Ask most people on the street what Java is and they might tell you it's an Indonesian island. If you happen to bump into some programmers, they'll probably tell you it's a language that reads like C++ but has garbage collection and a virtual machine to make it por...

The world's first office computer, known as LEO, was created in the 1950s by Lyons, the British teashop giant. Its aim was to replace the thousands of clerks who did the billing, invoicing, and stocktaking, and also tracked the supply and demand of sticky buns and...

At a presentation a number of years ago given by Josh Bloch he made a comment that Java as a language hit the 'sweet spot' of programming. His metaphor was based around the fact that the language was straightforward to learn and that rather than containing many es...

Java has been the springboard for some of the most successful open source projects today including JBoss, NetBeans, and Eclipse. Several folks though have felt the missing piece was an actual open source implementation of the runtime. Some view Sun's stewardship o...

The problem with defects is that while they occur, the cost of finding and preventing them has a diminishing return, so the approach often taken is that once no more serious defects can be found in a test pass, all that remains must be minor and the programming is...

I witnessed a recent BOF conversation in which the general feeling was that the browser GUI and its accompanying plethora of back-end frameworks had let people down by delivering a poor return on investment and a weak user-interface experience.

Tim'O Reilly, the eponymous publisher, kicked off EclipseCon 2005 in Burlinghame earlier this year with an excellent presentation titled 'Open source business models and design patterns.' As well as documenting various failures and successes in the computing world...

At a recent presentation given by a software engineer from a very large automotive company, I gleaned some remarkable facts:for a particular car model where the basic price goes up as the livery becomes lusher and the initials on the trunk longer, half of the inc...

Go fast, it runs too slow, you've got to make the number show. Diddle de bop, da la de doop, sitting around and feeling groovy.

Earthdate: October 15, 1997, and the Cassini spacecraft is launched. Mission: to boldly go and explore the planet Saturn.

Paul Simon sings, 'Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.' Each person who attempts to conquer the highly fickle music or fashion market frequently does so by merely rehashing old ideas. Trends are repeated and what was once passe becomes fashionable ag...

The key to building a distributed application successfully lies in a sensible partition of work across the different boundaries and devices. With a client/server program, one of the advantages it offers over a more traditional thin client is that for each task, in...

While at lunch with colleagues recently I overheard four very able Java developers swapping horror stories of the kit they'd cut their teeth on as junior programmers. One had used a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of RAM and a black and white TV and a tape recorder in lieu ...

My first programming job was done using Report Generator Language (RPG) on the IBM System 36. The hardware was green screen, the tape decks reel-to-reel, and the printers large and noisy. The language itself was very data-centric with each program declaring format...

One of the principles of any OO language such as Java is an object's ability to encapsulate its data and provide clients with a specific and well-defined API. This is done through the visibility keywords public, protected, and private.

Sun has made two significant announcements recently in the Java desktop space: Java Desktop Integration Components (JDIC) (jdic.dev.java.net) and Java Desktop Network Components (JDNC) (jdnc.dev.java.net), both of which are open sourced under an LGPL.

Several years back I was watching Independence Day, a fairly decent movie about aliens invading earth. It was an enjoyable film with some pretty neat special effects, except my suspension of disbelief broke down when Jeff Goldblum decided he would infect an alien ...

Among geneticists there is an ongoing argument about which species is superior: humans or bacteria. Both are the end product of millions of years of evolutionary refinement; they just took separate routes on the road to survival.

Recently I was having a discussion with a colleague about traditional versus Web clients. Instead of hearing the usual defense about how much easier it is to deploy and manage a thin client application, his point was that client/server fails because fine-grained ...

At the opening keynote speech at the EclipseCon conference last month, Erich Gamma showed the Swingset application running inside an Eclipse viewer. For me, it was a definitive demonstration of the two GUI toolkits side by side. Instead of Java GUIs having to choo...

Java Web Start (JWS) was created as part of JSR 56 and is included with JRE 1.4. The idea was to provide a way to distribute a Java application that would run in a JVM on the client, but avoid the problems associated with traditional applets. JWS does this by in...

This talk will look at the Java desktop space, discuss the issues and technologies, and then discuss what's at stake if Java can't recapture its lost pride as a client platform...versus what's at stake if it can.

Recently I was giving a demo of Java Web Start (JWS) to a customer and while they appreciated that systems management issues had been addressed, someone in the audience said 'it's just client/client all over again - not really client/server.' Her point was that tr...

A problem encountered by any GUI is - if the user resizes the application window at runtime, how should this be handled? The most desirable effect is that the controls flow into the new space to make the best use of it (lists and trees grow while buttons remain a ...

Reports of Java's death on the desktop may be somewhat premature. A recent Giga group report, 'Return of the Rich Clients', predicts that in the next three years browser-rich clients will grow by 350%, stand-alone clients by 250%, while HTML will decline by 50%.

Java serialization was initially used to support remote method invocation (RMI), allowing argument objects to be passed between two virtual machines. RMI works best when the two VMs contain compatible versions of the class being transmitted, and can reliably trans...

The first part of this article (JDJ, Vol. 8, issue 4) introduced the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), and showed how graphical user interfaces can be created using some of the basic widgets found in SWT. In addition, layout classes were described that allow widgets ...

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a Java class library that allows you to create native user interfaces. It's designed to provide efficient, portable access to the underlying facilities of the operating system on which it's implemented. SWT uses native widgets ...

The task of a layout manager is to position and size each component based on the size of its container. Each component has a preferred size that can be used to determine the real estate it wishes to occupy, as well as a minimum and maximum size.

Essential to the development of complex systems are tools that help the developer locate, analyze, and fix problems. Debuggers provide support for this by letting a developer inspect the internal state of a program at runtime, as well as suspend and resume execu...