I was asked to mail a weekly "interesting subject" to my fellow developers (all very experienced) - a short summary (2-3 paragraphs), some "how is this relevant to us" information, and a link or two for further reading.
Now, as I've said before, these are very experienced people - some more than me. I was thinking along lines of "why not to use finalize (multiple GCs)" and "how does reference compression works in 6u14" - what other subjects do you suggest?
I just finished reading "Programming Collective Intelligence" and "Numerati". Sounds like using the Internet as a treasure trove of data and trying to glean insight out of it using statistics, modeling, and numerical methods is beginning a Golden Age.
Next step for me is learning statistics using R. My formal math education was calculus. Any statistics that I learned was by osmosis. I thought it'd be good to be formal about it for a while before branching off. Plus it's a good way to become familiar with R.
Why not get them to subscribe to the Java Specialist newsletters instead ?
These come out weekly, or biweekly, and almost always have something of interest wrt. Java and the commonly used APIs - whether it's an issue on JVM functionality, API oddities or something else. It's the most 'advanced' Java information I subscribe to.
I suggest looking into this project
The Two-Tier Programming Toolkit is a software design and re-engineering (or round-trip engineering) tool which supports forward and reverse engineering of object-oriented programs. The current prototype supports authoring visual specifications ('modelling'), verifying these specifications against Java 1.4 programs, and the visualization of native (plain source code) of Java 1.4 programs (read more). Also available is a video demonstration of the TTP Toolkit.
I recently read about Google Wave, a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, and the Wave Protocol
It looks like something interesting to keep an eye on.
I suggest giving them the Java RSS feed from StackOverflow :)
I would look into some books like "Effective Java" for some ideas, or some design patters, refactorings ideas, but I'm not sure how high you're setting your bar, these might be considered easy things.
performance tuning/measuring might be also interesting ( JMeter and similar )
security issues are always interesting/important/easily overlooked, but again, it depends on your audience
unit tests in conjunction with legacy code and refactoring patterns ( like adding say adapters for old code in order to work with new parts of the project )
javaranch is a nice site/forum that might provide you with some other ideas
pick some idea that's not necessarily spectacular, but that's a bit out of your main "focus" and provide something to get back to in the future if needed ( say embed a jetty server in a downloadable package, compare some standalone databases - derby, hsqldb, etc - integrate a tinymce editor in some web pages, etc )