June 16, 2005

The LAMP open source development stack is steadily winning marketshare against Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java programming suites. LAMP includes the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database and the scripting languages PHP, Perl or Python. In recent months, the LAMP suite has been making big inroads into large companies, due to a growing number of third-party software and service providers that are helping to accelerate the push of LAMP into corporate IT. A number of open source and commercial web applications like SugarCRM and Journyx are also being built atop the LAMP stack instead of atop .NET or Java. Microsoft is now also viewing LAMP as serious threat and is focusing on reducing the cost and complexity of using the .NET framework. As a response, Microsoft is working on a series of low cost products to compete directly with LAMP.

June 8, 2005

Informit.com has published an article explaining how to use the Google Web API from your own .NET and Java applications. Using the Google Web API, your applications can access many of Google's services, including its immense index of the web. The API uses a combination of WDSL, XML, and SOAP to communicate with Google, but all of that complexity is hidden from developers thanks to the Google Web API. The article shows you how to put together sample Google Web API applications in C# using Visual Studio and in Java using the Sun JDK.

May 5, 2005

ONJava.com has published a two-part article explaining how to use the new generic types feature in Java 5.0. This feature allows you to create parameterized types which provide a degree of type safety for collections and other classes. In addition, generic types allow your methods to safely accept multiple types for any given argument.

April 28, 2005

If you're a Java developer trying to decide between using Swing or SWT for your next project, this excellent article is just what you need. Although the article comes out in favor of Swing, it does contain has a lot of information about both SWT and Swing that you really should be aware of before making your choice.

April 24, 2005

MacDevCenter has published an article that explains how to use the Eclipse IDE to develop Java based Cocoa applications for Mac OS X. Eclipse is free and offers many advantages for Java compared with Apple's Xcode, which was designed primarily for Objective-C development. For example, the Java debugger in Eclipse is very powerful and nothing like it exists in Xcode. In addition, the article explains how to use Eclipse and Ant to simply builds, configurations, and deployment.

April 22, 2005

ONJava.com has published an article describing in detail the best new features of version 5.0 of the Java language. These include Callable and Future Interfaces, Varargs and Autoboxing, Iterable and other new interfaces, Override annotation, MatchResult, and more.

March 30, 2005

According to the most recent statement by Sun Microsystems president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz, the company will likely make the Java Enterprise System available as open source. The official announcement may come in the next month or two.

March 28, 2005

John Carmack, the man behind games like Quake and Doom decided to take a recreational break from aerospace coding and write DoomRPG, a 3D cell phone game in Java using CDLC and MIDP. In a very interesting blog entry, he talks about his coding adventures in the cell phone world.

March 25, 2005

DeveloperWorks has published an article showing how to use XQuery in Java to extract information not only from XML documents, but also from HTML pages. For instance, you can write a simple application to extract stock quotes or weather data from a Yahoo! page and feed it directly into your own Java program for further processing.

March 10, 2005

ONJava.com has published an excellent guide on how use XSLT and MySQL to migrate WebLogic server applications to the JBoss open source platform.

February 19, 2005

At LinuxWorld this week Sun showed off Java Desktop 3.0. Aimed at the corporate desktop environment, the operating system includes the Linux 2.6 kernel as well as additional Windows interoperability features. These include Samba 3.0 and Exchange integration for the Evolution client.