One of the great new features in Tiger is the enumeration construct, a new type that allows you to represent specific pieces of data as constants, all in a type-safe manner. Tiger expert and frequent developerWorks contributor Brett McLaughlin explains what an enumeration is, how you can use it in your programs, and why it will allow you to dump all that old public static final code.
If you’ve ever developed a non-trivial Web application, you know that development complexity is increased by the fact that Web browsers allow users to follow arbitrary navigation paths through the application. No matter where the user navigates, the onus is on you, the developer, to keep track of the possible interactions and ensure that your application works correctly. While the traditional MVC approach does allow you to handle these cases, there are other options available to help resolve application complexity. Developer and frequent developerWorks contributor Abhijit Belapurkar walks you through a continuations-based alternative that could simplify your Web application development efforts.
Tuning isn’t always about speed, sometimes other aspects of the application need fixing. When your application needs tuning, your first course of action is normally to monitor the application with a profiler. But profiling is not always practical — sometimes for ironic reasons. In this installment of Eye on performance, Jack and Kirk relate their recent experiences with profiling a fat client — so fat, in fact, that it left no room for a profiler.
Take an in-depth look at the Synth look and feel, the newest addition to Swing introduced in Java 5.0. Synth lets developers rapidly create and deploy custom looks for an application by introducing the concept of a “skin” to Java UI programming. Software Engineer Michael Abernethy takes you through Synth concepts step-by-step to build an application with a Synth look from scratch. After reading this article, you should be able to create professional-looking UIs in no time.
The HttpRequest object initially might not seem like a big deal. Explore the possibilities of it when you issue a HTTP GET or POST on a URL for succinct page refreshes that update only a specific portion of the Web page
Generic types, added in JDK 5.0, are a significant enhancement to type safety in the Java language. However, some aspects of generics may seem confusing, or even downright bizarre, to first-time users. In this month’s Java theory and practice, Brian Goetz examines the common pitfalls that ensnare first-time users of generics.
In this article, Filippo Diotalevi introduces TestNG, a new framework for testing Java applications. TestNG isn’t just really powerful, innovative, extensible, and flexible; it also illustrates an interesting application of Java Annotations, a great new feature in JDK 5.0.
Velocity is a versatile, open source templating solution that can be used standalone in report generation/data transformation applications, or as a view component in MVC model frameworks. In this article, Sing Li introduces Velocity and reveals how you can integrate its template-processing capabilities into your own client-side standalone application, server-side Web application, or Web services.
Chris Dunne provides a step-by-step description of his experience with building a single sign-on solution for a Web portal. He shows you how to set up an open source solution, the Central Authentication Service from Yale University, and how to extend it to authenticate to a Microsoft Active Directory infrastructure.
All manner of Java applications commonly need to schedule tasks for repeated execution. In this article, Java developer Tom White shows you how to build a simple, general scheduling framework for task execution conforming to an arbitrarily complex schedule.
