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...
View ArticleA 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...
View ArticleSoftware 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
View ArticleGo 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
View ArticleMaking 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...
View ArticleGeeks, 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...
View ArticleTotal 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleSoftware 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...
View ArticleEnterprise 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...
View ArticleFrameResizer
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...
View ArticleJ2SE 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...
View ArticleInterface 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...
View ArticleOne 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...
View ArticleArrayListModel 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...
View ArticleJava 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...
View ArticleHow 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...
View ArticleWhat, 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++...
View ArticleSun-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...
View Articlei-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...
View ArticleExtending 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...
View ArticleWhen 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...
View ArticleWhere 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...
View ArticleWe 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...
View ArticleAll 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...
View ArticleJava 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...
View ArticleSwing 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...
View ArticleWho 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleJava: 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleTen 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...
View ArticleSoftware 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...
View ArticleE-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...
View ArticleThose 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....
View ArticleBrowser 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...
View ArticleIntelligent 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...
View ArticleGet 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...
View ArticlePlease 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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