Three times in recent years I've joined an organization that was relatively new to Java development and missing some basic infrastructure elements that I'd relied on in previous development efforts. These elements include utility classes, standards and conventions, and build and qualit...

Decades ago, when we were all computing on mainframes, the application stack was pretty simple. Programs were all running in core memory on the same machine as the operating system and the data store. There was typically one transactional log for activity and one for errors - not too m...

As developers or system administrators, we all have common tasks that must be replicated again and again. A few examples might be creating a new feature test, populating a test database with data, copying data from a file system to a database, or creating new user accounts.... You get ...

The Eclipse Open Source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) (see http://eclipse.org) is rapidly gaining popularity among Java developers primarily because of its excellent Java Development Tools (JDT) and its highly extensible plug-in architecture. Extensibility is, in fact, one o...

Highway and Java enterprise application projects have much in common. Both can suffer from design flaws, stalled flow, and unforeseen performance glitches. But in the case of Java enterprise applications, performance management tools can help developers highlight potential problems bef...

We've all heard about the simplicity and power of the EJB 3.0 specification. And because this has proven to be true, we can't help but think that performance must be rather poor. After all, all that simplicity must come at a price.

This article provides a solution for improving productivity in scenarios where EJBs are used to implement business services using Spring, an Open Source POJO container, as a lightweight mock container for testing and using XDoclet attributes to define design-time considerations. The pr...

Back in the '90s, we became accustomed to receiving half-inch thick glossy brochures from various training companies. Five days of such instructor-led training would cost more than $2,000. For corporate employees this was 'other people's money,' and usually employees were entitled to a...

'Java on mobile phones' has been the hottest topic at the JavaOne conference for the past several years. This year was no exception and a large part of the show floor was designated as the 'Wireless Village.' With tens of billions dollars' worth of Java phones and related services sold...

At JavaOne this year, one of the biggest announcements (albeit this one had nothing really to do with Java) was the acquisition of SeeBeyond by Sun Microsystems. It looks like Sun is putting its cash, which it has plenty of, to good use. As we have seen over the last decade of Java, Su...

Despite the increasingly widespread adoption of J2EE for enterprise applications, measuring their performance in production continues to be a black art. Without knowing what to look for, many people measure anything that seems useful, which soon results in an overloaded system and ream...

The elegance of Java stems from how the language addresses a number of highly complex software engineering issues in a seemingly consistent and easy-to-use paradigm. While there are a few potholes that you need to be mindful of, most caused by the differences between primitives and obj...

Network speed has improved tremendously over the years and has revolutionized enterprise computing, but even with today's network infrastructure sending messages across a network is of several orders slower than sending messages locally. The latency caused by the network is a function ...

If last September I was calling the Java job market healthy (see http://java.sys-con.com/read/46228.htm), today's market is hot. Once again recruiters are hungry and polite, but this doesn't mean you can easily get a new job. I'd like to share with you some rules and techniques that ca...

Over the course of its life, the J2EE Web Tier has faced many challenges in easing Web application development. While it's a scalable, enterprise-ready platform, it isn't exactly developer-friendly. Particular challenges to Web developers include the need for a standard Web framework, ...

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is not so much a new technology as a new state of mind. Technology for implementing business logic in the middle tier and exposing it as a service has been around for years. Yes, the technology is more standardized now and more widely accepted. What'...

Object-oriented design is like an alloy that consists of a solid grounding in the object-oriented (OO) approach and implements the best OO practices, heavily laced with how to sidestep the OO pitfalls. The design process is more than just applying basic OO principles.

As the Web becomes an intrinsic part of the economy and our everyday lives, the success and survival of many businesses increasingly depend on the availability and accessibility of their core Web applications. Although a high degree of scalability and reliability can be achieved throug...

How many times have you coded a financial, engineering, or pricing calculator and used an Excel spreadsheet as a reference? What if you could take that Excel spreadsheet and make that the business logic for a Java application? The e.SpreadSheet API from ReportingEngines makes that drea...

