Articles by Topic

Vocal Java
Disabled users depend on assistive technologies to help them work with computers, and this technology is built into Swing. In this article, Jeff Friesen shows how to use a free implementation of the Java Speech API to create a program that reads the text of Swing and AWT components as a user mouses over them.
by Jeff Friesen
[April 13, 2006]

James Liu and OpenSolaris Team Roundtable
java.net's Gary Thompson moderates a roundtable discussion with James Liu and members of the OpenSolaris team in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne.
by Gary Thompson
[July 20, 2009]

Juggy and the Java Tools Team
Java Tools Community Leaders Toni Epple and Fabian Nardon speak with Juggy (Bruno Souza) in a wide ranging "conversation" in this java.net Community Corner podcast recorded at JavaOne 2009.
by Bruno F. Souza
[July 16, 2009]

Pavel Suk and Jakub Podlesak on Prague and Java Communities
Jim Wright interviews Pavel Suk (Director of the Prague Engineering Center) and Jakub Podlesak (head of the Prague JUG) in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne.
by Jakub Podlesak, Pavel Suk
[July 15, 2009]

Query by Slice, Parallel Execute, and Join: A Thread Pool Pattern in Java
Pagination is a much-needed feature; one that's harder than it looks. For large datasets, reading all results into memory is impractical, if not dangerous, but only fetching small chunks can make it difficult to apply business logic across all results. Binildas C. A. shows how to combine the database's ROWNUM function with Java SE 5's thread pools to create highly effective pagination.
by Binildas Christudas
[January 31, 2008]

Adopting a Java Persistence Framework: Which, When, and What?
Java programmers have a number of persistence frameworks to choose from, and far from being redundant, each is based on significantly different beliefs, assumptions, and ideal use-cases. In this article, Sharad Acharya takes a comparative look at JPA, Entity EJBs, Hibernate, and TopLink, to help you understand which is right for your needs.
by Sharad Acharya
[December 18, 2007]

What's New in JDBC 4.0?
Java SE 6 offers a new version of the platform's database support: JDBC 4.0. Sharad Acharya shows off the new features, including simplified driver loading, better exception reporting and handling, support for more data types, and more.
by Sharad Acharya
[April 10, 2007]

Alice Team Roundtable
Sonya Barry moderates a roundtable discussion with the Alice Team in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne.
by Sonya Barry
[July 20, 2009]

Global Software Engineering Class Teaches FOSS Development Techniques
Educator Dragutin Petkovic talks with java.net's Gary Thompson in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast recorded at JavaOne, presenting a synopsis of a Global Software Engineering class.
by Dragutin Petkovic
[July 07, 2009]

The ATM Object-Oriented Design and Implementation Case Study
Author/educator Paul Deitel provides an overview of the two-chapter ATM Object-Oriented Design and Implementation Case Study in "Java: How to Program", and discusses his experiences teaching it.
by Paul Deitel
[July 01, 2009]

Real World Java EE Patterns: Rethinking Best Practices
Java Champion Adam Bien talks with java.net editor Kevin Farnham about JavaEE and enterprise computing best practices in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne.
by Adam Bien
[July 15, 2009]

Using Annotations on the Java EE 5.0 Platform
Java EE 5 achieves a high level of simplification over previous editions of the platform by using annotations for declarative programming. In this article, Sangeetha S. and Subrahmanya S. V. look into this approach and its many uses.
by Sangeetha S. and Subrahmanya S. V.
[May 22, 2007]

Migrating from EJB 2.x to EJB 3.0
EJB 3.0 makes life easier, but what if you've already got an EJB 2.x app written? How do you make the move? Should you? Sangeetha S and Subrahmanya S V look at the specifics of what changed in EJB versions and introduce strategies for making the move.
by Sangeetha S. and Subrahmanya S. V.
[January 23, 2007]

UISpec4J: Java GUI Testing Made Simple
GUI's are notoriously difficult to test, and the robot-based approach to automated testing makes agile development difficult, as you need finished GUIs before you can test. The UISpec4J project takes a different approach, and in this article Régis Medina and Pascal Pratmarty show how it works.
by Régis Medina and Pascal Pratmarty
[May 17, 2007]

