As part of my job, I help customers to select the appropriate software to either fulfill a need or as a component of a larger solution.  Fulfilling this role means comparing similar software offerings and selecting the best fit.  The challenge in this goal is to map the vendor offering...

Your organization defines your ability to succeed and prosper within a corporate environment. Identifying the best talent, attracting them and retaining them is not always that easy. There are ways to identify the best talent within your company as well as recruiting from the outside...

In an article in the October edition of the FTP Webzine 'Upside' Peter Varhol laments the trend toward per-developer metrics in the software development process. 'Individual developer data is stored and available to be manipulated in less than honorable ways,' he says, 'and there are p...

Intellectually everyone understands that improving code quality is a good thing. After all, we know bad quality when we see it. (Anyone old enough can cast his or her mind back to the late '80s and Microsoft Word for Windows 1.0.) But we also know that there comes a point where there's...

Lightweight application frameworks are all the rage in the enterprise Java community in the past couple of years. From the pioneering Spring and Hibernate frameworks, to the infusion of technologies like aspect-oriented programming and metadata annotation, to the new standard EJB 3.0 (...

The marketplace tells you that 'middleware is everywhere' when all along it should wise up and recognize that 'middleware is dead.' Because that's the new reality of enterprise computing today, according to Sun's software czar Jonathan Schwartz.

My dear wife has just started to learn to use Java in her work and asks me a lot of questions as she begins her journey in this wonderful language. To almost all her questions my answer is the same: 'See Javadoc.'

Do you feel that being a Java guru sets you apart and makes you indispensable in your company? Or are you an entry-level person scared of being laid off given all these outsourcing trends? What are your career choices in the corporate world? Put on your headphones, turn on Pink Floyd's...

We are fortunate to be part of a vibrant and healthy community, one worth investing in, and one whose integrity we are willing to fight for.

I have a love/hate relationship with J2EE. I love the idea of standards that we can all use in our development to improve interoperability, ease integration issues, create a pool of skilled developers, etc. I hate the idea that I have to wait years for the standards to evolve and becom...

Inversion of Control (IoC) is about software components doing what they are told, when they are told. Your OO application could well become unmaintainable without it.

It's with continued amusement that I constantly read about how Java should be defended from .NET, and how .NET will destroy Java. I understand the invective used by both sides, but the shine is starting to wear off; it's time to stop hurling insults, and examine what the future really ...

Speaking to Sun's J2EE marketing team recently, we learned that J2EE 1.4 has been delayed so that 'vital' new Web services features could be added. Originally targeted for the second half of 2002, J2EE 1.4 FCS is now not expected until this summer.

In his editorial 'Swing Is Swinging Java out of the Desktop' (JDJ, Vol. 7, issue 10) Alan Williamson lamented the current state of Swing and AWT for building competitive desktop applications. One alternative he mentioned is a technology called SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) that was dev...

Lately it's been easy to dislike Sun. Their JVM is slow; Sun ONE is certainly nowhere near the fastest J2EE application server; Forte, while capable, is far from what coders actually want to use if they want to write code in a reasonable amount of time; MS's constant marketing and tech...

Who would have guessed that this duo - Java and Linux - would revitalize the development community and help customers make the move to an open, standards-based approach to computing? The momentum surrounding Java and Linux is undeniable. In just a few short years, both have gr...

Back in the beginning of October, I was dragged into the middle of a raging e-mail argument. The argument was whether J2EE was a success, and if it was too complicated. This was like waving a red cape in front of a Spanish bull. I felt then, as I feel now, compelled to respond.

I've been actively involved with Java development in one way or another since 1996, including working with some of the original issues of the servlet specification, the early adaptation of the EJB spec, and migration to JSP not long after it became an official part of the J2EE spec.

Did you use EJBs in your last J2EE project? Many Java programmers (and their managers and CIOs) would consider this a strange question. 'How can it be a J2EE project if it doesn't include EJBs?' they might ask. The answer is: Sun currently lists 11 J2EE component technologies of which ...

Java has come a long way in its short life. Linux just celebrated its 10-year anniversary; for Java that milestone is still more than three years away. Who really understood, seven years ago, that Java would become the standard platform for delivering content over the Internet and ...