These days, powerful computers (including servers) are cheap compared to the 'good old days.' In fact, they're even cheap compared to what they cost a couple of years ago. Vendors are selling PCs whose CPUs clock above 3GHz for under $1,400. Their memory and HDD capacity are also impre...

A custom multithreading framework is an efficient way to improve the performance of Java applications. It uses an asynchronous parallel pattern to implement the business process. However, its traditional Java thread-based implementation shouldn't be used in applications hosted in a J2E...

It's been almost 10 years since enthusiasts around the world started to form small local communities called Java Users Groups (JUGs). They gather once in a while after work to network, listen to a presentation on some new Java technology or JSR, and talk about what's hot and what's not...

This article introduces readers to bytecode generation and shows how to inject generated bytecode into a JVM runtime. After reading this article, generating a Java class won't be any harder than creating an XML document with the DOM API.

Java Web applications have needed a standards-based API for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for a long time. ECM is an essential requirement for Web applications on the Internet, intranets, and extranets. ECM vendors have proprietary APIs in various languages and this fact has inhi...

With the standardization of the Java Data Mining (JDM) API, Enterprise Java applications have been given predictive technologies. Data mining is a widely accepted technology used for extracting hidden patterns from data.

Yahoo is joining rivals Microsoft and Google with its own blogging products.

SOA is obviously the new buzzword of the day. Among the many acronyms, one that is seen very often is 'Same Old Architecture.' In many ways, this is true. The key differentiator between the paradigms that have been prevalent in the past and this new incarnation of 'service-orientation'...

The latest trend in information portals and Web applications has been to build complex Web pages. To present large amounts of information and functionality without compromising usability, designers have imposed a clear structure by grouping related elements together.

The Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) is a standard API to access different naming and directory service implementations like LDAP. A naming service provides naming functionality and a directory service provides applications with directory functionality. The Java naming servic...

A multitiered J2EE-based enterprise application is usually deployed on multiple J2EE application servers running on geographically separated machines. It may also integrate the services distributed in heterogeneous applications within an enterprise (such as an ERP application or a main...

In the past six months, I had the opportunity to work with two leading firms in the Java world - Nokia and JBoss. Being the world's largest J2ME device vendor and most popular J2EE server developer, respectively, Nokia and JBoss come from the two ends of the Java technology spectrum, w...

Developing lightweight J2EE client applications that interoperate with multiple application servers can be difficult to do. Having to include an application server-specific JAR file along with a thin client application can significantly increase the size of the deployed application and...

Most Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) serve a definite purpose, performing a specific set of actions on behalf of client applications. The ubiquitous Bank Account bean, which supports basic account transactions such as withdrawal and deposit, appears in almost every J2EE tutorial. Students ...

As demonstrated by the emergence of multiple portal initiatives within organizations today, the benefits of enterprise portals are clearly understood. It's common to see several enterprise portal platforms deployed throughout an organization. However, many companies are attempting to s...

Mobile communication comes into our daily lives very quickly, and as of today several wireless technologies have become standard. In this article I'll briefly review Bluetooth principles and the principles of Java development for Bluetooth on mobile devices.

The Java Technology for the Wireless Industry specification (JTWI) encompasses a standard set of J2ME APIs for mobile device development that is being widely adopted by mobile telephone service providers, making it an important platform for Java developers.

In the November issue of JDJ (Vol. 9, issue 11) I explained the theory behind the JSR 168 (Portlet Specification) from an academic perspective. The specification provides the infrastructure, classes, interfaces, and JSP tags for building applications that can be pieced together from a ...

Last month's article on EJB 3.0 (Vol. 9, issue 11) focused primarily on the basic features of the specification. Part 2 dives much deeper into the specification to talk about more advanced features like dependency injection, dependent objects, secondary tables, and inheritance.

A challenge of software architecture is to create software that can grow with the business and withstand changes to the technology with minimal redevelopment costs. Business growth usually means increased loads on enterprise computer systems.

It used to be difficult if you wanted to create a Web-based site that offered users the ability to access various systems from a single page. Systems were too severely disjointed and required a huge investment of time and work in order to bring them together in a single Web page.