Macromedia's mission is to improve the user experience on the Web. While it's best known for its Web authoring and media playback solutions, it's also committed to the viability and importance of Java as a platform for servers and has invested heavily in Java technology for two of its products, Dreamweaver UltraDev and Generator. Macromedia feels that the integration of authoring, playback, and server capabilities is key to creating the best user experience.

How many times have we pulled out our hair trying to find a proper way to deploy high-end graphics and animation over the Web? The answer is perhaps a bit embarrassing. In DHTML concepts, with the help of JavaScript and layered components, we could render interactivity with graphics and produce some animation effects, but those were far from what we desired and what existing multimedia packages could offer for PC-based games and animation programs. By the time Java came into the picture it offered graphics-handling features, which perhaps put a ray of hope into the developer's world. Despite the fact that Java could handle graphics, it was to a limited degree and had inherent problems with graphics rendering, such as flickering, and frequent repaint problems. It was (should I say is?) a head-breaking task to write extra code to avoid those problems. Moreover, in a browser environment Java applets took a fairly long time to download and display heavy graphics, calling into question their potential as a solution.

In Part I of this article (JDJ, Vol.6, issue I) we discussed solving legacy data integration problems with VisualAge for Java and WebSphere Studio. In Part 2 we'll discuss using the MQSeries Integrator and some of the steps for creating data translations and data flows.

Using charts makes complex data easier to comprehend. Unfortunately the decision to add charts to a Web site or an application doesn't necessarily make life easier for the designers and programmers responsible for displaying them. Depending on the complexity of the data, developers may encounter a seemingly endless series of questions. What type of chart is needed? Should the data be displayed horizontally or vertically? 2D or 3D? What increments should be used along the axis lines? What happens if the data changes?

Every company that's been around longer than a few months has probably created or purchased many different systems dedicated to specific areas of the business. For example, let's say customer files were set up years ago using off-the-shelf software. The software had hooks for customization, and some features were added. Over the years the customer list has grown very large, and the company has become dependent on this system. You know the word: legacy.

JBuilder Data Express controls enable JBuilder developers to use prebuilt objects to provide the user with an interface in which to view and manipulate data. For the most part, the use of Data Express components simplifies our task of programming data access functionality into our applets/applications. One drawback of using these components is that you're restricted to using only functions and changing properties that are supported by that specific control. In other words, although JBuilder simplifies your task, you can use only prewritten functionality.

One of the most important but least used techniques in software development is proper design before implementation. Everyone knows this, but it seems that no one does it. Insane development schedules, pointy-haired manager types who believe that the only 'real' artifact produced by a developer is source code, and a host of other events conspire to keep development as a nonengineering pursuit. However, those who have used good design (in the form of use cases, sequence diagrams, class diagrams, and so on) find that it reduces the number of required changes late in the project, calls for fewer design changes after coding has started, and shortens development schedules.

Kawa 5.0 Allaire Corporation Kawa 5.0 is an integrated development environment for J2EE application development. A streamlined J2EE-compliant visual tool, it makes Java development accessible to many. Advanced capabilities include a debugger that supports multithreaded debugging and conditional breakpoints, as well as an extensibility framework for easy customization. Kawa 5.0 complements Allaire JRun Studio and is available in two editions, Professional and Enterprise.

Who are you writing beans for? Like most bean developers, you probably think your customer is someone just like you, a Java programmer. You design your beans with yourself in mind, adding features that would help you as a programmer. Seems reasonable. But what if you could reach a wider audience?

One of the first things that crossed my mind after being asked to review JRun 3.0 was this: How could I objectively evaluate this product without being biased by my own experience working with a competing product? To give you a little background, all but one of the major Internet application projects I've worked on used this other product (which will remain nameless) as their Java application server. In addition, I've seen this product used so often in conjunction with Oracle Enterprise and Sun servers that the combination in my mind has become a semiofficial architectural standard. Despite its prominence in the Java application server space I had to come to the realization that other application servers on the market are just as capable and have unique and desirable features of their own. One such product is Allaire's JRun Application Server 3.0.

ParaSoft's WebKing 2.0 Web testing software is a tool to assist developers in testing and deploying dynamic Web sites. It applies traditional C/C++ and Java testing techniques to the Web environment to identify a multitude of potential errors in a site. WebKing also provides a publishing mechanism to automate the testing and transfer of a site's components.

Since the mid-'90s we've seen the quality of Web programming paradigms mature at an astonishing rate: from static pages with animation, CGI-based programs, and JDBC connectivity to back-end relational databases and servlets processing requests on application servers. We commonly hear about Web pages being more interactive, likely using HTML forms, JavaScript, or Java applets.