Code Reviews
Need to be sure your program really runs right? Oh sure, testing's a part of it, but so are code reviews. Sri Sankaran argues that research and experience prove that a standardized, effective code review process mitigates costs and produces better code.
by Srivaths Sankaran
[August 17, 2006]

Keep Changes Small: A Happy Jack Story
How do you reconcile the calls from agile processes for constant refactoring and integration with demands to deliver huge new pieces of functionality? In a sort of cubicle-era Socratic dialogue, Michael Ivey shows how developers can learn to do big things with small changes.
by Michael Ivey
[April 27, 2004]

Introducing Custom Paints to JavaFX
Leverage undocumented JavaFX capabilities to support custom paints in version 1.2.
by Jeff Friesen
[July 30, 2009

Integrating JavaFX with JavaEE Using Spring and Hessian Protocol
This article shows how a JavaFX client can call remote JavaEE services using the Spring framework and the Hessian protocol. The article walks the user through developing an example client-server program.
by Francesco Azzola
[June 30, 2009]

Animation and Transition with LWUIT
Animation is increasingly being used by desktop and mobile applications to provide a better user experience, bringing the user's attention to changes in content or context. In this article, Biswajit Sarkar introduces the animation and transition features provided by LWUIT for mobile Java applications.
by Biswajit Sarkar
[November 20, 2008]

James Liu and OpenSolaris Team Roundtable
java.net's Gary Thompson moderates a roundtable discussion with James Liu and members of the OpenSolaris team in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne.
by Gary Thompson
[July 20, 2009]

Kirk Pepperdine Interviewed by Janice Heiss
Janice Heiss interviews Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine about Java performance tuning and more in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne.
by Janice J. Heiss, Kirk Pepperdine
[July 13, 2009]

Java Tools SQE Roundtable, JavaOne 2009
The Java Tools Community and SQE Project Leaders talk about Java Tools, SQE, and more, in a java.net Community Corner roundtable at JavaOne 2009.
by Toni Epple
[June 22, 2009]

Synchronizing Properties with Beans Binding (JSR 295)
The idea of setting up listener relationships between your GUI models, views, and controllers is simple enough, but grinding the same "glue" code dozens or even hundreds of times is wasteful and error-prone. JSR-295, Beans Binding, offers relief from the drudgery. In this article, John O'Conner shows how it works and what it can do for you.
by John O'Conner
[March 20, 2008]

Unified Expression Language for JSP and JSF
JSP's expression language is great until you try to also use it with JSF. The limitations and differences between the two technologies has given rise to a "unified" expression language. In this article, Krishna Srinivasan takes a look at how the unified EL works.
by Krishna Srinivasan
[March 07, 2006]

Sprinkle Some AJAX Magic in Your Struts Web Application
AJAX offers a richer client-side experience than is offered by the typical reload-the-page cycle of web applications, but do you have to start over to get its benefits? As Paul Browne shows, you can incrementally add AJAX functionality to an existing Struts web app.
by Paul Browne
[October 27, 2005]

JSR-286: The Edge of Irrelevance
JSR-286 updates the Portlet specification to add new functionality, but has the Portlet ship sailed? In this article, Eric Spiegelberg looks at the history of the Java Portlet spec and argues that the design and philosophy of Java web applications has moved on and left portlets behind.
by Eric Spiegelberg
[January 20, 2009]

JSR 310: A New Java Date/Time API
Java SE's Date and Calendar classes leave much to be desired. Will the third time be the charm? JSR 310, tracking for inclusion in Java SE 7, once again tries to offer a comprehensive date and time API, borrowing much of its design from the popular Joda Time API. In this article, Jesse Farnham takes a look at JSR 310's concepts and how they may yet bring sense to dates and times in Java.
by Jesse Farnham
[September 18, 2008]

The Open Road: java.nio.file
A file I/O API with reliable and speedy methods for copying and moving files? Getting and preserving file attributes? Filesystems to represent RESTful web servers or the contents of zip files? JSR 203, which may be part of Java 7, offers a totally overhauled approach to File I/O in Java. In this installment of "The Open Road," Elliotte Rusty Harold takes a look at the current spec.
by Elliotte Rusty Harold
[July 03, 2008]

