CS for Poets: "Traditions of computer science and software engineering have tried to turn all aspects of software creation into a pure engineering discipline, when they clearly are not. The MFA in software would begin to repair this error." » Read more

Deploying JXTA just got a whole lot easier: ... via JNLP. WebStart/JNLP, I salute you! — James Todd

London Java Meetup - Xmas Party 2003: Come and join us for the London Java Meetup Christmas party on the 15th of December! — Simon Brown

The Poetry of Programming
John Mitchell points us to an interview with Richard Gabriel titled The Poetry of Programming. Gabriel has both a PhD in Computer Science and an MFA in Poetry and has been thinking a long time about training programmers the way we develop poets and artists. Like poetry, he says, "writing software is a creative activity that requires a lot of interaction with the people who are going to use it."

JSP 2.0: The new deal, Part 2
Hans Bergsten continues his exploration of the new JSP features in JSP 2.0: The new deal, Part 2 . In this second in a four part ONJava series, Hans details "the improvements made in the area of error handling and the new deployment descriptor features." To take advantage of the new error reporting he recommends " that you develop TLVs [Tag Library Validators] for the custom libraries you write, and insist that the developer of any third-party library you use do the same." The changes to the deployment descriptor are that "the rules for the web.xml file are now defined by an XML Schema, and most of the JSP-specific configuration items have been moved to a new XML element, which is under the control of the JSP specification "