“What would you think if I told you that you can develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you can with a typical Java framework?” Oops! Ten times faster! Well, after these comments I decided to learn Ruby on Rails. I need to know the true key of the productiv...

This article is about what processes I came from, my definition of the Agile/Scrum process, and how stress has been spread out throughout the project vs. at the end. Stay tuned for #2 in the Agile Chronicles series where I elaborate on the re-factoring challenges.

This is the third article of the Agile Chronicles series. We'll talk about utilizing branches for each developer in Subversion, Merge Day, and how while cool, it’s an ivory tower process.

JavaServer Faces (JSF) has seen increased momentum among enterprise Java developers ever since it was incorporated into Java EE 5.0 and became the standard framework for Java-based Web development. While some are just now taking their first steps with JSF, early adaptors have already d...

A standard from OASIS called Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is used to allow portlets to be decoupled from a portal. It allows portlets, which are deployed to remote portal servers, to be aggregated at runtime into a unified portal page by a local portal server. The remote por...

All too often quality is an afterthought in the application lifecycle. Ever-changing requirements, the pressure of increasingly short release cycles, and factors such as distributed development compound the complexity involved in effectively managing quality practices across applicatio...

Web Services are becoming the chosen way of exposing interoperable units of work as services. Today consumers and providers of software services talk different languages, and SOAP makes them understand each other. SOAP can be transported via almost anything, and we sometimes joke that ...

Today's applications require faster and more frequent access to data at the mid-tier than ever before. This is due to a number of factors, including massive growth of data volumes and the extreme processing requirements that accompany such growth, the pressure from ever-changing busine...

Deploying and migrating JavaEE applications is hard work. Specifically, it's work that's error-prone, repetitive, and time consuming because of the complexity of setting up or tweaking Web application servers. The result is lost man/hours, soaring costs, and potential problems associat...

With any new technology, best practice documents are invaluable in helping developers avoid common errors and design quality systems. There is much literature already available regarding best practices for using Java Management Extensions (JMX) in monitoring and management applications...

This was the challenge: Build a generic system that lets users compare data suppliers in different categories. The data to be compared is defined by XML Schemas, where new schemas will be frequently uploaded and existing schemas may be changed. Moreover, the schemas aren't specifically...

AJAX has forever altered user expectations regarding the experience delivered by the Web. In today's world, users sit at the edge of their seat waiting to see what scrumptious eye candy AJAX will serve them next. Some of the more notable visual effects and desktop-like interactions inc...

Virtualization technology is transforming the IT landscape and holds significant promise for those looking to maximize hardware utilization as well as reduce the time associated with provisioning and administering separate physical systems. According to the Yankee Group, today more tha...

As software developers we have enjoyed a long trend of consistent performance improvement from processor technology. In fact, for the last 20 years processor performance has consistently doubled about every two years or so. What would happen in a world where these performance improvem...

The multi-core buzz is everywhere. Pick up a newspaper and the local electronics mega-store is advertising multi-core desktops and laptops to the consumer. Interesting, but what does it mean to the everyday Java programmer? Maybe nothing. If you live in the application server world wri...

It's widely recognized that the telecommunications industry is riding the crest of change and evolution on the back of new access technologies such as 3G, GPRS, and Wi-Fi. Such IP-centric access mechanisms must also be considered in conjunction with the emergence of feature-enabling te...

WebLogic Server 10 Technology Preview supports JEE 5. A feature of JEE 5 is the Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) used to create Web Services and Web Service clients. WebLogic Server 10 provides the jwsc task to create the Web Service artifacts and the clientgen task to create the...

We live in a relational world - which is too bad since we develop with objects. Since most non-trivial applications require information to be persisted and retrieved in what is generically called a database, we need to find efficient methods for persisting our objects and retrieving th...

The EJB 3.0 Java Persistence API (JPA) was released in May 2006 as part of the Java Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE) platform, and it has already garnered a great deal of attention and praise. What began as merely an easier-to-use successor to the much-maligned container-managed persiste...

Java is an outstanding language for building components, services, and many applications that are vendor and platform neutral. The vast adoption of Java technology by the industry in the past decade is a testament to the power of Java. Development of new applications, services, and com...

