Over the weekend jEdit Community registered its 50th member, after only four days in operation! Thanks to all of you for your interest and support.

I want to emphasize that membership information is not distributed to anyone and is used only for purposes of jEdit Community: password maintenance and the occassional annoucement on matters dealing directly with jEdit or the site itself. You need only supply a user name and a valid email address. Please consider becoming a member if you have not done so already.

While Microsoft's support for Java seems to range from lukewarm to non-existent, it continues to make available the Microsoft SDK for Java 4.0 for download. It includes two application launchers, jview.exe and wjview.exe. They operate like java.exe and javaw.exe, although command-line syntax differs substantially. The Java virtual machine included in the package reports its java.version property as 1.1.4. Version 3.2.2 of jEdit will run in Microsoft's virtual machine if you place the Swing classes in its classpath.

It would be useful to collect in one place any bugs or other problems jEdit users have with different combinations of operating systems, JDK's and keyboards for various languages. There are a number of posts on the mailing lists but it would be good to get current experience. If you have some combination to report on, leave a short comment to this article from which other users can get guidance.

The Downloads section of jEditCommunity is available as a repository for beta or development versions of plugins that are not ready for posting on jEdit's Plugin Central. You can either post a download link or send an email message attaching a jar archive file. If the download is a new plugin, a short description of its capabilities will obviously be helpful.

The situation differs among the major browsers. Internet Explorer, even as recently as version 6.0, will work with self-signed certificates under Microsoft's JVM. However, Netscape, Mozilla and other browsers using Sun's Java Plugin-In have stricter security requirements. Beginning with JDK 1.3.1, a security certificate will not work without a valid root Certificate Authority. It appears there is no way to circumvent this requirement, even if the user were willing to run an untrusted applet plugin. Since an IRC applet on the jEdit Community site would have to access the Internet to communicate with an IRC server, security limitations are triggered.

We have opened an IRC channel for jEdit users where you can discuss general jEdit issues or simply enjoy yourself. Feel free to join #jedit on irc.openprojects.net (port 6667).

You might also want to install the IRC plugin for jEdit which allows for in-place discussion right within your favorite editor! Visit jEdit Plugin Central to learn how to install it.

The PostNuke web portal system uses "themes" to provide options for layout and presentation of the site's content. The jEdit Community site now has the "Slate" theme as an alternative to the default "PostNuke" and "ExtraLite" themes. Rendered largely in shades of dark and darker blue, the Slate theme is based on the PostNuke theme of the same name created by PixelMayhem (formerly known as Somara), which has kindly released its creation for public use.

If you are a registered member of jEdit Community, you can specify the Slate theme and other display options in the Your Account section of the site.

The jEdit Community site is being featured on the home page of the PostNuke project as a new site adopting the web portal system. We hope that this will give PostNuke users an opportunity to learn more about jEdit.