So I'm experimenting with JXTA using the JXTA Programming Guide. I've bought several books on the subject but I found them difficult to grok(that's read and comprehend, in geekspeak.) The guide, also, would serve as the best reference for the latest and greatest version on the JXTA API, which changes constantly. Well, at least on paper, JXTA's programmability is supposed to be getting easier with each released iteration. I'm not finding that to be so true in practice. For one thing, the documentation isn't suited for someone looking for a high-level abstract toolkit to build a peer-to-peer application on. To be fair, the material is outside my usual ken, which is more of a gluecode kind of work, but I should be able to pick it up. Anyways, I continue to plug away. One nice discovery is that the latest and greatest version of NetBeans (4.1) is turning out to be a pleasant surprise to work with. I'm not sure if it will replace Eclipse as my primary IDE, but NetBeans seems purer in concept and less daunting to the casual coder. Eclipse definitely has the leg up in features, though, but it can be maddeningly confusing to use. Does anyone know if NetBeans has an equivalent to Eclipse's templates? A nice presentation of NetBeans' current and future is here.
I'm posting this using Sauce Reader 2.0 Beta. I've been using Sauce in its earlier iterations for well over a year now to compose my blog posts. I find its superb editing environment to be unequaled. I'm wondering, though, what happened to spell check in this release?
Darth Vader's blog, Memoirs of a Monster, finished up today. It was/is a fascinating read that sought to portray the Dark Lord's innermost feelings regarding the events between A New Hope and The Return of the Jedi. Kudos to the author, Matthew Heming on a fine idea, finely executed.
Got a gas (propane) grill over Passover and have been rigorously grillin' ever since. Lorraine marinates a French Roast for me to grill for our Friday night dinners and it's scrum-diddly-umptious! Having some friends over tonight for some steaks and turkey burgers. Can't wait. Got tiki torches for the occasion. For a primer on gas grilling in America read Patio Man and the Sprawl People, by David Brooks. Also, watch King of the Hill.
1 comment:
Good day.
I first discovered JXTA back in January of 2002, read the books by Sing Li and Brendon Wilson --- and still didn't really "get it".
I put thoughts of programming JXTA away for two years, then picked it up again in about October of last year --- and "got it".
I re-read Wilson's book, which is close enough to the modern API to be quite useful, and ported his chat application to that modern API. I learned a great deal on that second careful reading.
Since October I've written three what I would term nontrivial JXTA apps, each one better than the one before it.
It took me time to understand how to think about the platform. The Programmer's Guid e is a good place to start. And the jxta developers list @jxta.org is full of helpful people - including the platform developers themselves.
We can talk out of band about JXTA development if you wish. I'm at petrovic@research.earthlink.net
Best,
Mark
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