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is the GUI toolkit used by Eclipse. The same folks that worked on the Common Widget (CW) library for IBM/Smalltalk developed it, this time for Java. Now, it's maintained as part of the Eclipse Platform project and distributed under an open source licen...

A challenge facing many organizations is how to quickly and effectively react to frequent changes in business requirements, whilst improving productivity and reducing costs. To achieve this, you need a flexible infrastructure that can meet the demands of a changing marketplace and seiz...

What do Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Claude E. Shannon, and Konrad Zuse (to name but a few) all have in common? All were missing from the initial round-up I recently published in an attempt to nail down - by consensus - the top 100 or 150 contributors of all-time to i-Technology, to ...

Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a simple model for creating service-oriented applications. This article highlights the benefits of SCA and introduces SCA concepts by walking through an example. The example has been developed using the Apache Tuscany open source project (http://...

Putting AJAX functionality into your Web application can be a daunting task when you're first learning AJAX. After all you're a Java programmer not a JavaScript programmer. It can also be very frustrating having to learn how the different browsers handle XMLHttpRequests. It's been repo...

Much of the work surrounding the design and development of enterprise applications involves decisions about how to coordinate the flow of persistent data. This includes when and where to cache data, when to apply it to a persistent store (typically the database), how to resolve simulta...

Understanding the complexity of AJAX at the browser level is critical to refining and debugging rich AJAX applications that leverage Web technologies such as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XMLHttpRequests. Adding a third-party AJAX runtime heightens the complexity and su...

I have spent a good part of the last year trying to 'wrap' COM servers in Java for a content management organization. It had an array of syndication servers supported by an integrated messaging platform developed using COM. The purpose of this exercise was to increase the organization'...

Does this sound familiar? You have a domain object, perhaps for reporting purposes, that's built from a ton of JDBC queries and it takes too long to load. Nothing else happens until this object is built, so it's become a bottleneck. Even worse, each of the queries is actually well tun...

It's been over three years since the JDBC Expert Group held its first meeting to gather requirements, requests, and pipe dreams for the JDBC 4.0 specification. In that meeting, we discussed a wide variety of topics, including performance enhancements, clarifications on the existing JDB...

Applying XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations) to XML documents can be done using the Java EE (formerly J2EE) Servlet filters model and Java Server Pages (JSP) technology. Servlet filters can be invoked before or after the invocation of a particular servlet or JSP, ...

The Eclipse platform is an Open Source, integrated system of application development tools that you implement and extend using a plug-in interface. Eclipse provides a set of core plug-ins that configures the basic services for the platform's framework. A platform developer can build an...

Experience has taught us that it's not enough to simply have a persistence standard as part of an enterprise specification. It must be a standard that can solve people's problems and be useful to most of the applications that want to use it. While earlier versions of Enterprise JavaBe...

Unlike the HTTP protocol there's no stable default JMS listener for invoking the Web Services exposed in Apache Axis 1.x using JMS (Java Message Service) as the transport protocol - other than the one provided merely for demo purposes.

A previous article compared Jakarta Struts and JavaServer Faces implementations of five simple design patterns for list selection. (JDJ, Vol. 11, Issue 3). Long lists and ordered selections require a more complex design pattern. This pattern displays available items in one list and cho...

I'm going to share my experience of enabling a graphics-oriented GIS visualization module with a C++ rendering engine for a Java desktop application using JNI technology. The solution was implemented in the GIS library TerraLib as part of the TerraLib Develoment Toolkit (Tdk), applying...

Testing Java code is increasingly a task taken on by developers rather than separate teams to which the programs are handed. Many Java developers are now familiar with JUnit and know the different between unit tests and integration tests. This has been driven largely by the focus on te...

This article will describe our experiences with developing a Java-based instant messenger application using Jabber/XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) - a free, open and public protocol and technology for instant messaging. According to the Jabber Software Foundation, 'Un...

Service-Oriented Architectures offer a number of potential benefits: They can provide new opportunities to connect enterprises with customers, partners, and suppliers; improve efficiency through greater reuse of services across the enterprise; and offer greater flexibility by breaking ...

In today's work environment analyzing large amounts of varying data types is paramount. Graphing techniques can be an invaluable tool to understanding and interpreting that data. In many cases two-dimensional graphs, such as XY, scatter, pie, and bar charts, are sufficient. But increas...