If you are an enterprise or XML developer and wish you had a tool that could make your life easier, check out this review as it discusses two of the most useful tools in the industry.

A first-hand report from what the organizers call 'by far the biggest conference for Java people in Europe.'

Kirk Pepperdine spent the last few days in Antwerp at the BeJUG's (Belgium Java Users Group) second offering of JavaPolis. Learn how he got on.

What is every Java developer's nightmare? Maintaining code, even if he or she has written it. Code is often chaotic and incomprehensible, mostly due to nonuniform coding styles.

At WinWin Solutions we build custom business applications for insurance, health care, and financial vertical markets.

JDJ's Editor-in-Chief Alan Williamson was faced with having to build an IMAP server. Just as he was about to start getting into Sockets, Writers and Readers he happened upon a jewel lurking within the pile of open-source. Discover of what he found.

JDJ's Editor-in-Chief Alan Williamson finally had to find out what all the fuss was about. He accepted the invitation and headed down to Washington to witness and participate in his first NoFluffJustStuff symposium focusing on Java. Find out how he got on.

The JRockit engineers made two assumptions when they first designed JRockit. First, server VMs run for a long time and, second, memory is cheap and plentiful.

Way back in the November 2001 issue of JDJ (Vol. 6, issue 11), I took a look at Aligo's M-1 Mobile Application Server. Back then, the technology market was still in the heady 'bubble' days and wireless was the next big frontier. Fast-forward to mid-2003 and here we are wallowing in the throes of an extended technology slump. However, wireless applications are still a part of the next big frontier, and the team at Aligo has been hard at work updating their software. I recently had the chance to get my hands dirty with the latest, forthcoming release of the Aligo Omni Mobile Platform.

It was at the end of day 3 at JavaOne and I was tired. I was tired of product pitches, tired of talking, and tired of listening to all the hype. But Juliet caught his attention.

One of the key challenges facing Java developers is that their object-oriented applications use data stored in relational databases. The result: time- and cost-intensive mapping between the two paradigms. InterSystems' Corporation develops and markets a post-relational database management system called Cache that's designed to address this challenge by eliminating the impedance mismatch between objects and tables.

For the business people of the world, Excel is like mother's milk. I'm convinced that my neighbor, a financial planner for an investment bank, does our homeowner's reconciliation for fun: a showcase for his Excel prowess. It's a sickness. Excel is powerful, simple to use, and ubiquitous in virtually every market.

This review has, admittedly, been quite some time coming. Had I been looking at basic phone features, I could have produced something months ago - however, this magazine is not the mobile phone-geek's equivalent of the Trainspotter's Almanac (fortunately), and we have slightly more relevant details to discuss, such as exactly how well the P800 performs when running Java applications - so the review has taken considerably more time than I originally expected.

I work with a lot of J2EE development tools. While some feel like solutions looking for a problem, every once in a while I run into one that feels like it was inspired by a developer's frustration at not being able to work quickly and effectively. Ensemble Glider from Ensemble Systems is that sort of tool.

Recently, I had the opportunity to work with the latest version of Object-Venture's J2EE development tool: ObjectAssembler. ObjectVenture promotes ObjectAssembler 2.5 as a 'smart' development tool that simplifies and accelerates J2EE development. This is a popular claim among Java tools, so I decided to put it to the test. My experience showed that ObjectAssembler lives up to the challenge.

Creating cross-platform applications has always been a challenge. Java can insulate us from much of the hassle during application development, but often the particulars of each platform become painfully acute when distributing the application to a host of varied platforms. Most commercial installer programs support only one platform, which leads developers to support multiple installers on multiple platforms (using multiple products from multiple vendors).

Pop quiz: you're writing a standalone cross-platform application that needs to handle a large number of data files. The data may be disparate in type but it has some qualities in common. You want the user to be able to browse or search the data and, of course, you want your application to be responsive.

Java started as a simple programming language with a rather comprehensive runtime library. To penetrate the enterprise world, Sun then created the J2EE specification and, consequently, their application server.

There are seemingly countless self-paced J2EE computer- and Web-based training tools on the market today, and many are of questionable value. However, Conquer-IT! J2EE Part 1: JSPs and Servlets stands out from the crowd, focusing on the key skills developers require and giving users a chance to work with an actual application server, real code, and associated build procedures - very different from standard multimedia simulators found in most computer-based training products.

On November 7, 2002, Chutney Technologies sponsored a small get-together at New York City's Marriott Financial Center. When Alan forwarded the invite to me, my first thought was, 'Goodie. Nothing about Web services.'

