 6uN EA "This build contains the new Direct3D 9-based Java2D pipeline, which is enabled by default on Windows platform. It is very similar to the OpenGL pipeline (in fact they share a lot of code)" Very exciting, Java2D performance is going to get another boost.

Becoming a Better Programmer: A Conversation With Java Champion Heinz Kabutz A very interesting interview with a Java Champion Heinz Kabutz.

JDK 6 Update 3 is out http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp 6 Release Notes JDK 5.0 Update 13 is out http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index_jdk5.jsp 5.0 Release Notes Update: these seem to be mostly security fixes. JavaLobby: Sun patches critical security flaws

Java diagnostics, IBM style, Part 1: Introducing the IBM Dump Analyzer for Java "Cut through endless dump files to get to the heart of the problem" An interesting article about the IBM Dump Analyzer for Java IBM developerWorks article link

jPCT 1.15 released Features Changes Screenshots Article GameDev Java gaming article looks interesting : Active Rendering GamesDev.net: Java Games: Active Rendering

yEd - Java™ Graph Editor yEd is a very powerful graph editor that is written entirely in the Java programming language BlueJ BlueJ: About BlueJ is an integrated Java environment specifically designed for introductory teaching. ImageJ Features An excellent Java image application : ImageJ

Learning Java 3rd Edition Amazon.com: Learning Java Amazon.co.uk: Learning Java Amazon.com: Effective Java Amazon.co.uk: Effective Java Joshua Bloch is a Java genius. A 2nd edition is out soon according to Amazon.com Recommendations (Updated for Java 5): Thinking in Java (4th Edition) Amazon.com: Java Puzzlers Amazon.com: Java Precisely, 2nd Edition Java Cookbook , Second Edition I have the first edition which is excellent, but the 2nd edition is updated for Java 5 so that's on the list to purchase. Head First Java , Second Edition Java Network Programming , Third Edition Head First Design Patterns Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook Filthy Rich Clients: Developing Animated and Graphical Effects for Desktop Java™ Applications Amazon.com: Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit Amazon.com: Java How to Program (7th Edition) Amazon.com: Java Concurrency in Practice

IBM developerworks Java section has a lot of good Java articles, here is a new one about JavaSE 6 performance monitoring. It's detailed and informative. IBM: Monitor and diagnose performance in Java SE 6

I keep listening to this wonderful podcast : Java News, Interviews and more about the Java programming language. I'm catching up with past episodes and listening to the past Java events that I missed the first time around. I'm up to episode #057 so far, it's wonderful. Very interesting and enlightening. JavaPosse About JavaPosse

The NetBeans 6.0 beta has been released. I gave it a quick test on Ubuntu and it seems wonderful so far. I loved the local history addition which was a feature I wanted from Eclipse. It seems to have a revamped editor and profiler is now included by default and improved. On Windows I have Eclipse Europa and NetBeans 5.5.1 installed. For non-GUI Java coding I think that Eclipse is better, the compiler warnings are superb and really helpful. But think about doing GUI work I think NetBeans has the edge, and now that 6.0 is going to have more Eclipse features that will help me switch. I very much look forward to the 6.0 final release. JavaLobby: NetBeans 6.0 Beta NetBeans roadmap

The excellent "Developing Games in Java" written by David Brackeen is covered here : Developing Games in Java book This page details the excellent book, plus has updates and details changes made in Java 5 and 6 and how they could affect Java gaming. He has written an extremely good Java applet game toolkit called PulpCore : http://www.interactivepulp.com/pulpcore/ http://www.pulpgames.net/ The games are fast & great to look at.

