It's All About the Readers

It’s been several months since I last attempted to write a newsletter column, and during that time we’ve had some great guest writers from around the community filling in each week. I want to thank all of them for contributing some excellent articles. This evening though, I felt a strong urge to write about some of the things that we’ve been working on lately and let you know that we are listening to the requests you guys make.

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been working hard to improve the user registration process and to integrate the login systems between our DZone.com site and our content communities like Javalobby and Eclipse Zone. This work has involved several things. First, we’ve been trying to streamline the whole registration system. If you’re a recent registrant, you might have noticed that we’ve been asking for quite a bit more profile data. I hate long forms as much as the next developer, so we spent a long time trying to condense the form into as tight a space as possible. The result is that we get the data we need, and you still get through the form in under a minute.

Another nice side effect of the work on the registration form is that it has given us the chance to go back and rework some of the other problems in our current theme. After the launch of the most recent redesign, we admitted that we made some mistakes. For our long-time members, you might want to take a second look at the new Javalobby. We’ve moved the announcements back out of the main flow, into a clear section highlighting them. You might also notice that we’ve condensed each story on the front page to something a bit more manageable. Instead of all the links in each block taking you to ten different places, we’ve gone back to just two links. It’s clear where to click to view the story, and the headlines are clearly visible. We also took the size of the user avatars down a few pixels; they still provide a personal touch while not being as in your face as before.

These changes, along with cutting down the number of zone leaders that you see in the upper left (another user request), should give some of our long time users a bit more comfort when visiting the site. Fortunately, we’re not sitting still, and these design changes are actually really just a quick stop on the way to a much more exciting design that really starts to put together a lot of the things we’ve been working on over the past six months. Keep an eye out for some community beta testing in the very near future. We’re also focused on creating great content, and I think you’ll see some very sweet articles, tips, and code snippets coming down the pipeline.

Cookie Values: What’s Valid?
During the course of running DZone, we’ve had sporadic reports of some users not being able to stay logged into the site. No matter what we tried, nothing seemed to work. After months, I finally found a posting from a developer at Atlassian that was having a similar issue with their authentication system. It turned out that when they were hashing the cookie value, they got invalid characters. As I dug into the problem some more, especially as I tried to integrate the login between DZone and Javalobby, I found that there are actually quite a few characters that can occur in the course of hashing that are invalid in cookie values. Unfortunately, none of these invalid characters happen to be mentioned in any of the cookie specs. So much for “standards”, but I hope we’ll have a reasonable solution soon that won’t involve needing to have everyone logout!

JavaOne 2008: What Will It Be This Year?
JavaOne is just around the corner, and developers from around the world will be making the annual trip out to San Francisco to see what all the fuss is about. DZone will be there all week, covering the show from multiple angles with write-ups daily (probably multiple times daily) on the site and in daily newsletters like we’ve done in the past.

Last year, we heard about JavaFX and its plan to take over the world. What’s it going to be this year? My bet is that we’ll hear more about the consumer JVM that’s in JDK 6 Update 10, but I’ve been known to be wrong. What do you think Sun will be announcing this year? Chime in at Javalobby with your thoughts.

In addition to the show coverage, we’ll also be giving away something really sweet to those of you at the show. Be sure to stop by the SpringSource booth early on in the show to get your DZone show giveaway. Supplies will be limited. You might also be able to find the DZone team (they'll probably have DZone t-shirts on) walking around with some additional giveaways if you’re lucky!

Until next time,
Matt Schmidt
matt@dzone.com