'Do product aesthetics matter much to you?' asks Brian Duff, longtime Java developer. He is preparing to show at JavaOne that, in his JDeveloper development team at Oracle at least, the undeniable shift toward aesthetically pleasing UI is in full, er, Swing. 'I think Mac OS X is entire...

It was April 2, when I first heard the news that Sun and Microsoft had reached a settlement on their long-standing dispute over Java. When I first saw the headline, I honestly thought it was a leftover April Fool's joke, so I ignored it. It was only when I saw the words 'Microsoft and ...

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.

Joseph Ottinger speaks to Sun to find out more about Java Studio Creator and its place in the development pantheon, and comes to the conclusion that Sun's done a better job than many developers expected.

We've all heard the news: JBoss has received $10 million in funding and now it's time to sit back and mull it over. Without a doubt this infusion of capital is a signal of confidence for JBoss Group. But is this investment a good thing for open source? Not an unimportant question for t...

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 transactions don't work...

This article makes the case that Web services provide a significant benefit to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance projects, and that they will therefore be used extensively on these projects. We begin with a very brief primer on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, then describe the connection between S...

Well, you may have seen the Java Industry Newsletter's hot story, 'Eclipse versus NetBeans.' As an editor of this fine publication, it's my privilege to see all of our feedback arriving at my inbox. My first reaction was, oh please, not another IDE war. But I dutifully suppressed the u...

Welcome to the March edition of the JCP column. Each month you can read about the Java Community Process: newly submitted JSRs, new draft specs, Java APIs that were finalized, and other news from the JCP. This month I'll discuss the public review of the upcoming J2SE 1.5 technology and...

IT development organizations tend to comprise Business Developers and/or Technology Elites, or a mixture of the two. The latter group basically has all they ever want or need from the Java community - tools, technologies, documentation, standards. But what about the Business Developers...

Do you enjoy history? I do. In fact, I've always enjoyed history for I've always found that understanding the past has been useful in helping me to understand the here and now. Part of my here and now is the taking on of the role of enterprise editor.

Welcome to the February edition of the JCP column! Each month you can read about the Java Community Process: newly submitted JSRs, new draft specs, Java APIs that were finalized, and other news from the JCP. This month I'll discuss four new JSRs and a few JSRs that are in the Proposed ...

With this January issue, JDJ is entering its ninth successful year of publication, and we have achieved this success by serving the most influential readers - like yourself - around the globe.

In the fall of 1991, when mobile computing involved a hand truck and an extension cord, the idea of an everything-connected world was a leap of faith to some and a really crazy idea to most. But Sun's engineers were already working on notebook computers, and Peter Deutsch, one of Sun's...

Microsoft is redefining the application interface around rich clients, and if Java does not have an answer, it faces being cut off from end users. The answer lies in matching Microsoft's richness while trumping it on security.

JDJ took some time to poll some of the major vendors and personalities in this space for their views on the future of Java in the enterprise. Some of the answers will surprise, many will reassure, and a few may astonish. Read on...

Today marks the European debut of the SunNetwork Conference and Pavilion, a.k.a. 'SunNetwork Berlin' - with Scott McNealy, Greg Papadopoulos, Mark Tolliver, and Jonathan Schwartz due to hold forth to the Java faithful at ICC Berlin, the International Conference Center over the next two...

There is, says Henry Roswell, a curious omission from a discussion over at LinuxWorld...

Norman Richards along with the Austin Java Users Group got a first hand demo of the Sun Java Desktop System from Sun. Was he impressed? He has kindly shared his blog entry with us here at JDJ.

With desktop Java now becoming a serious contender, John Kucera talks through the advantages of employing Java at the client side - and shows it's not a completely lost cause.

What do you get if you cross an early 21st century visionary CTO with a late 19th century employee of the Edison Electric Light Company? Answer: a fantastic keynote address at Web Services Edge 2003 West, held in Santa Clara last month.

