This article tries to take the mystery out of the black art of developing layout managers. Much of the coverage in books and magazines typically centers on trying to wrench the complicated GridBagLayout into submission or demonstrates the development of a layout manager with virtually ...

Version 1.0 offered developer productivity, ease of use and powerful features. Now, with a new high performance compiler, connections to more enterprise systems, team programming support and exploitation of the latest in Java technology, VisualAge for Java, Version 2.0, looks like a gr...

So you joined a startup. You have plenty of stock options, a new company to build and a lot of work ahead of you. What's motivating you is the challenge and the chance to learn and grow. But be honest. You really want your stock options to be worth something one day. You want to ...

The JECF provides services (application programmer interfaces) on top of Java for creating payment and financial applications. The current version (beta release 0.8) provides services such as graphical user interface, secure encrypted database, capability mechanism, access to cryptogra...

Undoubtedly, the support for distributed transactions is a part of any enterprise system. Part One of this series (JDJ, March 1998) explored the X/Open Distributed Transaction Processing (DTP) Model - a common model for distributed transaction processing. We also explained the concepts...

Visual Age for Javaª provides a good IDE for object oriented development. One of the strong points of Visual Age for Java is its support for JavaBeans. As everyone in the world knows by now JavaBeans are components, or software parts, from which applications can be built. This has been...

Object-oriented software development using Sun Microsystems' Java language has become an industry standard for building scalable enterprise client/server applications. Additionally, most online transaction processing (OLTP) applications developed today by enterprises use relational dat...

As it turns out, designing and implementing this wizard framework exposes many of the real-world design and programming issues we face when creating Java applications. Overview The first step in designing our wizard class is to come up with an interface. An interface is a prototype for...

Since a middle tier isn't much good without something for it to talk to, we're going to use the Pubs2 database, which is an example database provided with Sybase SQL Server 1.1 Specifically, we'll use the authors table which is described in Figure 1. Imports:All of the example code is...

Although Java is cross-platform, its performance and quality are greatly influenced by the features of the underlying native platform. Since the Java language and environment includes concurrency and multithreading (MT) as integral components, the native operating system's multithreadi...

If you are experienced in using the POSIX threads package (pthread) in C or C++, one of the first things you may have noticed while learning Java is that thread semantics is one area where Java's designers did not try to emulate C semantics. The next thing you may have noticed is that ...

There is no doubt that Java holds tremendous potential in bringing sophisticated behaviors and networking to VRML 2 worlds. The debate is over how to add the Java and how much control the Java should have over the VRML. There are two approaches to using Java to extend VRML 2 worlds whi...

The purpose of this article is to explain how to change the appearance of some shapes as a result of the user clicking on one of them. This article assumes that you are a beginning VRML developer. VRML and JavaScript One is a language used to describe 3D worlds while the other is the ...

Summary An iterator is a language mechanism that facilitates successive enumeration of all the elements of a collection in some definite order. Java provides an iterator-like interface called Enumeration. The implementation model imposed by enumerations is known as cursor objects. It i...

Java is rapidly evolving from just a useful language for developing Web-based applets to an enterprise platform for developing and deploying mission critical applications. An enterprise-class application must possess many characteristics. Comprehensive security is, inarguably, one of t...

One of the salient aspects of the Java language is the control it gives to developers for dynamically generating and reusing code. This allows the language to offer Java programmers the ability to write code in which the actual behavior is determined at runtime. Of the eleven buzzwords...

Increasingly, technologists are asked by strategists to state the capability of Java within a distributed component architecture. The larger corporate platform is mixed and the owning, interacting businesses must implement a framework technical architecture in which present and future ...

In 1995, Java technology shook the World Wide Web as a network-centric, object-oriented language providing client-side processing that helped Web developers turn otherwise static pages into dynamic visual experiences. Key to the creation of these animated Web pages was Java's graphical...

Need to store your Java objects? Files can do this, with a little bit of programming to flatten them. Need to share them with others, guarantee integrity? Traditional DBMSs can do this, if you translate your Java objects to SQL. Need 24x7, scalability, distribution over WANs, flexibili...

