Vol: 8 Iss: 6 Read Back Issues

What's in a Specification? This past month gave me a newfound respect for specification writers. I remember when James Davidson marshaled the early Servlet API and the lively discussions that ensued on the mailing lists, basically coordinating the entire operation (no JCP in those days, eh?!). The point is, at l... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 9,722

From Within the Java Community Process Program Welcome to the June edition of the JCP column! Each month I provide news and information about the Java Community Process: newly submitted JSRs, new draft specs, Java APIs that were finalized, and other updates from the JCP. June means it is JavaOne time, and hence this column will dis... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 12,449

JDJ Editors' Choice Awards The editors of Java Developer's Journal are in a unique position when it comes to Java development. All are active coders in their 'day jobs,' and they have the good fortune to getting a heads up on many of the latest and greatest software releases. They were asked to nominate three pr... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 11,475  Replies: 12

ObjectAssembler 2.5 Enterprise Edition by ObjectVenture, Inc. 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 tool... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 11,656

Ensemble Glider by Ensemble Systems 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 ... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 10,383

Sex Machine Bean There's a a carefully understated saying, attributed to the ancient Chinese: 'May you live in interesting times.' While at first glance living in interesting times might have been construed as a blessing, we who live in the present times know that interesting can be a curse. We've take... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 14,339

P800 by Sony Ericsson 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 rel... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 14,385  Replies: 1

J2ME Clients with Jini Services Jini provides simple and reliable access to services over any network, independent of platform, protocol, or application technology. Enterprises can use Jini to develop a resilient service-oriented architecture that can be accessed from a broad range of clients. Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 18,813  Replies: 1

Interesting Technologies A recent J2ME-related announcement I find particularly interesting for a number of reasons is esmertec's demonstration of a MIDP 2.0 implementation on BREW. First, esmertec recently acquired Insignia, whose Jeode Embedded Virtual Machine for Java has made PersonalJava available on PDAs... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 16,107

Performance of Java Compilers: An Empirical Study How fast should our Java code be to be considered fast? After all, speed is a relative concept. I'll compare the results of CPU performance for the following JVMs: Sun's J2SE 1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.1, and Jikes. These results can be used to make a number of educated decisions such as choosi... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 19,775  Replies: 5

XML Data Binding with JAXB and UBL As more and more industries standardize their data formats around XML, Java developers are challenged to keep up. That's especially true of developers employing a document-centric programming model, where an evolving schema can expose brittleness in your code and leave you wishing for ... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 28,978  Replies: 1

Testing, Testing . . . While I was preparing for my interview with Bruce Eckel, a quote appeared in his Web log in May that said 'If it's not tested, it's broken.' It got me thinking about how much I actually tested the code that I wrote. Now I don't write JUnit tests for everything, but perhaps I should. To... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 15,495  Replies: 6

Using JCache to Save Money During the past 18 months, a rapidly growing number of organizations have been taking advantage of the emerging JCache standard for distributed caching to help scale application performance while at the same time reducing infrastructure costs. Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 16,321  Replies: 3

XML Serialization of Java Objects Java serialization was initially used to support remote method invocation (RMI), allowing argument objects to be passed between two virtual machines. RMI works best when the two VMs contain compatible versions of the class being transmitted, and can reliably transmit a binary represent... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 44,800

A Brief History of Tags Custom tags in JavaServer Pages have come a long way since their inception. Now that Sun has provided some standards for these tags in the form of JSTL (and the up-and-coming JavaServer Faces), and has promised additional support for these standards in JSP 2.0, let's look at how we got... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 14,781  Replies: 2

Too Much Innovation! As I look over my choices for various tasks, I'm a little unsettled at how many choices I have, what they do, and how they interoperate. I'm not going to be the one to say that innovation is a bad thing, but too much innovation probably is a bad thing. In software design, it usually me... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 13,570  Replies: 7

Dial Tone for Business Apps Around 15 years ago there was a cascading switch failure in the telephone network along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Phones stopped working. So did air traffic control, because information about air traffic was communicated between control towers using the phone network. Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 10,484  Replies: 1

And the Artificial Stupidity Award Goes to... I remember well the first time I worked at a company that used corporate e-mail. Instead of the usual development process that involved weekly meetings with users, between which we wrote specs and coded deliverables, this new messaging technology was going to streamline everything for ... Jun. 1, 2003  Reads: 13,569  Replies: 3