The Web is moving to wireless and Java is making it happen! How is a wireless environment different from the Web? What languages are used for wireless devices and what features do they have? Most important, what role does the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) play in a wireless architec...

In just a few years the Java language and platform has become the technical approach of choice for building complex, distributed and Web-enabled applications across the enterprise. Thanks to its cross-platform runtime environment, object-oriented development model, and facilities for w...

During the last couple of years there have been several developments in the application server environment. Nineteen ninety-nine truly was the 'Year of the Application Server.' The evolution of the application server market has been influenced by several factors. The term application ...

Yes, Virginia, there are still people who think you can build a complex B2B e-commerce Web site using HTML. The good news is, these people are mostly harmless; they'll learn the error of their ways quickly and probably before their projects are too far down the road. There are far more...

Polymorphism is an often-misunderstood concept within the developer community. Outside the community it's often a buzzword used to create an image of intellectual capital accumulating in a vault somewhere.

Enterprise system developers have embraced the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) development model and the collection of Java APIs for developing standard, component-based, multitiered enterprise solutions. These APIs provide a standard mechanism for accessing pertinent system...

Part 1 of this series on business rule engines (see 'Implementing Business Rules in Java,' JDJ, Vol. 5, issue 5 [May 2000]) addressed the question of how to integrate the rule engine into a Java application. To review...business rules are the policies and procedures that describe or co...

Front-end architecture and the art of developing GUIs that are functional and intuitive have been a challenge in this industry for quite some time. The advent of Java has made things a little easier; Java's extensive Swing package has assisted in the rapid creation of GUIs for applicat...

They usually happen during the early hours of the morning, shortly before the code needs to ship: exception errors. . . .

Have you ever wanted to have your own Web e-mail system, rather than relying on free Web e-mail services? In this article I'll show you how to build a scalable Web e-mail system based on Java servlets and JavaMail, two members of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. The syste...

The past three articles in this series have highlighted the strengths of scripting languages. They're interactive and dynamic, and allow you to experiment, debug and prototype solutions quickly. However, the most common response when I speak to die-hard Java fanatics is, 'Yeah, but I'l...

The fifth anniversary of the inaugural JavaOne conference is upon us, and there can be little doubt that Java has had a profound impact on the way that applications are developed and deployed.

So you want to build a robot that walks around and bumps into things. But that's not enough for you (this is the year 2000, after all); you also want to control your robot over the Internet. What's more, you want to use Java to control it.

It began sometime in late '96 or early '97 ­ JDK 1.0 still ruled and Tandem was still called Tandem, not Digital or Compaq ­ when people from IBM, Tandem and Oracle met and started to muse.

Before we start on the technical front, let me tell you about my latest acquisition. I recently went out to purchase a watch. My wife wanted me to buy one of the fancy ones, but I'm more excited by watches that have all the features ­ stopwatch, backlight, barometer, altimeter, everyme...

One unfortunate aspect of the many enterprise APIs and specifications that Sun has released over the last few years has been the lack of information about how some of these APIs interact with one another. In particular, two very useful specifications ­ the Java Messaging Service (JMS) ...

Developers at some point in their careers will find themselves standing at the whiteboard, trying their best to regurgitate some complex development design they've spent all night working on. This is usually done with a series of strange symbols, arrows and scribblings in an attempt to...

A common set of programming problems drove us to develop a Java class we call PropArgs. Consider the following questions a programmer may want answered about a program: Which RDBMS instance should data come from? Does this particular user have any personal preferences I should be setti...

Most Web-based applications today confine users to the frame of their browser, restricting them to viewing only one Web page at a time. Technologies such as JavaScript make additional browser windows possible, but this approach doesn't enable the kind of customized menus, toolbars and...

Say you're writing an Enterprise JavaBean that represents a persistent object, such as a customer or a product. You have two choices for getting data (such as customer name and product number) from the bean to the database and back:

Part 4 of a series discussing the many languages that compile and/or run on the Java platform

Twenty years after it first made waves, rule-based technology is making a comeback. Java developers with an eye on the e-commerce market are becoming aware of how integrating business rules and objects in Java can help expand Java into new niches within Web-based applications. This art...