Sun's iPlanet division has become the umbrella organization for all the application development software that Sun has collected over the past several years. Sun's initial foray into this business was their acquisition of application-server vendor NetDynamics - but the core technology for iPlanet came from the Sun/Netscape/AOL multiplayer trade that put control of Netscape's server products under Sun's domain. Ultimately, Sun would go on to acquire Forté Software and NetBeans to round out their application server family of products. Technically speaking, Sun doesn't own the Netscape product line outright and iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions is an alliance among AOL, Netscape, and Sun that was formed in March 1999. The iPlanet name comes from another Sun acquisition and the alliance appears to be primarily controlled by the Sun camp. The iPlanet 6.0 application server is the latest release of the consolidated product suite - one that includes code from both NetDynamics and Netscape.

How many appliances do you have in your household? Unless you're currently a contestant on 'Survivor' island, the answer is probably over 20. Refrigerators, microwaves, TVs, VCRs, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and the favorite appliance of so many programmers - the coffeemaker. The list goes on. Unfortunately, although appliances have grown increasingly intelligent in recent years, they tend to exist in their own individual universes, oblivious to the world around them.

Over the past year all the major database vendors and many of the classic client/server tools vendors have turned their attention to the application server market. The venerable database and tools vendor, Unify, is no exception. Unify has released a new version of its eWave Studio and eWave application servers into the fray. It considers itself an endorser of the J2EE platform, but is not yet an official licensee of the J2EE. I recently looked at this latest release with an eye on its Servlets and JSP capabilities.

In the September Java Developer's Journal (Vol. 5, issue 9) we discussed the tools available in VisualAge for Java and WebSphere Studio for building and debugging Web applications. This month we demonstrate how to use these tools to build a simple Web site that allows users to access their bank accounts using an Enterprise JavaBean.

Moore's Law essentially states that the processor speed for chips doubles every 18 months, and it's proved to be a fundamental tenet of the high-tech industry. Milbery's Law, on the other hand, has been less rigorously proved. It states that developers have to double their output with fewer resources every time they're asked to do so. Machines get faster and faster and developers get further and further behind. One solution to this endless cycle is to aggressively model and analyze your business requirements before you start slinging code. Ideally, the closer you track your software requirements with the needs of the business, the more likely it is that your code will match the business requirements on time and on budget. Toward that end I had the chance to look at Ensemble Systems' Ensemble Streams Professional 3.2, a business-process tool for communicating workflow models to end users, analysts and teams of software developers.

Your team has been assigned to build an end-to-end Web application. As a Java programmer, you need to focus on the code, to ensure that it can successfully call the required data. Your graphic and Web designers need to focus on the actual presentation to the user, to determine how best to display the information.

Eliad Technologies is a young company with a mission: to bring data visualization components to the Java community in a very small footprint (i.e., 162KB).

Java-based technologies such as servlet and JavaServer Pages enable the effective development of component-based, server-side Web applications. Although servlets can be self-contained programs, it's more common that JavaBeans handle the business logic, JSP components handle the presentation logic and servlets handle the HTTP protocol interaction flows.

I'll be the first to admit I was a little reluctant when JDJ approached me about reviewing the newest release of Sun's Java 2 Standard Edition platform. It's a little like asking a Jim Morrison fanatic to review the Doors Greatest Hits CD. Since I spend most of my days working and thinking in Java, I find it a little hard to be truly objective about it. (And it's even more difficult to choose which topics are worthy of inclusion in a review!) Nevertheless, the Java 2 platform is jam-packed with critical technologies for building enterprise-class applications. Sun has released new versions of both the Standard and Enterprise editions, and in this article I'll be taking a brief look at them.

The phrase customer-driven has become a mantra for many companies - asserting and embracing the central role played by customers in the daily life of today's corporations.

In last month's issue of JDJ (Vol. 5 issue 6) I talked about the concept of using frameworks to automate the development of J2EE applications. Armed with this concept I took a look at Codagen Technologies' Gen-it for Java 1.1.

Many Internet sites and applications began life as simple static Web pages. Once developers gained some initial experience working with the Web, these same applications went from being static pages to dynamic applications. In response, a host of dynamic application servers emerged in the marketplace, many of them featuring their own proprietary languages that were derivatives of HTML tags.

Let me first intoduce PurchasePro.com, Inc. - a provider of Internet B2B electronic commerce services. The company's e-commerce solution consists of public and private 'e-marketplaces' where businesses can buy and sell a wide range of products and services in an efficient, competitive and cost-effective manner. It was built using Microsoft technologies such as COM and SQL Server.

