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 Java Watch
By Allen Holub
Do We Really Need the JCP?
(Issue 116, December 15, 2004)
The two interesting pieces of news of the past few weeks are Sun’s open-sourcing of Solaris and Sun’s creating a new Java-persistence community-process group by melding together the EJB and JDO efforts. These two events play off each other in interesting ways.
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Reading About Design Patterns
(Issue 114, November 15, 2004)
Good software must be designed before it’s built. Code that’s written without the benefit of design takes two to three times longer to write than necessary, and is usually considerably more buggy as well. This isn’t to say that all of the design for a large program must be complete before you write a line of code—the agile methodologies all depend on an incremental design process that parallels development.
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The Protection Racket Shakedown
(Issue 113, November 1, 2004)
Patents are a weapon. A patent’s value is proportional to the patent holder’s willingness to go to court. Many businesses (IBM is notable) use patents as an offensive weapon. They attack the competition for infringement in order to drive the other company into bankruptcy. Looked at this way, the validity of the patent is not much of an issue. The U.S. Patent Office, which seems particularly incompetent when it comes to weeding out bad patent applications, doesn’t help the situation.
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Schizophrenic Development
(Issue 112, October 15, 2004)
It’s possible to develop a server-side Java app on Windows and run it on Linux, but it’s best to develop and test on the same platform. Platform-related inconsistencies (such as threading behavior) make any other approach too risky, and I test too often to develop on one system and test on another. Nonetheless, I don’t want to have a dedicated Linux development system. I need to run Quicken, Visio, and other commercial apps. click for full story
Subversion Control
(Issue 111, October 1, 2004)
A good version-control system is central to all project development, no matter the size. This statement is particularly true in an object-oriented environment where programmers work on use cases, not classes; the changes required to implement a use case typically span many class definitions, and odds are that a teammate who’s working on another use case is working in the same classes that you are. click for full story
First, or Best, to Market?
(Issue 110, September 15, 2004)
How important is the notion of “first to market?” I had intended, in this column, to review VisiComp’s RetroVue debugger, but unfortunately, the installed (as compared to demo’d) version was disappointing. RetroVue is a wonderful idea: a debugger that keeps a history of your execution so that you can definitively answer the question: “How did that happen?” But the shipped product simply is not good enough to be thoroughly tested and reviewed; my guess is that they were so interested in being first to market, they released too early, rendering a potentially great product disappointing. Rather than discuss RetroVue, then, let’s talk about the first-to-market issue. click for full story
The Dark Underbelly of Community
(Issue 109, September 1, 2004)
When most people think of community, they think of an idealized small town, full of supportive people sharing common values, working together toward common goals. But there are other sorts of communities as well. Dark slums, where a stranger is more likely to cut your throat than give you directions. The general consensus amongst almost everybody that I talk too is that the Java community—at least that part of it that’s evident online—is more like turn-of-the-century Calcutta than Anytown, USA. click for full story
From JavaOne to JavaOne-Half
(Issue 108, August 15, 2004)
The most interesting thing about this year’s JavaOne was that it wasn’t—interesting, that is. Over the years, the conference has gone from one of the best technical conferences that I’ve ever attended (in 1996, if I remember right) to one of the most vapid. click for full story
JavaOne, Community and Dumb Ideas
(Issue 107, August 1, 2004)
The underlying theme of the JavaOne conference has always been “community,” and this year’s conference was largely a failure because Sun has lost touch with the community that it created. click for full story
Java Still Struggles With Persistence
(Issue 106, July 15, 2004)
When it comes to persistence—storing an object in some place external to your program, ideally in a database—there’s a strong need for simplicity. click for full story
More Thoughts on Tiger
(Issue 105, July 1, 2004)
A month or so ago I talked about my disappointment in some of the features of Sun’s Tiger (J2SE 1.5) release (“Missed Opportunities,” May 1). This month I want to talk about a couple more problems that I see in the new version. click for full story
Good Tech Support Yields Better Software
(Issue 104, June 15, 2004)
I was out of town last week, and was forced to get e-mail through a dial-up connection. My provider is SBC—the biggest DSL provider in California (this fact will be relevant in a moment). click for full story
When Hiring, Smarts Beat Skill Lists
(Issue 103, June 1, 2004)
During dinner after the last day of a five-day training session on object-oriented design, the manager who’d hired me posed an interesting question: How do you identify above-average Java programmers in a job interview? click for full story
You've Gotta Have Faith
(Issue 102, May 15, 2004)
Maybe it’s the full moon, but weirdness seems to be in the air. click for full story
Missed Opportunities
(Issue 101, May 1, 2004)
Java’s “Tiger” release (version 1.5) is due out later this year. I’ll have many things to say about the changes that Sun has made to the language, but in this column, I want to address some of the downside. Just to head off the flames, bear in mind as you read this column, that I like Java. I program in it almost exclusively and think that it’s a great language for what it does. I am not the enemy. click for full story
 Java Wireless Middleware
(Issue 100, April 15, 2004)
Once a novelty, wireless technologies in the form of smartphones and PDAs have become commonplace. Short Message Services and camera phone services are advertised on TV every night. They’re not just Generation Y tech toys, though. Businesses also are adopting wireless technologies to enable today’s mobile work force—and underneath all this lies wireless middleware. click for full story
JavaServer Faces Is Here
(Issue 099, April 1, 2004)
It took more than two years, but JavaServer Faces (JSF), aka JSR 127, is finally available. In theory, JSF will help new developers build JavaServer-based Web applications quickly by assembling reusable user interface (UI) components in a page, connecting components to an application data source, and wiring client-generated events to server-side event handlers. Essentially, JSF provides a single application programming interface (API) set for creating interoperable components for application servers and component libraries. click for full story
Open-Source Java Now
(Issue 098, March 15, 2004)
Unless your Web connection is permanently set to collecting Teletubbie memorabilia pricing on eBay, you already know that a substantial part of Windows NT and Windows 2000’s source code was swiped and made available over the Internet. click for full story
The Universal IDE
(Issue 097, March 1, 2004)
Eclipse has the potential to become the universal integrated development environment. I don’t mean that in terms of beating up NetBeans. What I mean is that by letting go of IBM’s apron strings in early February and becoming a nonprofit organization, the Eclipse Foundation is in a much better position to push its open-source, open-standard IDE into prominence over all the other IDEs. click for full story
Keeping the Code Clean
(Issue 096, February 15, 2004)
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Doug Levin, founder and CEO of Black Duck Software Inc. As reported by David Rubinstein in the Jan. 15 issue (“Black Duck Analyzer Seeks to Protect IP,” page 1, Black Duck is working on an auditing and management tool for detecting and managing proprietary and open-source code. click for full story
NetBeans VS. Eclipse: Round 2004
(Issue 095, February 1, 2004)
Foolish me. I had hoped that Sun would finally make peace with the IBM-inspired Eclipse consortium late last year. I was wrong. click for full story
Selling J2EE 1.4
(Issue 094, January 15, 2004)
In late November, the Java Community Process gave Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4 its blessing. So now the question is, as we wait for J2EE 1.4-compliant Java application servers and Java Database Connectivity drivers to appear, what are we going to do with it? click for full story
Java on Linux Tablets
(Issue 093, January 1, 2004)
Some people think that there’s a future for mass-market tablet PCs. They’re wrong, but there is a current and future market for vertical applications on tablets, and there’s no reason why Java applications on Linux can’t do well in this environment. click for full story
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