Zero and Shark: a Zero-Assembly Port of OpenJDK
The Red Hat team needed to port OpenJDK to multiple Linux platforms, but porting assembly code to multiple platforms is an enormous task. The solution? Zero and Shark.
by Gary Benson
[May 21, 2009]

OpenJDK Podcast Season 1 Episode 1: Thomas Fitzsimmons on IcedTea
Thomas Fitzsimmons from Red Hat explains what the IcedTea project is, how it came about, its role for Fedora, trademarks, certification, gcjwebplugin, netx and the portable Zero interpreter for Hotspot.
by Dalibor Topic
[July 14, 2008]

The Open Road: Building the JDK
Ready to work with the GPLed JDK from the OpenJDK project? Your first order of business will probably be getting the code compiled and running on your machine. And that's not an easy process. In this installment of The Open Road, Elliotte Rusty Harold relates the step-by-step process of building the JDK on Linux.
by Elliotte Rusty Harold
[November 29, 2007]

Using the Payment API for Microcredit and Other Applications
This article describes how to apply the Payment API (JSR 229) in JavaME applications. The example application enables lenders to provide microcredit for projects.
by Biswajit Sarkar
[August 02, 2009]

Java Mobility Podcast 83: JATAF panel discussion
Excerpts of the panel discussion for the launch of JATAF (the Java Application Terminal Alignment Framework) at JavaOne.
by Daniel H. Steinberg
[July 27, 2009]

Getting Started with BlackBerry J2ME Development
Learn how to set up a development environment for BlackBerry applications. Three sample applications are included: Hello World, a persistence app, and an HTTP networking app.
by Atif Razzaq
[July 02, 2009]

Real World Java EE Patterns: Rethinking Best Practices
Java Champion Adam Bien talks with java.net editor Kevin Farnham about JavaEE and enterprise computing best practices in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne.
by Adam Bien
[July 15, 2009]

Grails and Continuous Integration: An Essential Combo
Grails is an excellent, highly productive development framework that positively encourages good development and testing practices. This article shows how to set up a Continuous Integration build job to compile and test your Grails application in Hudson, for automated continuous integration.
by John Ferguson Smart
[June 23, 2009]

Hacking JavaFX Binding
The JavaFX bind operator connects or links variables, through a small framework based on Locations. This article looks at the internal structure of JavaFX binding, and demonstrates how it can be applied as a binding framework for Swing.
by Thomas Künneth
[June 02, 2009]

The Open Road: Building the JDK
Ready to work with the GPLed JDK from the OpenJDK project? Your first order of business will probably be getting the code compiled and running on your machine. And that's not an easy process. In this installment of The Open Road, Elliotte Rusty Harold relates the step-by-step process of building the JDK on Linux.
by Elliotte Rusty Harold
[November 29, 2007]

Code Reviews
Need to be sure your program really runs right? Oh sure, testing's a part of it, but so are code reviews. Sri Sankaran argues that research and experience prove that a standardized, effective code review process mitigates costs and produces better code.
by Srivaths Sankaran
[August 17, 2006]

Smooth Moves
Animation quality is a subjective perception, and that makes it somewhat more of an art than a science. Chet Haase has taken a look at some of the things that make animation look choppy, and offers programmatic approaches to improving the appearance of Java animations.
by Chet Haase
[February 23, 2006]

MarkMail's java.net Email Search
Clark Richey talks about the java.net email search capabilities provided by MarkMail.org.
by Clark D. Richey, Jr.
[July 06, 2009]

Introduction to Nutch, Part 2: Searching
In the second part of this look at the Nutch web indexing and search engine, Tom White looks at how to perform searches on the index generated in part one's crawl, and shows how to integrate Nutch's search capabilities with your applications through direct Java calls to its API or via the OpenSearch API.
by Tom White
[February 16, 2006]

Introduction to Nutch, Part 1: Crawling
Do you need your own search engine, when the world already has Google? Quite possibly so: you may belong to an organization with enough of its own contents that you want to manage and run your own search engine--and know how it works. Nutch is an open source search engine written in Java. In this article, Tom White shows how it crawls pages to build its index.
by Tom White
[January 10, 2006]

