Erik has his finger on the pulse of the Java community. This column is his take on what is hot, and what the community is buzzing about.

• Charles knows how to Handle Bug Reports.
• Everybody's talking about java.net: Carlos, Kevin, Simon, Stephan, Nicola, Roman, Matthew, Steven, Dominic, Hugo, Mike and Steven.
• Mark and Glen look at the IDEA GUI Builder.
• Paul makes an interesting find or two.
• Joe visits the Regular Expression Library.
• Carlos goes to Church.
• Alexander pounders, literally.
• Neill zeros in debugging log4j.
• Joe doesn't Get Java.
• Notable software releases: kaffe 1.1.0, Struts 1.1 Release Candidate 2, NetBeans 3.5 Final, ANTLR plugin 1.0.4, jSimpleX, PJIRC 1.84, Tomcat mod_jk 1.2.4, J2EE 1.4 SDK Beta 2, Java Development Kit 1.4.1_03, Java Media Framework 2.1.1e, Java 3D API 1.3.1, Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE) 1.0.3_02, MIDP 2.0 for Series 60, JPublish 2.0, Kablog 1.3

Erik C. Thauvin is director of technology at Imacination Software, where he has spent the better part of last year creating and developing the jTalk E-Business Platform. He has close to 20 years of professional experience in hardware and software development, and maintains a lively Java blog. Erik can also be found lurking in #mobitopia.