While militaristic, this might be interesting as a basis for projects in a course on multiagent systems or Java.

“Robocraft, developed for MIT’s 6.370 class, is a real-time strategy game. Two teams of robots roam the screen collecting resources and attacking each other with different kinds of weapons. However, in Robocraft each robot functions autonomously; under the hood it runs a Java virtual machine loaded up with its team’s player program. Robots in the game communicate by radio and must work together to accomplish their goals. The software and competition specifications are available for download.”

“Ever wonder what makes LISP so powerful? Now you can find out for yourself- And you don’t even have to install anything on your computer to do it!”. So begins Conrad Barski‘s tutorial Lisp comic, Casting SPELs in Lisp. “Anyone who has ever learned to program in LISP will tell you it is very different from any other programming language. It is different in lots of surprising ways- This comic book will let you find out how LISP’s unique design makes it so powerful!” The online comic book tutorial has small bits of LISP code throughout which, when collected and entered into a LISP interpreter implement a simple text adventure game. This sure beats learning LISP from JCM’s LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual

Sun invites outside involvement with Java 6. Java 6 is expected sometime in the first half of 2006.

“The new version will be easier to manage, exposing information that outside management software can use to make control decisions, said Mark Reinhold, chief J2SE engineer. And it will be easier to find problems, with an “attach-on-demand” feature that can let debugging software graft onto software while it’s running instead of just before it’s launched. … Another item on the list is support for a basic set of Web services called WS-I, Hamilton said. That basic set, standardized through the Web Services Interoperability organization, had been scheduled for the Tiger release. … And Mustang [1] will have better integration with graphical user interfaces, including Microsoft’s upcoming Longhorn version of Windows, Reinhold said. “

[1] Mustang is the codename for java 1.6. Tiger was the
codename for for Java 1.5.