Over the past few years, maturity of the Internet, as well as the introduction of a host of other technologies, has led to the development of highly complex Web solutions that test the functionality and scalability of even the most versatile application servers.

Information repositories are essential. They allow data to be shared within or outside an organization, bringing us closer to the reality of the paperless office.

Enterprise JavaBeans (aka EJBs) are fast becoming a mainstay in Web-based business applications. They're not trivial to develop, though ­ at least not if you're developing them by hand and ignoring the EJB tools already available to automate (and thus simplify) your development tasks.

The convergence of information technology (IT) and business strategy has become an increasingly critical competitive factor for most businesses. Lincoln Re came to this realization several years ago when we embarked on transforming our IT systems architecture from a mainframe-based environment to a distributed client/server infrastructure.

Having been involved in a fair number of development projects over the years, I've often wondered what goes on during the process of setting up and configuring installation programs using authoring tools such as InstallShield. The task of generating a setup program was always assigned to some unsuspecting junior programmer on the team. How they were able to get all the various components, registry settings and so on set up in the tool and compressed into a single file was always a well-guarded secret (I always thought it had something to do with job security). Anyway, driven by curiosity and answering the call of duty, I accepted the offer to evaluate the new 3.0 version of InstallShield Java Edition.

As the software development process becomes ever more complex, end users demand more and more functionality in less and less time. Companies are extending their business applications to run on both intranets and the Internet, and new applications have to run on many different platforms. All this calls for large development teams to design, build and maintain applications.

Java has brought much in the way of programming advancement within easy reach of developers. Powerful constructs such as multithreading and advance communication are now relatively easy for you to use in your programs. Java has also brought a strong sense of object orientation. The ability to reuse code and not reinvent the wheel each time you program is a great improvement over alternative programming languages.

Desktop applications, handheld devices, telephones - Internet applications can be delivered from a variety of sources and appliances. They can originate in one country and be delivered to another in the blink of an eye. As a result, no matter whether you're constructing an informational Web site or an e-commerce solution, you won't be able to service all possible users unless you can "speak their language."

Second in a series of articles adapted from Java Servlets: By Example by Alan R. Williamson, reproduced here by permission of Manning Publications. One of the core building blocks of any system - distributed, local or virtual - is a database. At some point in the chain of processing, the ability to store and retrieve data needs to be addressed. The capacity to access a database successfully is a high priority for many projects. Coupled with the onslaught of the Web and the need to place some sort of front-end access to a database, the demand for database connectivity at the server side is at an all-time high.

JClass LiveTable from KL Group proved to be the ideal solution for building an intuitive and dynamic graphical user interface for the Vanguard product family from Integrated Measurement Systems Inc., a global leader in the development of engineering testing systems.

JFCSuite is a collection of visual beans based on JFC and complementing it. It fills in missing pieces in the JDK/JFC GUI libraries, namely, masked (number-only, all upper case, etc.) entry fields, date/calendar controls, various extensions (sorting) on JTable and more. All components support the Java Look and Feel (JLF) and are 100% Pure Java certified. Although the licensing is per developer, there are no runtime license fees when the library is used in commercial products. The product is also available with enterprise (priority) support bundled, which may be a good choice if the components are relied on heavily in your UI. Detailed pricing information for subscription, source code and other options are available at www.protovi ew.com/order/direct.asp.

I'd like to introduce you to a new JDJ series consisting of selected excerpts from my current book, Java Servlets: By Example. I've put a number of chapters into article format, hoping they'll give you some insight into the world of servlets and the sort of things we have to do at the server side. The first one really has nothing to do with servlets at all - it's more of a general overview of debugging and optimization techniques. This is by no means an exhaustive exploration, merely a toe-tipper.

If there's one industry that challenges the enterprise Internet for growth and excitement, it's medicine and biotech. The pace of medical research and innovation rivals that of any dot-com startup or enterprise computing gambit.

The JProbe ServerSide Suite, version 2.5, consists of three related tools: a Profiler/Memory Debugger, a Threadalyzer and a Coverage product. All can use the LaunchPad to start profiling sessions against applications, applets and servlets, or use their built-in launch facilities.

PointBase, formerly known as DataBahn and DataBean, is legendary Oracle founder Bruce Scott's latest venture. PointBase, an embedded database that's written entirely in Java, is available for a wide variety of platforms. The main advantages of embedded databases are their ultra-small size, self-management capabilities and portability. The PointBase Server Edition is designed to run on a wide variety of hosting platforms and uses a very small footprint. In fact, the Mobile Edition can reportedly consume as little as 270K of memory on the client. These types of databases are ideal for embedded systems and applications that require the services of a full object-relational database without all the associated overhead.