Welcome to the November edition of the JCP column! Each month you can read about the Java Community Process: newly submitted JSRs, new draft specs, Java APIs that were finalized, and other news from the JCP.

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%.

(September 18, 2003) - Today we are participants in the new age of information access and consumption for personal and business use. New types of information and new ways of using it are driving up demand for anytime and anywhere access, feeding a need for always-on and always-connecte...

Over the past few years, the phenomenon of open source has risen to its rightful place in the hearts and minds of developers everywhere. You'd be hard pressed to find a Java project that doesn't make use of some form of open source software.

Up till now, changes to Java have been pretty much constrained to APIs and the inner workings of the Java 2 platform. All of this will change once the JDK 1.5 has been released. The extent of these changes was revealed in a recent interview with Joshua Bloch.

JavaOne always provides plenty of food for thought. JavaOne 2003 was no exception. This year, Alan Williamson, our beloved editor-in-chief, organized a 'birds-of-a-feather' session for the JDJ editorial board. This is quite an auspicious bunch, and this session provided an opportunity ...

Around 15 years ago there was a cascading switch failure in the telephone network along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Phones stopped working. So did air traffic control, because information about air traffic was communicated between control towers using the phone network.

Java developers like open source software. To varying degrees, anyway. For some, the attraction is free-as-in-speech; for others, it is free-as-in-beer. None of this should come as a surprise to you, and I'm certainly not the first person to make this observation. Nor will you be surpr...

Java's phenomenal success as an enabler of enterprise-wide, Web-deployed applications has compelled countless organizations and individuals to seek Java proficiency. Many are drawn like moths to a flame, and in fact go 'down in flames.' They're ill-prepared to harness Java's power as a...

(August 30, 2002) - It's interesting to discuss this on the day that Michael Skakel, the 'Kennedy cousin', is sentenced to 20 years to life for killing a woman 25 years ago. Someone mentioned to me that it seems a harsh punishment for something that happened so long ago, and I could on...

At the recent JavaOne conference in San Francisco, SchlumbergerSema demonstrated the benefits of a Java-based smart card. 'A Java what?' was a common response by visitors. A brief explanation showed that anyone with a GSM mobile phone, and many with a credit card, carry one of these ar...

With the next generation of wireless devices entering the market, the opportunities for Java developers are great. Analysts are predicting that the demand for wireless applications is set to explode, with over 170 million U.S. users subscribing to wireless services by 2005. Other count...

Standards, open source, Java, and the Web are combining to force a huge shift in the infrastructure software industry. Middleware is becoming a strategic commodity. Free J2EE application servers are just the beginning of this movement. It’s crucial to understand that the major fo...

Software that leapfrogs the intelligence and usability of wireless devices is quite a captivating pitch, yet we shouldn't forget a similarly proffered claim regarding Java on PCs when it became mainstream in 1995. Ultimately, it never took off on the client side, even though it enjoys ...

JMS has been a godsend to Java developers who want to use tried-and-tested messaging paradigms without having to wrestle with multiple proprietary APIs. A new breed of messaging vendors is delivering enterprise-quality JMS implementations at substantially lower costs than the previ...

With the growth of the wireless industry, and telecommunications providers realizing the potential of provisioning personalized mobile applications for customers, Java developers are positioned to capitalize on a tremendous market opportunity. The number of wireless communications devi...

J2EE provides a common set of processing constructs that provide common building blocks for creating e-commerce applications. In the case of connectors and containers, standardization relieves the development of infrastructure code, allowing application behavior to be declared rather t...

Since its introduction in 1995 Java technology has been known for its 'cross-platform' compatibility. This ability to run applications on multiple platforms made Java big news and presented developers with a new and unique application development platform. In the beginning cross-platfo...

By 2004, each corporate knowledge worker will have 3 to 4 different computing and information access devices that will be used to access various applications. -META Group