When we opened up the JDJ domain to bloggers everywhere, we knew the take-up would be good. But one thing we couldn't be certain about in advance was whether the blogs themselves would be any good. We needn't have worried.

As many of you will already have found out, the editors of JDJ all blog regularly, and naturally RSS feeds are available too - so if in between issues of the magazine you want to read something by, say, Ajit Sagar, all you need to do now is scoot over to http://ajitsagar.javadevelopersjournal.com or subscribe to Ajit's RSS feed: . Likewise you'll find Calvin Austin's feed at http://java.sys-con.com/read/rss/65.htm, and so on.

A list of RSS feeds to all the JDJ Editors' Blogs can be found at the new JDJ main page (http://jdj.sys-con.com), where you'll always be just one click away from being able keep up with the latest thoughts of Ajit and Calvin - or those of Joe Winchester, Yakov Fain, Bill Dudney, and Michael Yuan. Jason Bell (http://java.sys-con.com/read/rss/66.htm) is back now on the JDJ team, too.

Talking of Michael Yuan, he is going to run a JavaOne BoF next month titled "Smarter Rich Client Through Middleware Services." Given the recent interest in running Swing apps inside a container, he's expecting developers with interesting ideas on middleware services that can benefit Swing apps to come to the BoF and share them (or you can e-mail him at michaelyuan@sys-con.com). Michael will also, he says, be discussing more "traditional" client-side container topics such as the OSGi.

Now that he has left Sun and joined the Kim Polese start-up, SpikeSource, Calvin can at last blog source code. Though talking of source code, perhaps you prefer to keep in touch with the thoughts and views not of our esteemed editors but of regular JDJ readers like Uday Kumar (http://udaykumar.javadevelopersjournal.com/), who describes his blog as the "musings of a software philosopher"). Most recently - for example - you'd have been able to read Uday's commentary on the source code of the Jasper compiler.

Before that Uday blogged a fascinating discussion on the CLR (in .NET) in comparison to the JVM. "In the JVM world," he observed, "the Java code is translated into byte code by a compiler, after which the byte codes are interpreted and executed by the JVM. Compilation of byte code into native CPU instructions is optional. The CLR, however, is more than a virtual machine; in fact the CLR is more akin to the J2EE container than the VM. In the CLR world, the programs written in a host of languages (C#, VB.NET, Java, etc.) are converted to a byte code by the respective compilers. These are compilers that target the CLR: in that sense the CLR is like a VM - it abstracts away the underlying CPU."

One more quick example of a reader blog worth subscribing to is http://straxus.javadevelopersjournal.com/ - where a recent entry discussed Sun and open source. "It's interesting to see the extent to which Sun has adopted Open Source ideas and principles, at least in part," blogged Straxus. "On the one hand, they've released several major pieces of software into the Open Source world, and opened up a boatload of patents to Solaris developers. On the other hand, Java is not Open Source, and shows no signs of changing that status any time soon."

"There seems to be a certain amount of duality in Sun's public activities," Straxus concludes, "and I suspect that this might be part of an internal corporate struggle to determine which way (proprietary or open) is the best way to go. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next year or so."

It will be interesting too to see how blogging at javadevelopersjournal.com shakes out. The early signs are that it is going to be a fast-growing community, and to encourage its widening and deepening we are already devoting space online to featuring blogs that inform, stimulate, entertain, or inspire. So if you haven't started one yet, now's the time; after all, who's to say it won't be your latest blog that's featured one day in an editorial here in JDJ?