Pitfalls of the Java Permissions Model
Is Java a good choice for creating applications with configurable security? Denis Pilipchuk argues that Java's permissions-based security model is a relic of its browser days and lacks the configurability, expressiveness, and efficiency that enterprise Java developers need. In this article, he looks at the problems of the permissions model and considers some alternatives.
by Denis Pilipchuk
[September 30, 2008]

Securing Your Web Application Requests
One often unanticipated vector for security attacks on web applications is the possibility that a user could hack the GET or POST request to send unanticipated or invalid data to the application. In this article, Eric Speigelberg shows how to use JSTL's URL encoding and a servlet filter to obfuscate or even encode parameters in each direction to thwart parameter-hacking.
by Eric Spiegelberg
[May 20, 2008]

JavaDB End-to-End Security
The all-Java database JavaDB (aka Derby) is known for its embeddability, but what about security? Can you put it out there for enterprise applications and keep data safe? Masoud Kalali shows the steps you can take to secure your JavaDB data.
by Masoud Kalali
[March 20, 2007]

An Introduction To Servlet 3.0
After years of simpler maintenance releases, the Servlet API is getting a major overhaul for Java EE 6, improving ease of use, configurability, pluggability, security, and more. In this article, Deepa Sobhana offers a detailed overview of what's changing and why.
by Deepa Sobhana
[October 14, 2008]

Instant User Tracking with ClickStream
Where are your users going on your website and what are they doing? ClickStream, one of the many OpenSymphony projects, lets you track and log where users go during their sessions. In this article Diego Adrian Naya Lazo shows you how to configure, run, and customize ClickStream
by Diego Naya
[September 06, 2007]

Building Web Components Without a Component Framework
In this article, Michael Jouravlev explores Java component development. His approach treats a web component in the old-fashioned way: as a resource, identified with unique location. If you use JSP as the presentation layer for your web applications, this article may open some new possibilities.
by Michael Jouravlev
[August 04, 2005]

Transparent State Management Using the Decorator Pattern
Storing state in the session makes sense at first, but can become a burden to manage properly, and can make more of your application stateful than you originally intended. Sharfudeen Ashraf shows how a servlet filter can be used to provide transparent state management.
by Sharfudeen Ashraf
[January 09, 2007]

Sprinkle Some AJAX Magic in Your Struts Web Application
AJAX offers a richer client-side experience than is offered by the typical reload-the-page cycle of web applications, but do you have to start over to get its benefits? As Paul Browne shows, you can incrementally add AJAX functionality to an existing Struts web app.
by Paul Browne
[October 27, 2005]

Struts Live Excerpt
In this excerpt, Jonathan Lehr takes you through integrating ActionForms with POJOs. He writes that one of the complaints about Struts "is that unlike some of the newer web application frameworks (Spring, WebWork, JavaServer Faces, etc.), it can't deal directly with POJOs. As a result, people developing Struts applications often feel forced to spend a considerable amount of time and energy devising solutions to bridge the gap."
by Jonathan Lehr
[January 03, 2005]

Complex Table Cell Rendering Made Simple
Plain old text-only JTable cells are boring, but once you start to mix multiple types of cell renderers in a table, your getTableCellRendererComponent() method can get completely out of control. In this article, Michael Bar-Sinai offers a performant and clever alternative that looks up the needed renderer with class-based and rule-based maps.
by Michael Bar-Sinai
[August 21, 2008]

Binding Beans
Expressing GUI relationships through beans' getters and setters is a burdensome process of wiring that has frustrated many developers. Binding offers an alternative: automatically connecting a model value to its GUI representation. This style of programming is available to users of the JGoodies Binding framework, as well as the implementation of JSR-295, and in this article Thomas Künneth takes a look at both.
by Thomas Künneth
[May 27, 2008]

Translucent and Shaped Swing Windows
The new "Consumer JDK," Java SE 6 Update N, offers desktop developers the ability to set per-pixel translucency on windows, which opens up a wide variety of possibilities for translucent and shaped windows previously only available to native applications. Kirill Grouchnikov shows how far these features can take you.
by Kirill Grouchnikov
[March 18, 2008]

