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.

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.

We've added a few more features to close out the first week of jEdit Community's operations.

The left column of blocks now includes a listing of the five most recently posted downloads and web links. Tooltips provide a summary of the material. The download links take you directly to the our full information page for the download item. The web links open the linked page in a new browser window.

There are two new themes available, both with Macromedia Flash graphics and music (or sound effects, depending on your taste). The WebDesignHQ_FlashGrey and WebDesignHQ_FlashRed themes were created and made available by WebDesignHq.com. The themes run on Internet Explorer and versions of Netscape Navigator prior to version 6. The Mozilla codebase (also used by Netscape 6) does not support the scripting methods available in prior Netscape versions that are used by the themes' embedded Macromedia Flash Player.

Thanks to Lionel Fiol for the "Made with jEdit" button logo that now appears at the bottom of our pages. Other contributions of graphics, or suggestions about themes for the jEdit Community site as a whole, are very welcome.

An online version of the User's Guide for the current "stable" version of jEdit, version 3.2.2, is now available on the jEdit Community web site. This is the same version of the User's Guide distributed with the current release of JEdit. Each page of the guide is separately displayed and can be presented in a printer-friendly format by clicking on the printer icon in the upper-right corner of the page's center column. We hope you find this facility useful.

The Tags plugin, created by Kenrick Drew, allows you to jump to the definition of a specific language object or "tag" using tag index files. The index files are created by the ctags program available for both Windows and UNIX-based systems. You can obtain a robust version of ctags from the Exuberant C Tags project site.

The author of JMonkey, Ashley Williams, describes this new plugin as follows:

The JMonkey plugin is a collection of file system helpers, known as JMonkeys. There are currently two JMonkeys available:

To use the article feed, simply insert the following PHP code on your web page:

<?php
readfile ("http://community.jedit.org/get_articles.php?
req=showarticles&limit=10&flat=1&summaries=1");
?>

Note that the readfile statement should span only a single line.

The first parameter is mandatory, the other are show at their default values. The limit parameter specifies how many articles will be displayed, beginning with the most recent. The flat parameter is a boolean that determines whether the article's author and publication date will be show on the same line as the title. The summaries parameter determines whether the first paragraph of the article will be displayed along with the title, author and publication date.

What should be our next survey? We can even have more than one at the same time. Nominate a question by adding a comment to this article.