XML has become the standard format for B2B data exchange. To actually implement such exchanges, however, the programmer must provide data transport and translation services. Java-based messaging provides an ideal transport for XML. This article explores how to use a Java messaging serv...

If you know SQL and Java, and you want to learn SQLJ, this series of articles is for you! I'm going to introduce SQLJ, the standard for embedding database SQL statements in Java programs. You may be familiar with JDBC, an API for talking SQL with the database. SQLJ takes many ideas fr...

With the proliferation of Java-based application servers at the core of today's Web applications, the preferred Web architecture that has emerged places Java in the middle tier, gathering data from myriad sources, and HTML presenting that data through a Web browser.

This article is Part 3 of an interactive series that discusses the many languages that compile and/or run on the Java platform. Java Developer's Journal invites you to vote for your favorite non-Java programming language in the JDJ forum. Your vote will decide which languages will be c...

They're one of the most commonly used computing tools in business today, regardless of a company's revenues or number of employees. Wall Street money mavens use them, and so does your hometown accountant...spreadsheets. Did you ever tweak spreadsheet formulas to play "what-if"...

EJB servers are transactional servers that allow developers to concentrate on business logic. The EJB model implements two-phase commits, transaction context propagation and distributed transaction, although it's up to the vendors to decide which technique to use. A transaction is form...

As a consultant, developer and database administrator, I've often been asked to provide coding guidelines and tuning assistance for Java code that utilizes JDBC. Over time, I've been introduced to or developed standard coding practices that make JDBC code faster and less error-prone, a...

In this article we're going to describe a tool that we've created to help OO newcomers understand the class/instance relationship, inheritance between classes and linking between objects...by automatically converting an object graph into HTML. The tool we've created is based on the &qu...

Several folks in the computing industry think of 1999 as having been the "Year of the Application Server." But while the term application server itself may be a fairly recent addition to the software computing vocabulary, the application server market has already become one o...

Java programmers have been anxiously awaiting the release of the Java Media Framework 2.0 for more than a year. Not only does JMF 2.0 finally let you capture audio and video content, but it claims to solve the most irritating limitations of the JMF 1.x release. Does JMF 2.0 live up to ...

Enterprise JavaBeans are being promoted as the component architecture for the new decade. The word Enterprise in the name would imply that EJBs are to the server environments what JavaBeans are to client computing. Both are component models, both are for Java, both try to deliver on th...

RTP and RTSP: Protocols that address the transportation of multimedia content over IP. The Internet is strewn with multimedia minefields. Lost or out-of-sequence packets and transmission delays can create havoc in your applications. Fortunately, you can overcome these problems by usin...

Exception chaining (also known as 'nesting exceptions'), is a technique for handling exceptions. A list is built of all the exceptions thrown as a result of a single originating exception as it's converted from lower to higher levels of abstraction. It can be used in both client and se...

The use of Java in Web browsers has had mixed results. Applications that run in browsers rather than locally find a host of different hurdles. They're more restricted, run slower at times and take a long time to load, thus making complex applications more difficult. Advances in securit...

What This Series Is About. This article is Part 2 of a series that discusses the many languages that compile and/or run on the Java platform. This is an interactive series. Java Developer's Journal invites you to vote for your favorite non-Java programming language in the JDJ Forum. Yo...

The Java servlet API specifies a very lightweight framework for developing Web applications. Although servlet technology is just one of the building blocks in the J2EE architecture, developers often use servlets to build full-fledged Web applications. Today several vendors and organiza...

A tip window (also known as a tool tip window) is a small popup window that displays a single line of descriptive text. Tip windows are usually displayed over toolbar buttons to provide textual help about a toolbar button's functionality. The tip window control is available for Swing c...

The multimedia objects in Sun's Java Development Kits are so primitive that they're worthless for serious development. Fortunately, Sun has overhauled Java's multimedia capabilities with the release of the Java Media Framework. In this article I'll explain why the JMF architecture is a...