We work in the IT services department of a large insurance company and were asked to rewrite an old PC-based finance application using a Web-based Java solution. The project development team's background was based on mainframe technologies with some client/server and Web experience (HTML, ASP, basic Java, and JSP).

Although developing full-featured desktop applications with Java has become a manageable task and performance has improved greatly, developers still face obstacles that make it difficult to get their Java applications more widely accepted. One problem with many Java standalone applications is a lack of integration into the desktop environment, which frequently alienates users.

Is there a development team out there who has never heard the following phrases when delivering a project? 'That's not what we wanted...' or 'We thought it would also do this...' Then even when we are on target, we're all too often hit with requirements that were simply not communicated and end up failing to meet our client's expectations.

Over the past few years the integrated development environment has raged on. For years I've used a text editor and a build tool to create my Java software; I used no set processes or design methods. The integration of UML modeling and Java coding makes obvious sense to a software designer, but a programmer like me has to ask, can XDE mentor me and make me think differently about the way I design software?

OpenSymphony is a collection of Java open source projects that provides a foundation for building J2EE applications. Each application tends to build from another OpenSymphony component in a loosely coupled manner, providing a best-of-breed option.

As most Java developers know, the standard GUI components provided with the Java platform are barely adequate for most applications. We've all had to extend the base Swing (JFC) components and AWT components to develop the rich user interface components that users expect today.

The latest version of Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA) marks a major turning point in the history of this product. Prior to version 8 the most important design goals were ease of use, small footprint, and cross-platform support, with high speed taking a back seat.

I do believe the center of Java development is the programmer who is creating object-oriented Java code. But how do you achieve this when developing Web applications? In the Internet scenario the client and server sides are disconnected: the front end is shown to the user miles away from where the real code that's reacting to it is executed.

Interacting with software can be extremely annoying or incredibly exciting ­ depending on the user interface. While one GUI can leave you hopelessly confused and deny the execution of simple tasks because you can't find the right button, another GUI can draw you in with its appealing and conclusive features, making the implementation of even complex procedures a walk in the park.

There's no doubt about it. Borland makes great products for developers. They're definitely expensive and usually complex ­ but very powerful. I've been using JBuilder 6 for several months, and when I had the opportunity to review the latest version, I jumped at the chance.

Over the past couple of years, a number of Java development tools have appeared on the market; these tools focus on various aspects of software development, such as modeling, deployment, and testing, and aim to increase productivity.

I must admit, until recently my idea of an integrated development environment was Emacs, a couple of shell windows, and a six-pack of Dr. Pepper. I had nothing against IDEs, in fact I was all for them, I just couldn't find one that worked for me, instead of the other way around.

It takes more than a group of keen developers coding like mad to create a software system that meets requirements yet is robust to change. As new requirements are discovered, new code must be written and existing code maintained. Without careful consideration of code structure, packaging, and component dependencies, a large system can quickly turn into a 'big ball of mud.'

While I wandered, head down, among the detritus of the post dot-com era, a new world order was forming. When I looked up, I found the technical world rallying under a new banner - Web services. Savior or hype? I had to know. What better place to learn than the world's largest Web services event?

To fully appreciate the power behind Workshop, you need to know a bit about Java Web Services (JWS), an up-and-coming standard in the J2EE world. Just as you can embed Java code in a JSP file and have it compile on the application server, Java code in a JWS file is compiled automatically into a Web service.

Although I've been following EJB 2.0 very closely, it was only recently that I walked into a project that was the perfect venue for its new features, such as the much enhanced container-managed persistence and local interfaces. And Enterprise JavaBeans, written by Richard Monson-Haefel, fit the bill as a reference and learning guide.

It's unfortunate that programmers come and go at an alarming rate in the IT industry, leaving code that must be maintained by someone who quite frequently had no hand in writing it. Software engineers using UML have models on how their programs behave, but the rest of us are left to read through reams and reams of methods. Most of the time all you need is an overview of how the program is made up, not the finer details.

One of the most common questions Java developers ask after downloading a new version of a product is: 'What really changed?' JDiff is an open source Java tool, based on Javadoc and developed by the author, that produces HTML documentation describing the precise API changes between two versions of a product.

Since its release in late 1997, the JMS API has established itself as a core component in the Java Enterprise suite. A number of vendors are offering implementations of JMS with one of the latest coming from Ashnasoft Corporation. Although new to JMS, Ashnasoft has brought its experience and a reputation from JTurbo (sold to New Atlanta last year) to the scene.

The appeal of Web portal applications relies on how conveniently they provide a coherent and unified gateway to dynamic content and applications that are tailored to users' needs and interests. The goal of portal applications for the enterprise is to attract users with specialized content and services, and then retain these users by personalizing their experiences.