My last column focused on several of Java's LayoutManagers, which are constructs used by developers to position Components within Containers using logic instead of pixel coordinates. We discussed all of Java's LayoutManagers except GridBagLayout, which is the focus of this article.

Last month, we started a fun project in creating a chat room applet. The overall project illustrates how to create Perl scripts which will be used as back-ends for your Java applets. The Java applets will interact with the Perl program using a standard CGI interface. While you can have...

Most interactive applications require online help - Java applications are no exception. To address this need, Sun Microsystems, Inc. has developed the JavaHelp API and help system. The JavaHelp software fills a void in the help market for a cross-platform, browser-independent help form...

It is not easy to query the contents of a database without proprietary front end tools or a database-aware IDE. A database-aware toolkit should be able to connect to and work with a variety of databases (local and remote, application and corporate) without a shift in how we view the co...

My last column covered Components, Containers and Events. The material discussed Java's different kinds of Components, the class structure, how Components generate events and how those events can be handled. We discussed the differences between Components and Containers. To recap, Comp...

Java enables us to embed miniature applications called Applets within Web pages which can process data, perform graphical animations and access databases, among other things, in a dynamic fashion. In addition, these Applets work fine on several different types of computers accessing th...

Introduction With wider acceptance of component development and distributed object technologies, applications can be 'assembled' as a set of collaborating components. For non-visual business components, where delivery time, integration costs and maintainability are the determining fact...

Coding style means nothing to a compiler; it will happily accept any legal code, no matter how badly formatted. Not so for us humans. Our ability to read and understand a program written by another is extremely sensitive to format. Imagine trying to read this article if every letter wa...

Personal Java PersonalJavaª is a new Java Application Environment for network-connectable applications on personal consumer devices for home, office and mobile use. It is designed specifically for resource limited environments.

JDJ: For those readers who aren't familiar with Schlumberger Electronic Transactions, could you please give us a short history of your corporate background and structure plus your own responsibilities? TL: Schlumberger has been in business since the late 1920s. The company was founded ...

Components transcend the programming language and support a very high degree of reuse. They greatly simplify the construction of large and complicated software architectures. One of the main reasons why Java promises such a bright future for the computing world is because of its inhere...

The drive to create a successful Web site has resulted in Web applications that are interactive and informative. A wealth of information is stored in corporate databases and there is a rush to publish this information on the Web. Corporations' traditional client/server applications are...

Despite extensive development over many years and significant demonstrated benefits, the object-oriented paradigm remains poorly formalized. Several concurrent object-oriented languages have been designed and implemented based on the concurrent object model. However, upon attempting to...

We are moving towards a world in which you can expect instant access to online shopping from a phone; your kids can always reach you with one number that bounces from your phone, to your pager, mail or car; and you pay one low price each month to your local telco provider that brings y...

Implementation of a fixed size pool of Objects in a distributed application must consider problems caused by the unpredictable nature of remote connections. An implementation is presented here for Java's Remote Method Invocation, which takes advantage of the Distributed Garbage Collect...

Introduction The rapid acceptance of Java for client and server applications has created an immediate need to move existing CGI scripts to Java servlets. Java servlets are server-side components that can extend the functionality of a Java-enabled web server. Currently, there are a numb...

This article focuses on the building blocks of Java's Graphical User Interface (GUI) building package, which is called java.awt, or just the AWT for short. AWT stands for Abstract Windowing Toolkit. It provides a platform-independent set of tools used by the Java developer to create bu...

Java needs to address the needs of performance and robustness on the server side to fulfill its promise of providing a networking solution for the enterprise. Servlets complement applets on the server side and complete the definition of Java's role in the client/server hierarchy. In th...

Introduction Just when you were beginning to get the hang of Java and had figured out it was more than just an animation tool, out comes yet another Java-related technology, complete with its own set of rules and conditions to dazzle and confuse. But what is so special about this new o...

Abstract This is the second in a two-part series presenting a Java implementation of a real-time multi-user blackjack game based on a collaborative, active object framework. In the last article, we presented the design of an active object framework for developing collaborative client/s...

More recently, due in part to Sun's "Java Everywhere" campaign, we are beginning to see applications featuring server-side Java (servlets) and imbedded Java devices (phones, light switches, etc.), as well as large-scale standalone applications (Sun Java Server). What continue...