A new serie of articles about serialization is on the way on WikiJava.

Serialization is one of the most important concepts in any programming language, it is basically the process of taking data from memory and convert it into a byte version (serial).

Serialization is fundamental whenever one needs to save information in a file for later use or send information over the network.

Over the years there have been developed many different technologies for serialization like:

• XML
• SQL and databases
• CORBA
• RMI
• JSON
• ASN
• Fast Object Serialization

The serie of articles on WikiJava will cover all these technologies to provide a complete reference manual about them.

The first article, about the serialization API from the JSE,  is already published here. More will be available soon in the category serialization.

WikiJava Projects is a training platform for all the Java students.

The system hosts several open source projects, the WikiJava Projects, that are instigated, developed and promoted within the WikiJava community.

The WikiJava Projects are beneficial for everyone.

Junior developers have the occasion of getting some experience in a real project, with a real team. Everybody knows how hard is at the beginning when the CV is empty to find a first job. This idea solves this issue: the CV won’t be empty anymore, all the contributions are registered and verifiable on WikiJava and in the SVN repository. So whatever a developer does for a project can potentially go straight on his CV, looking good for his career.

Senior developers can build up some experience as project managers and software architects. These will be more likely to have a wider angle on the projects and to be able to support them once on the open source market.

Every programmer has a good idea for a program or a service to offer online, most of the time these ideas never see the light, simply because of the lack of time or of knowledge. People with ideas can have their projects developed open source for free. WikiJava is the complete resource for learning how to program and for.

Once the project is ready, because it’s open source under GPL or LGPL licenses everyone can maintain it and get profit from it, in several ways, for example customizing it for his own clients, writing plug-ins and extensions for it providing support or the possibilities are infinite.

The WikiJava Projects are a win win win model in which everyone benefits, it’s useful and it’s a good idea.

We are currently testing the WikiJava Projects framework, it’s going very well so far and we found very few problems.

We believe that during this week we’ll be able to publish the whole thing and go public with the new platform that will allow everyone to work on real open source projects and learn while building up the CV.

On these pages we will give bits and pieces of what’s going to look like.

Stay tuned, we’ll disclose everything in the next hours.

The maintenance went successful yesterday evening. WikiJava staid offline for less than a minute reducing the inconvenience to everyone.

The upgraded site looks pretty much the same but it’s way faster to load the pages due to the new semantic repository and to the better caching of the pages.

In these days I’m being very busy with loads of new features for WikiJava (including this new blog of course).

For example I’ve been completing the WikiJava Starters course, which is made of five simple articles to guide step by step from Understanding what’s Java to writing, compiling and executing a first program in Java.

This is a very important course because it represents the starting point for everyone who wants to become a Java programmer and hasn’t any experience with it yet.

To view the WikiJava Starters Course, click here.