Here are some excellent Java related RSS feeds that I found recently : http://developers.sun.com/rss/java.xml http://www.cafeaulait.org/today.rss http://www.eclipse.org/eclipsenews.rss http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/news/dw_dwtp.rss http://www.javaworld.com/podcasts/jtech/index.xml http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/feed/7?format=rss2 http://feeds.feedburner.com/javaposse http://www.javaspecialists.eu/archive/tjsn.rss

jDiskReport is an excellent disk utility. Visual very well designed and works very well also. jGoodies jEdit is an excellent Java text editor. jEdit jEdit - features SQuirreL SQL Client - a universal SQL client SQuirreL SQL client SQuirreL SQL client - screenshots FreeMind - free mind mapping in Java FreeMind FreeMind - screenshots

Filthy Rich Clients: An Interview With Chet Haase Java.sun.com writer Ed Ort interviews Sun client architect Chet Haase about what's new and cool for developing compelling desktop applications.

1. Improve Application Performance With SwingWorker in Java SE 6 2. New and Updated Desktop Features in Java SE 6, Part 1 3. New and Updated Desktop Features in Java SE 6, Part 2 All 3 are excellent and very detailed. I've bookmarked them and will study them soon. I'm still reacquainting myself with Java and Java 5 specifically, it added a lot of new features.

It seems like the modern ones are really great & feature rich. I remember seeing people use VisualCafe, JBuilder and my favourite IDE VisualAge for Java. It seems like the most popular choices today are : IntelliJ from JetBrains - really popular with Java pros Eclipse - quite fast and uses native GUI toolkit SWT NetBeans - I'm trying this one out, version 5.5.1 seems great. I would still really like a VAJ return, it was a wonderful IDE, the built in version control system was excellent.

Java Precisely looks excellent. The link above has more details about the book and downloadable code. There is also a free PDF - Java Performance tips Java Precisely Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

A 2D game creation toolkit that relies on powerful Java technology. It looks great, easy to use and powerful. Stencyl: About Stencyl: developer info

Java Podcast : News, Interviews and more about the Java programming language. I found this excellent podcast the other day. It's excellent and really detailed. I would have preferred OGG rather than the MP3 format it uses. JavaPosse Another interesting podcast I found recently is : Software Engineering Radio : podcast for professional software developers

Project Sun SPOT Sun Small Programmable Object Technology sunspotworld: What is it? sunspotworld: Products

"Caucho Resin, a Java servlet container that provides a native Java based PHP5 interpreter. Resin can run as a replacement for Apache or lighttpd, or can work in cooperation with an httpd server." Resin backed PHP drives 4x performance improvements for Drupal Caucho Quercus: PHP in Java

The excellent jMonkeyEngine 1.0 rc1 is released "The jMonkeyEngine developers are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0 (release candidate 1) of their popular open-source Java gaming engine." JMonkeyEngine Blog: Write 3D games in Java using the JMonkeyEngine

Lightweight Java Gaming Library v1.1.2 released. Lightweight Java Gaming Library lwjgl: More info and release notes here

Java 3D 1.5.1 includes the following improvements. * Windows Vista Support * Automatic fallback to D3D pipeline if OpenGL unavailable * JOALMixer-based audio engine * Automatic mipmap generation * Pack200 support for Java Web Start applications * Logging framework * Support for new JNLPAppletLauncher utility (based on JOGLAppletLauncher) * Several bug fixes Release Notes Java3D 1.5.1 Java3D 1.5.1 highlights Java3D downloads

After playing around with Java in the early days (JDK 1.2/1.3) and doing lots of JNI work, I left that area and worked mainly in C code and got lured into the C#/.NET world. Recently I evaluated lots of toolkits with the idea of playing around with 2D games and stuff like that. I found some C# DirectX projects, but nothing great. The interesting toolkits/libraries like : C# SDL.net Irrlicht.NET I found lots of others, but nothing that had either a small download for development (didn't want to download 400MB SDK), small deployment runtime, and was pure C#. Then I toyed with some native toolits, there are a lot more to choose from: Native HGE - excellent Windows 2D C++ toolkit SDL - cross platform C/C++ toolkit PureBasic - excellent, easy to get sprites blitting examples up and running, hard to judge performance because demo is always in debug mode but IDE is great and easy to use BlitzPlus - demo seemed ok, bad IDE, samples were not good. I saw an extra set of SDL bindings for