This weekend Attila Balazs from the Transylvania Java User Group contacted me to tell me about his latest idea - the Java Advent Calendar. That's 24 articles from December 1st through to the 24th, all Java related.  And he's looking for people to become part of it.

Talking to Attila about the motivation for the site, and he raised some interesting points on the quality of Java articles across the web:

Even after all these years of Java being used (or maybe because if has been out for so long) good Java information is needed. There are a lot of low quality Java articles out there recommending explicitly or implicitly (by showing examples) things like using StringBuffer (we should use StringBuilder!), using Vector or Hashtable (no! java.util.collections.* needs to be used!) or writing code without generics. This results in a lot of poor quality code and frustration (and is one of the sources - in my opinion - for the wide-spread rumors that Java is "old", "dead", "hard to program in", etc). I'm hoping to counter-balance this trend (at least in a small way) with this site.

Attilla wants to get some genuinley interesting Java articles out there. The Perl community has this concept  already, PHP developers have it  too, so why doesn't the Java community? It's not like there aren't some great ideas out there.

So why not be a part of this and make it your end of year resolution to write an awesome article about Java. 

To make this work, here's what's needed: 

• Get 24 authors to commit to writing an article in this time interval. So far there are six involved, but we can do better right? The project needs more authors.
• And if you want to run in a more passive mode, just visit the site every day from the first of December to get a some fresh Java knowledge with your morning coffee

If you're ready to get involved, send an email to Attila, or leave a comment here.