It's becoming more obvious to me every day that Java technology is the platform of choice -- in more ways than one. In the traditional sense of the phrase, it's the answer to the questions all developers ask themselves: Which platform should I develop to? Which has the biggest market, ...

Video games are finally entrenched in popular culture and are as widespread a form of entertainment as movies and television. What's most startling is that the games industry achieved this entertainment parity without relying on the standards found in the television and movie industrie...

I saw a television ad the other day that portrayed someone using a cellular phone as a fancy cash card to make a vending machine purchase. As a person who hates to carry loose change - once you start, you suddenly realize you have a pocketful - this spoke to the kind of useful integrat...

The Thrilla in Manila: both the name and the events of that steamy October day in 1975 remain seared in the memory of all who watched it. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, two of the greatest boxers in heavyweight history, battled toe-to-toe for 14 rounds, until Frazier's corner surrendere...

Personally, I think J2ME is what Java is really about. Let's leave aside the fact that Java was originally developed (as project Oak) for just this purpose, and see what it means today.

At this year's JavaOne conference in San Francisco, I came face to face with the reality that Java no longer occupies the position of being a disruptive technology. It is now an accepted, depended-on, stable, workhorse technology. Of course, this has been shaping up for years, but for ...

Last year Sun came out with a new set of design guidelines for building enterprise applications using enterprise Java APIs. These APIs are available as a set of documents called the J2EE Blueprints. They include architectural design guidelines for developing enterprise applications...

This year will be the genesis of mobile devices and wireless applications. In fact, several European and American carriers have begun rolling out high-speed, packet-oriented wireless networks based on General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) as well as other standards. I've also noticed int...

Sun, in case you don't know - and there's no reason you should - has quietly gone and gotten one of its many licenses (Sun has licenses the way Imelda Marcos has shoes) admitted to the tiny pantheon of official open source licenses worshiped by the Linux community.

One of the most delightful parts of my job is to travel the world, sharing the Object Management Group's vision of integrated, interoperable systems with varying sizes of audience ­ from as few as 10 people to as many as 10,000 ­ in every corner of the planet.

By most people's estimate, it's the fifth anniversary of Java. Five years ago, with Netscape in tow, Sun unveiled Java, declaring that the Java programming language would be the next Web revolution. At the time HotJava was the 'killer app' for Java; more a proof of concept than a compe...

We live in a world of high anxiety. We're concerned about the competition, fearful we'll fall behind the curve, worried that making up lost ground might prove impossible. So we hastily turn to technology, which obligingly always seems to have a solution. Well, at least it says so in th...

The e-commerce market opportunities in the B2B space are exceptionally greater than those in B2C. GartnerGroup, one of the leading analyst firms, predicts that B2B e-commerce will amount to over $7 trillion by the year 2004. The interoperability and integration complexities are also mu...

Portals, e-commerce sites, B2B commerce and so on...we're witnessing unprecedented demand for e-business solutions of every stripe as companies rush to put their businesses on the Web. With Y2K now out of the way, this has become the top IT priority.

At work, Lisa takes advantage of her employer's dedicated T-3 to quickly access live NASDAQ quotes via a Java applet stock ticker. She spends each day alternating between development work and day trading. Soon to be rich, she dreams of early retirement and a life filled with leisure ac...

In the fast-changing world of Internet-based technologies, perception is everything. Is a business solution implemented in a particular technology truly cross-platform? Is it scalable? Is it robust? Is it easy to use? Does it do what it set out to do? Most times the answers to these q...

I have to agree with JDJ's editor-in-chief, Sean Rhody. The word XML seems to spark technological fires. The JavaOne Conference issue of JDJ(Vol. 4, issue 6) featured three articles on XML. Having written one of them, I share the experience of the flood of e-mails regarding this obviou...

If you had to conjure an image that best serves as a "sign of the times," what might it be? Perhaps a screen shot of a rare Partridge Family album being auctioned off for an incredible sum on e-Bay. Or how about a staged photo op of some of those starched-white-shirt telco ...

The modern manufacturing facility or laboratory often appears as thousands of points of information, scattered in and among hundreds of pieces of machinery and other equipment. Good integration of these information sources provides for an ongoing challenge.

When I began using CORBA in 1993 I was impressed by how well (and easily) I could define an object model and express it to other developers. That, of course, is made possible through CORBA Interface Language. More fundamentally, it is achieved with a strong and inherent distinction bet...