About this forum

This message was edited 15 times. Last update was at 06/06/2006 09:06:04

Welcome to the hotjoe.com Java forums! These forums are meant to be a friendly place for new Java developers and long time engineers to exchange ideas and information. Feel free to ask questions and browse around. As we're just getting started things are pretty sparse right now. Don't let that scare you - your questions will be answered. There are several members who are longtime Java engineers and who enjoy helping other people.

Suggestions
As I'm just starting this forum out please feel free to give me any ideas about ways to improve the forum. I certainly don't think that the groupings or forums are in their final form. I really think that there may be too many of them right now but I wanted to get something started. Take a look and let me know.

Configuration / software
The software for this forum is not perfect but it is Java based and I hope to help improve it over time. This forum is runing on JForum. It sits on top of a PostgreSQL database, running on a Linux machine. It is not the fastest machine in the world - if you see any slowdowns, let me know. Unlike some major Java forums I'm a big believer in "eating your own dogfood". So we use Java 1.5 on Tomcat for the basis. No CGI here!

Commercial Postings
This forum is meant to be commercial free for the time being. I lease a dedicated server and pay for it out of my own pocket. If the forums ever become successful I would anticipate including some sort of non-intrusive advertisements. I only ask to pay the hosting fees that I pay - I don't expect to get rich off of this, just pay my bills.

Having said that though spam will be dealt with switfly - it will be deleted as soon as the moderators can get it. Because this forum requires registration and is harder for a machine to register I expect spam to be at a minimum. However, users found spamming will have their accounts terminated.

Privacy
I strive to maintain the best privacy available. As part of the registration you do not have to enter anything more personal than an email address. Your email address is not publically visible to even registered users so there should be no issues with email harvesting. Administrators of the site do have access to your email address. Unregistered users are not allowed to see user lists or send private messages. However, I cannot guarantee privacy perfection. If you are concerned about this the please register for a free email account at a provider of these services such as Gmail or Yahoo!.

Children
While there is no intention to have any adult material on this site we request that children under 13 not register for the site, in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998. As we are based in the United States we will be introducing a modification soon that will require the user to certify that they are over 13. Again, I want to stress that anything inappropriate for the forums (using the moderators definition) will be immediately removed but there may be a latency between the posting and the removal.

Known Bugs
I'm aware of three technical, and some other minor issues with the forum. The first technical isssue is that, when you post, the date you joined the forum is shown as very far off from when you really did join. A fix for this has been implemented and is in the process of being tested. The second technical issue is that an error is generated when you select "Read new messages since my last visit" after you have logged in. I'm still working with the author of the software on that. The third bug is that the tag to make lists does not seem to work at all - lists must be created in HTML, not BB code. Lastly, this software was written by someone for whom English is not a first language. You may find various spelling and gramatical mistakes here and there (just as you will in my posts). Those can be fixed very quickly if they bother you.

About Me
I'm a software engineer living outside of Boulder, Colorado. I've been developing software for about 18 years now and Java for about 8. I was at the 1995 Solaris Developer and Networking Conference where Scott McNealy (the CEO of Sun Microsystems) and Marc Andreesen (worked on the original NCSA Mosaic browser, later helped start Netsccape) announced that Java would be included in the Netscape browser. I wasn't able to start using Java at that time but got in to it when it stopped being a way to animate images (like an animated GIF) and started to move towards the server.

We have upgraded to JForum 2.1.5 and the bugs that I know about have been fixed. That, of course, does not mean that there are no bugs but at least the ones I had mentioned above have been fixed.

Please let us know if you find any issues.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 05/06/2008 17:19:40

I guess I haven't updated this in a while but we've been running JForum 2.1.8 for quite a while now. However, we're now running in a 64bit Java 1.6 environment on Tomcat 6.0.x. The upgrade from Tomcat 5 to Tomcat 6 was almost painless other than I needed to get the ROOT web applications setup correctly. Tomcat 5.5.20 and below let you get away with not configuring the root web application correctly. While Tomcat 6 does it right I had to fix the forum as it doesn't create a ROOT directory by default.