HTML5 Canvas element has arrived

Good news: HTML5 has arrived (thank you in part to Apple).  We are no longer limited to using applet, object, svg or img tags to present dynamic visual content.  We can use the canvas element in addition to the geolocation and storage functionality.
As a first example, i have of course written a very rudimentary version of John Horton Conways' "Game of Life".  The William Gosper "glider gun" is an excellent proof of concept.
The following link will take you to a pure HTML5 document that renders the glider gun sequence. You will need the latest Android 2.x, Chrome, IE9, Firefox or Opera browser to see the canvas element.

Cellular Automata simulation in HTML5 using the canvas element
http://99.240.95.213:7101/radar/html5.xhtml (IE9, Chrome and (android based Firefox))
http://99.240.95.213:7101/radar/html5.html (android 2.x base browser)
http://99.240.95.213:7101/collatz/faces/index.xhtml
http://99.240.95.213:7101/collatz/ajaxclient.jsp

Cellular Automata simulation in a Java SE Applet
http://www.objectivej.com/inorganiclife/experiments/life/LifeAnimApplet.html

Cellular Automata simulation in a Wikipedia animated GIF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Thread Safety

The following Java API is known to be not thread safe.

SimpleDateFormat is not thread safe
The SimpleDateFormat implementation of DateFormat is not thread safe by design. If you wish to use this API you have several architectures to choose from in your application.
Use sychronization in your implementation - not advisable since this will queue your requests
Use InheritedThreadLocal storage by using get/set to use an instance of SimpleDateFormat per thread - recommended for environments running in thread pools - like in EE application servers.
Here we use an InheritedThreadLocal map entry to store an instance of the DateFormat object for each thread. See p.45 section 3.3 Thread confinement of "Java Concurrency in Practice" by Brian Goetz. Also, do not set this field before starting this thread or the ThreadLocal map value will be cleared to initialValue()
Use a pool of SimpleDateFormat instances - not in this case.

I will use the ThreadLocal map to store a unique instance for each thread of my running application. However, any ThreadLocal will not do - as I may be running in a pooled environment - like in an application server container like WebLogic, Tomcat, OC4J, WebSphere, JBoss, Spring tc, Spring dm, Geronimo and even JRun. In this case we need to use the subclass InheritableThreadLocal. When child threads are created, these threads will get a reference to their parent thread's ThreadLocal value by default. We will also want to override the InheritableThreadLocal.childValue() function to clone the parent value so that we are fully threads safe. Doing so will ensure thread safety whether ThreadLocal variables are set before or after thread creation.

private static final InheritableThreadLocal format = new InheritableThreadLocal() {
    @Override
    public DateFormat initialValue() {
      // This default value will get replaced by non-default constructors
      return new SimpleDateFormat(DefaultFormat);
    }
    @Override
    // All child threads must clone the formatter and not share the parent formatter by default
    protected DateFormat childValue(DateFormat parentValue) {
     // Object.clone() is a shallow copy, however DateFormat.clone() replicates mutable fields
        return (DateFormat) parentValue.clone();
    }

  };

SAXParser in JDOM SAXBuilder is not thread safe
The parser in SAXBuilder must be set to not be reused in your constructor.
See the following API
http://www.jdom.org/docs/apidocs/org/jdom/input/SAXBuilder.html#setReuseParser(boolean)

aBuilder = new SAXBuilder();
  aBuilder.setReuseParser(false);

Multiple Instruction Multiple Data

    We need to start thinking about how existing and future Java API's will work with all the combinations of multiple data sets, multiple virtual machines, multiple physical hardware devices and multiple clients.  The issues surround how we handle concurrent access, availability, synchronization, distribution and sharing of all these resources.
I1: Data sharing:

• shared database (old)
• shared schema (new)

References: