Joe Winchester's Java Blog: No More J and No More 2
Rumors of this name change have been flying around for a while but it is now official - the brand has been kicked into the bucket and replaced instead with a more verbose name and 'Platform.' This...
View Articlei-Technology Viewpoint: Java's Not Evolving Fast Enough
'If Java is to remain at the forefront of technology for the next 10 years,' writes Joe Winchester in his Java Developer's Journal column, 'it needs to find a way of decoupling API calls between...
View ArticleJoe Winchester's Java Blog: Is the AJAX Bullet Coated in Fool's Silver?
Ajax is an odd beast, because it gives a very rich user experience when compared to a traditional web page (Yakov writes wonderfully about this at http://java.sys-con.com/read/163232.htm), however...
View ArticleWhen Fixing Problems, Look Beyond
One way in which technology is adopted is when an existing process is automated and made more efficient, cheaper, or reliable. Another is when a technique or innovation is applied to an existing...
View ArticleWhere Are the High-Level Design Open Source Tools for Java?
I have just finished reviewing the book Open Source Development Tools for Java, which provides excellent coverage of such topics as log4J, CVS, Ant, and JUnit. There is a chapter on UML tools though in...
View ArticleWe Are Made to Persist. That's How We Find Out Who We Are
In Java's early years, the language received a lot of flak from its opponents over performance. Java turns its .class file bytecodes into machine instructions (MI) at runtime, something that costs...
View ArticleWeb Services and SOA - Sexy Clients and Programatic Oaths
Recently I was called in at the last minute to help out with a sales opportunity. The team had been working hard on a proposal for many months, during which they'd built a large working prototype...
View ArticleAll for One and None for All
When someone in a corporate boardroom decides what their IT strategy is going to be, it isn't based on what language or software architecture they will use, but on how a system can provide value to...
View ArticleJava Developer's Journal: 'To Dwell in the Future and Forget About Today'
Some of the words I dread most in a meeting are: 'What if ?' They're fine in the present tense of 'What if a user tries this option?' or 'What if the database read fails mid flight?', but as soon as...
View ArticleWeb 3.0 - The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum
When the phrase Web 2.0 came out a number of people were sceptical about what it actually means. Being objective, it's a collection of disparate technologies that make web sites more usable. Everyone...
View ArticleSwing Baby, Yeah!!!
Back in 1996, Java was originally hailed as a way of making the Web more appealing through applets, and, with its 'write one, run anywhere' philosophy, as the holy grail for desktop apps that would be...
View ArticleRich Client, Poor Client, Cool Client, AJAX
The problem with the web has always been that despite anyone trying to convince you otherwise, it's a page based latency bound transaction model that is a dressed up graphical mainframe. Works well...
View ArticleSPAM, FUD and Rogue Web Services
First one today from 'Visa services' who'd insisted I entered my credit card details and password on their web site today to avoid irreversible instant deactivation of my account. Only problem is I...
View ArticleWho Does Business Logic?
One of the phrases that has always puzzled me is 'business logic'. It seems to crop up a lot in presentations, articles, sales pitches and so forth. The one I saw it in most recently was a talk about...
View ArticleCan Map Do A Better Job at Allowing Optimized Iteration Over Its Keys and...
I've used the map to store things in a keyed fashion and want to iterate over the keys and the value for each. Problem is, each time I do it I find myself thinking how inefficient it must be. The keys...
View ArticleThe Death of Mediocrity
Computers can generally be characterized into two types: ones that are designed to have more than one user attached and those intended for a single user. In the beginning almost all computing was done...
View ArticleJava: Money, Freedom and Open Source
In 1996, Sun created Java and the terms under which it is distributed. Since then, the Java Community Process (JCP) has emerged, allowing companies to participate in shaping language changes, but the...
View ArticleNetBeans Interview with Tim Cramer
Recently I was able to talk to Tim Cramer, executive director of tools at Sun, about NetBeans. Tim started in engineering doing supercomputer compiler work, moved to more generalized hardware compiler...
View ArticleThe Perils of Abstraction
Abstraction, as defined on dictionary.com, is 'considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.' It's a powerful...
View ArticleThe Two-Dimensional Legacy of GUIs
Ted Nelson, inventor of, among other things, hypertext, once lamented that software development today is at the same evolutionary stage film making was at 100 years ago. Back in the 1900s, when the...
View ArticleTen Brilliant Years
The year 2006 marked the tenth anniversary of the Java language and for me is the most significant in its history. The most important event was the announcement that a GPL version of Java SE will be...
View ArticleSoftware Should Be More Hard Wearing
I am always in awe of people who develop hardware. They're the real engineers of our profession, the ones pushing forward the speeds at which things work, their size, and their connectivity. For...
View ArticleShip Happens! Insights From the Eclipse SWT Community
The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is the GUI toolkit used by Eclipse. The same folks that worked on the Common Widget (CW) library for IBM/Smalltalk developed it, this time for Java. Now, it's...
View ArticleE-mail - Problem Solved or Created?
At the annual Alan Turing memorial lecture given by Grady Booch in London last month, he chose as his subject, The promise, the limits, and the beauty of software. It was an excellent address in which...
View ArticleJava Editorial — Not Invented Here: Reject, Repulse, and Reinvent
The phrase 'not invented here,' or NIH, when applied to technology, describes a resistance by a group to use a perfectly valid solution to a problem they're encountering because they'd rather build the...
