This portal has been getting over 10,000 pageviews a day in the last week, yet the discussion forums are not picking up. Some improvements to the forum and whole system (this site is a home grown EJB-based solution are in the works:
1) Long term cookie support (no annoying logins anymore).
2) Thread "explorer" like a table of contents of all messages in a thread, so you can see headings of all posts in a thread before scrolling down (similar to slashdot).
3) Quote message support
4) Automatically populate subject header when replying to a message.

  Any other ideas?

I would like to see each discussion forum available from the front page as a channel (maybe even channels that can be added or deleted by the user?). I'm the sort of person that very rarely clicks on anything labeled "Discussions", but if the discussion topics were readily available from the front page, I would probably look at anything that caught my eye.

Do you make any of your information available via RSS?

We set up the "Hot Threads" just for that purpose. Though I see that it may be useful to list out our forums on the front page as well, for users who don't want to click on "Discussions" :).

   What is RSS?

Floyd

Floyd,
I believe RSS is a way for a site to put its content in a well defined xml doc so that the site need not be *scaped*. It is put out by o'reilly. I saw a little presentation on it at JavaOne. Seeing as how this message was posted in June, you have probably already figured that out. :-)

Chris

As far as discussion in general goes, I'd like to see some responses from the "management" of this site to questions I have been directly asking for a number of days - eons in Web time.

Specifically, I would like some answer to the question of when and where the promised source code for Ed's book is because in my humble opinion, a book for developers without source code, especially EJB source is not that helpful (though I have no doubt its a good way to publicize the book :-)

I find that on the Sun EJB/JSP forums and on the Tomcat forums there is a fair amount of lively discussion and good questions rarely go unanswered for long. I don't mean to be critical, but some questions, like "where is the source code located" which concern resources advertised on this site, need to be addressed by the management of this site. What that does is to increase credibility and in doing so make it worth the while of some poor developer type like myself to write up answers and questions and post stuff to a forum like this.

Just my humble opinion. By the way, where IS the source code?

- Sheldon Bradley Wosnick

Sheldon,

   I apologize for the delay in getting your questions answered, and you are right about the fact that questions are being answered faster on other forums. The problem here is that TheServerSide.com is a brand new community, we are simply not as active as established forums. With the help of people like you, hopefully TheServerSide will become the defacto resource for J2EE developers.

    As for your question about the source code. Ed Roman has been very busy (he's the CEO of The Middleware Company) and simply hasn't had time to organize the accompanying source code. The source code will either be posted here or on The Middleware Company website, as soon as Ed can get to it (within a week for sure).

   Sorry again for the delays,

Floyd Marinescu

Fair enough.

-Sheldon

Though I've using Ed Roman book for some time now, its only now that I came to know the existance of this site.This may be my ignorance but I feel the same with many other developers too.When somebody referred that the book is available for download, I went to willey and searched for a link but couldnt find.Finally after searching thru I found this site.I like this site and sure would try to advertise.

As for the discussion, I can see some of the questions still waiting for answers.Developers might require solutions at a faster pace.I like Javaranch.com for java topics and if you can really make it happen, J2EE's needs can be made available here and as defacto standard.Its need of the industry for now.

Thanx for this site.
Raj

Also, you might want to consider imporving this forum.After replying, there's no link to get back to the forum and such niceties.

Hey Floyd,

Still searchin' for the source code to the book.

Any ideas?

- Sheldon Wosnick