Java

Self-promotion: My new book, Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 24 Hours, Third Edition, is now available. Features of the book's Web site -- a homebrew PHP/MySQL application -- include an RSS feed for site updates and a place to download Yahoo's discontinued News Ticker Java applet. One of these days I'm going to rewrite it to work with any RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 feed. ... (read more)

2002/11/07

I'm writing Java code to read Advogato diary entries using the site's XML-RPC interface and the Apache XML-RPC library. I can't get the getDates() method to work, and the cause appears to be some off-spec XML-RPC encoding in the response, as I describe on the XML-RPC discussion board. Help from XML-RPC gurus would be appreciated. I'm so deep into this debugging effort that I feel like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now ("The horror. The horror."). ... (read more)

2002/10/24

I had a chance this past week to evaluate Apache XML-RPC, an open source Java class library for XML-RPC programming. It's a nicely designed library that makes it trivial to create an XML-RPC server or software that makes XML-RPC calls. Remote methods are called in a manner comparable to calling any other method in Java -- XML-RPC and networking are handled by the library. Once you have figured out which Java data types to use in remote method calls and remote methods, described in this table, ... (read more)

2002/10/22

Elliotte Rusty Harold has released XOM, a new XML object model for Java. "Like DOM, JDOM, dom4j, and ElectricXML, XOM is a read/write API that represents XML documents as trees of nodes," Harold explains on his weblog. "Where XOM diverges from these models is that it strives for absolute correctness and maximum simplicity." ... (read more)

2002/09/18

Self-promotion: My new book, Teach Yourself Java 2 in 21 Days, Third Edition, is now available. I publish a Web site to support each of my books, and this is the first one that's published using a PHP/MySQL Web application instead of static HTML files. I can edit the site remotely in a Web browser and offer new features, including an RSS feed for site updates. ... (read more)

2002/09/08

Charles Miller suggests that Java should be taught using an environment where students can create and experiment with objects without needing to learn the words "public static void main()." It's an interesting idea -- the Naked Objects approach could be useful in this regard. However, as someone who has tackled this issue with each of my Java books, I've concluded that it's better to start with simple applications and the main() method, because most readers are using the Java 2 SDK while ... (read more)

2002/08/23

BEA Systems has dumped Visual Cafe as its Java development environment of choice and reached a deal with Borland, agreeing to resell Borland JBuilder in exchange for a new version of the tool tailored for the BEA WebLogic application server. ... (read more)

2002/08/14

TogetherSoft, which offers the ControlCenter Java programming environment, has purchased WebGain Studio, from WebGain, which closed in June. The software includes Visual Cafe, and the most likely result is that Studio's best features will find their way into ControlCenter while Studio itself is mothballed. The only WebGain product that hasn't found a new home is the modeling tool Application Composer. ... (read more)

2002/08/13

Object-Oriented Programming Pioneer Kristen Nygaard Dies

Kristen Nygaard, the computer science pioneer who is credited with Ole Johan-Dahl for the invention of inheritance, has died at age 75. Nygaard's website contains an encyclopedia entry he wrote about their role in early object-oriented programming, along with a lot of other interesting material on programming, including a funny article about the object-oriented family tree. "Ole-Johan Dahl and I are said to be the 'fathers' of SIMULA I and SIMULA 67 and thus of object-oriented programming," ... (read more)

2002/08/12

Sign of the times: Sun's Java Web site, which was redesigned recently, no longer uses applets on any of its well-trafficked pages. The last design featured applets that scrolled Java-related news and presented a directory of user groups, but Sun appears to have come to the same realization as most of the Web: The load time required for the Java virtual machine makes applets a poor choice for popular pages. Sites that use applets today are employing them for games, chat, the visual depiction of ... (read more)

2002/08/02

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