Kirk Pepperdine on Java Performance Tuning
Kirk Pepperdine talks about Java performance tuning in this java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast, recorded at JavaOne.
by Kirk Pepperdine
[July 08, 2009]

Source Code Analysis Using Java 6 APIs
Why does Java 6 expose the javac compiler through a programmatic interface? It's not just for building IDEs. In this article, Deepa Sobhana and Seema Richard show how to use the new feature for static code analysis, with an example that verifies that classes overriding Object.equals() also implement the required override of Object.hashcode().
by Seema Richard, Deepa Sobhana
[April 10, 2008]

UISpec4J: Java GUI Testing Made Simple
GUI's are notoriously difficult to test, and the robot-based approach to automated testing makes agile development difficult, as you need finished GUIs before you can test. The UISpec4J project takes a different approach, and in this article Régis Medina and Pascal Pratmarty show how it works.
by Régis Medina and Pascal Pratmarty
[May 17, 2007]

Exposing Domain Models through the RESTful Service Interface, Part 1
JAXB and JPA can be combined to reduce the boilerplate code of Java EE applications and to optimize the performance of RESTful web services--a flexible solution, which preserves the original domain model while following the JPA, JAXB, and HTTP standards.
by Felipe Gaucho
[June 04, 2009]

Generating PDFs for Fun and Profit with Flying Saucer and iText
Generating PDFs used to require proprietary and/or difficult-to-use tools, but the combination of the Flying Saucer XHTML renderer and the iText PDF library makes it easy to generate PDFs from a variety of markup formats. Flying Saucer founder Joshua Marinacci shows how it's done.
by Joshua Marinacci
[June 26, 2007]

Track Conversation State on the Client using Applets
HTTP's statelessness has long been a challenge to web app developers, requiring state to be maintained somewhere, usually on the server. Ganesh Ram Santhanam offers a new approach, exploiting an interesting trait of the Java plugin to allow applets to maintain state for your JavaScript, even across Applet.destroy() calls.
by Ganesh Ram Santhanam
[May 29, 2007]

JSR-286: The Edge of Irrelevance
JSR-286 updates the Portlet specification to add new functionality, but has the Portlet ship sailed? In this article, Eric Spiegelberg looks at the history of the Java Portlet spec and argues that the design and philosophy of Java web applications has moved on and left portlets behind.
by Eric Spiegelberg
[January 20, 2009]

Ajax Form Validation Using Spring and DWR, Revised
In a previous article, Eric Spiegelberg offered a design for using DWR to allow an Ajax-based web application to provide server-side validation of client-side input. After nearly a year in production, he's back with a cleaner, more efficient design.
by Eric Spiegelberg
[December 04, 2007]

Instant User Tracking with ClickStream
Where are your users going on your website and what are they doing? ClickStream, one of the many OpenSymphony projects, lets you track and log where users go during their sessions. In this article Diego Adrian Naya Lazo shows you how to configure, run, and customize ClickStream
by Diego Naya
[September 06, 2007]

JavaFX HTTP Networking and XML Parsing
Much of the interest in JavaFX has centered about the platform's GUI capabilities and tooling. But many JavaFX applications will need to be network clients, and JavaFX provides classes to help you with common network tasks. In this article, Francesco Azzola shows how to retrieve XML data via HTTP and parse it with JavaFX's XML parser.
by Francesco Azzola
[February 12, 2009]

Exploring ESB Patterns with Mule
Will Enterprise Service Bus be the next big thing in enterprise integration? ESB is a highly ambitious standard, providing high levels of flexibility and extensive features. In this article, Igor Dayen shows how to implement a common enterprise integration pattern, the routing slip, by using Mule, a popular open source messaging framework.
by Igor Dayen
[July 31, 2007]

SOA Reusability: Shrinking the Lag between Business and IT
SOA is really the latest effort in a decades-long quest to achieve software reusability. In this article, Mehul J. argues that the key is not in the IT department, but rather in enabling business analysts to directly reconfigure systems built on SOA.
by Mehul Shah
[July 24, 2007]