View ArticleThose Who Can, Code; Those Who Can't, Architect
At the moment there seems to be an extremely unhealthy obsession in software with the concept of architecture. A colleague of mine, a recent graduate, told me he wished to become a software architect....
View ArticleIntelligent GUIs Should Require No Thought to Operate
In Bernard J. Baar's book 'A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness,' he describes the brain as having a single conscious area that can be occupied by one thought at a time. The unconscious part of the...
View ArticleThe Vision for Eclipse: An Interview with Mike Milinkovich
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, has been kind enough to answer some questions for Enterprise Open Source Magazine. Rather than rattle off the usual ones about the name,...
View ArticleJDJ Editorial —Conference Presentations, Magic Shows, and the Five-Ring Circus
Having attended two conferences in the past three weeks and seen untold presentations, I've come to the conclusion that irrespective of the subject matter, each presenter invariably falls back on the...
View ArticleEclipse Developer's Journal - The Evolution of Java
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, has been kind enough to answer some questions for Java Developer's Journal. Rather than rattle off the usual ones about the name, about...
View ArticleDesktop Java Slims Down to Enter the AJAX Race
A number of very significant development efforts are underway that bode well for Desktop Java's future. On the language side is the Java FX script project http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/index.jsp....
View ArticleDoubtful Diagrams and Far Out Figures of Web 2.0
In a recent presentation I attended, the speaker warmed up with a couple of bulleted lists that outlined the agenda of the session before moving onto his third slide that was clearly many days, work of...
View ArticlePlease Listen Carefully as the Following Options Have Changed
The other day when I arrived at work my phone's voice mail light was lit up. Cool, except that after pressing the voice mail button I was asked to enter my password. Issac Asimov's first law of...
View ArticlePointless Places, Boring Faces, and Useless Cases
Often in software I find myself preaching restraint to those who wish to move platforms for no apparent reason than to keep up with the IT fashion industry; however, even harder than the silver-bullet...
View ArticleSoftware Salespeople Are Like Pretty Boy Band Members
Once upon a time, software developers wrote code and ruled their kingdoms. Good programs had few bugs and performed their tasks efficiently and with style. The elite programmers went on to become...
View ArticleJava JVM Swapping - Safe Practice or Unsafe Risk?
One of the most fundamental design principles of Java is captured in its motto 'Write Once, Run Anywhere.' It describes how a .class file encodes its instructions at the bytecode level, allowing...
View ArticleGoogle Searching for Java Innovators
Imagine you are a contestant on a TV game show and your grinning quiz master pops the question: 'Name the one thing you most associate with Google?' Think about your answer - write it on a card (don't...
View ArticleIs It Time for a Hippocratic Oath for Programmers?
Hippocrates, one of the founding fathers of modern medicine, realized that those who trained to become physicians were not only able to use their skills for good and for progress, but also might be...
View ArticleIs Computing Riddled with Too Many Acronyms?
An acronym occurs when the first letters of a phrase are combined into a shortened form that becomes an abbreviated way of describing the original. In science, they are often used to take a fairly...
View ArticleThe 4 Core Principles of Agile Programming
One of the things I really enjoy at the moment is the recognition and adoption of agile programming as a fully fledged powerful way to deliver quality software projects. As its figurehead is a group of...
View ArticleWhat Does the Future Hold for the Java Language?
Before Java I was a Smalltalk guy. I remember switching from one language to the other and the tipping point that you reach when you've mastered the new language and how many months it takes, not to...
View ArticleDesktop Java Editorial: Management – The Final Frontier
The finest programmer I've ever worked with told me recently that she was giving up coding altogether. The reason – a succession of inept and incompetent managers had just destroyed her faith in...
View ArticleThe JavaFX SDK Has Landed
At last year's JavaOne Chris Oliver gave a presentation on JavaFX in which he discussed how he was interested in programming Java2D not in terms of JComponent paintEvent methods that launch into...
View ArticleShould Java Assert that Network I/O Can't Occur on the UI Thread?
Doing network I/O on the user interface (UI) thread is bad. Most developers know that and can tell you why; unfortunately, it’s still done. At this year's JavaOne, one of the keynote JavaFX demos...
View ArticleDevils, Demos, Details, and Demons
When a product a colleague worked on recently shipped its first generally available release, the event was accompanied by a marketing fanfare of podcasts, press releases, and conference trips to...
View ArticleCatching the Test Bug
The software industry is often obsessed with progress be it in the form of a new language, wire protocol, specification update, or some other technology-driven feature. For me, software is a means to...
View ArticleUser Interface Generation Tools: Silver Bullet or Fool's Gold?
User interface generation tools are something that has always been dear to my heart. I’ve enjoyed using them and have been fortunate enough to work on developing them. However, there’s a huge tar pit...
View ArticleThe Trials of Software Testing
Software testing while one of the most important tasks done in a development project is often misunderstood and abused by everyone from programmers and managers to testers. Wikipedia calls testing “an...
View ArticleDialog Boxes, Habituation, and Single Threaded Thought
In Jef Raskin’s excellent book, The Humane User Interface, he discusses how the human brain is able to perform many tasks simultaneously while only having the ability to focus on one conscious thought...
View ArticleJDJ Editorial: IT Olympics
There are a number of esteemed contests for the greatest and fastest software developers among us – events where we can pit our coding prowess against fellow brainiacs and like-minded techies. I think...
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