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The Return of the Pig

The key to building a distributed application successfully lies in a sensible partition of work across the different boundaries and devices. With a client/server program, one of the advantages it...

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A Time Zone Patch

The java.util.TimeZone abstract class that represents a time zone is used to produce local time for a particular global time zone. A TimeZone comprises three basic pieces of information: an ID, a time...

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Software Testing Shouldn't Be Rocket Science

Earthdate: October 15, 1997, and the Cassini spacecraft is launched. Mission: to boldly go and explore the planet Saturn.read more

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Go Fast It Runs Too Slow

Go fast, it runs too slow, you've got to make the number show. Diddle de bop, da la de doop, sitting around and feeling groovy.read more

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Making PDFs Portable: Integrating PDF and Java Technology

Since Adobe released the first public PDF Reference in 1993, a number of PDF utilities and libraries, supporting all kinds of languages and platforms, have been made available to users and developers...

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Geeks, Germs, and Software

At a recent presentation given by a software engineer from a very large automotive company, I gleaned some remarkable facts:for a particular car model where the basic price goes up as the livery...

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Total Eclipse

Tim'O Reilly, the eponymous publisher, kicked off EclipseCon 2005 in Burlinghame earlier this year with an excellent presentation titled 'Open source business models and design patterns.' As well as...

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The Return of the Client

I witnessed a recent BOF conversation in which the general feeling was that the browser GUI and its accompanying plethora of back-end frameworks had let people down by delivering a poor return on...

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Software Engineers Aren't Doing Enough To Really Create Error-Free Software

The problem with defects is that while they occur, the cost of finding and preventing them has a diminishing return, so the approach often taken is that once no more serious defects can be found in a...

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Enterprise Java - Properties Editor Framework

Property files are frequently used in systems built using Java whether it's a thick Java client, a servlet, or a business component. Java specifies the format for a property file and provides the...

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FrameResizer

This article presents a Java/Swing component implementation of a feature that is ubiquitous in nearly all desktop applications, particularly Windows applications - an area in the lower right portion of...

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J2SE and Open Source - Living Together in Perfect Harmony

Java has been the springboard for some of the most successful open source projects today including JBoss, NetBeans, and Eclipse. Several folks though have felt the missing piece was an actual open...

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Interface All Boundaries

Experienced developers know many of the benefits of and motivations for using interface-based design principles. Interfaces provide for polymorphic behavior by hiding the implementation and only...

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One Size Fits No One

At a presentation a number of years ago given by Josh Bloch he made a comment that Java as a language hit the 'sweet spot' of programming. His metaphor was based around the fact that the language was...

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ArrayListModel with Swing's JList and JComboBox

This article presents a data model based on a Collection implementation that can be used with Swing components JList and JComboBox. It also discusses a method to use these same concepts in constructing...

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Java Desktop: The Usability Paradox

The world's first office computer, known as LEO, was created in the 1950s by Lyons, the British teashop giant. Its aim was to replace the thousands of clerks who did the billing, invoicing, and...

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How To Build a Toolbar From a Menu

Actually I would like to do something more, for instance, providing a toolbar for my application. First, I add three buttons with the same cut, copy, and paste icons (no text for them, according to the...

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What, Where, or Who Is Java?

Ask most people on the street what Java is and they might tell you it's an Indonesian island. If you happen to bump into some programmers, they'll probably tell you it's a language that reads like C++...

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Sun-Google: What's It All Mean? "Really Disruptive," Says Founder of the AJAX...

Paolo Massa is Web-famous for predicting AJAX Office would become a reality within a year. Now he considers the Sun-Google announcement and what it might mean for the prospects of OpenOffice and Google...

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i-Technology Viewpoint: Java's Not Evolving Fast Enough

'If Java is to remain at the forefront of technology for the next 10 years,' writes Joe Winchester in his Java Developer's Journal column, 'it needs to find a way of decoupling API calls between...

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Extending Rich GUI Clients with Jython

Allowing extensibility of a rich Java GUI is a daunting task. Each user may require slightly different functionality - this one wants to be able to import data from an Excel spreadsheet, and another...

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When Fixing Problems, Look Beyond

One way in which technology is adopted is when an existing process is automated and made more efficient, cheaper, or reliable. Another is when a technique or innovation is applied to an existing...

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Where Are the High-Level Design Open Source Tools for Java?

I have just finished reviewing the book Open Source Development Tools for Java, which provides excellent coverage of such topics as log4J, CVS, Ant, and JUnit. There is a chapter on UML tools though in...

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We Are Made to Persist. That's How We Find Out Who We Are

In Java's early years, the language received a lot of flak from its opponents over performance. Java turns its .class file bytecodes into machine instructions (MI) at runtime, something that costs...

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All for One and None for All

When someone in a corporate boardroom decides what their IT strategy is going to be, it isn't based on what language or software architecture they will use, but on how a system can provide value to...

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Java Developer's Journal: 'To Dwell in the Future and Forget About Today'

Some of the words I dread most in a meeting are: 'What if ?' They're fine in the present tense of 'What if a user tries this option?' or 'What if the database read fails mid flight?', but as soon as...

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Swing Baby, Yeah!!!

Back in 1996, Java was originally hailed as a way of making the Web more appealing through applets, and, with its 'write one, run anywhere' philosophy, as the holy grail for desktop apps that would be...

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Who Does Business Logic?

One of the phrases that has always puzzled me is 'business logic'. It seems to crop up a lot in presentations, articles, sales pitches and so forth. The one I saw it in most recently was a talk about...

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The Death of Mediocrity

Computers can generally be characterized into two types: ones that are designed to have more than one user attached and those intended for a single user. In the beginning almost all computing was done...

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Java: Money, Freedom and Open Source

In 1996, Sun created Java and the terms under which it is distributed. Since then, the Java Community Process (JCP) has emerged, allowing companies to participate in shaping language changes, but the...

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The Perils of Abstraction

Abstraction, as defined on dictionary.com, is 'considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.' It's a powerful...

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The Two-Dimensional Legacy of GUIs

Ted Nelson, inventor of, among other things, hypertext, once lamented that software development today is at the same evolutionary stage film making was at 100 years ago. Back in the 1900s, when the...

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Ten Brilliant Years

The year 2006 marked the tenth anniversary of the Java language and for me is the most significant in its history. The most important event was the announcement that a GPL version of Java SE will be...

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Software Should Be More Hard Wearing

I am always in awe of people who develop hardware. They're the real engineers of our profession, the ones pushing forward the speeds at which things work, their size, and their connectivity. For...

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E-mail - Problem Solved or Created?

At the annual Alan Turing memorial lecture given by Grady Booch in London last month, he chose as his subject, The promise, the limits, and the beauty of software. It was an excellent address in which...

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Those Who Can, Code; Those Who Can't, Architect

At the moment there seems to be an extremely unhealthy obsession in software with the concept of architecture. A colleague of mine, a recent graduate, told me he wished to become a software architect....

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Browser Wars and Swing on the Desktop

The WebRenderer Swing Edition changes the face of Java Swing applications and the rendering of Web content within Java. Before we jump into that, let's take a look back at Web content display in Java...

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Intelligent GUIs Should Require No Thought to Operate

In Bernard J. Baar's book 'A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness,' he describes the brain as having a single conscious area that can be occupied by one thought at a time. The unconscious part of the...

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Get a Boost of Flex this Monday in New York City

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web...

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Please Listen Carefully as the Following Options Have Changed

The other day when I arrived at work my phone's voice mail light was lit up. Cool, except that after pressing the voice mail button I was asked to enter my password. Issac Asimov's first law of...

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