Joe Winchester

Java serialization was initially used to support remote method invocation (RMI), allowing argument objects to be passed between two virtual machines. RMI works best when the two VMs contain compatible versions of the class being transmitted, and can reliably transmit a binary representation of the object based on its internal state. When an object is serialized, it must also serialize the objects to which its fields refer - resulting in what is commonly called an object graph of connected components. Although the transient keyword can be used to control the extent to which the serialization process penetrates the object graph, this level of control is seldom enough. Many have tried to use Java's serialization to achieve the so-called "long-term persistence" of data - wh... (more)

JDJ Editorial: IT Olympics

There are a number of esteemed contests for the greatest and fastest software developers among us - events where we can pit our coding prowess against fellow brainiacs and like-minded techies. I think it's high time we had an alternative set of awards, suited not to aspiring budding Turing machine engineers, but rooted more in the humdrum real, rather than artificial academic, world. Th... (more)

SWT: A Native Widget Toolkit for Java - Part 2 of 2

The first part of this article (JDJ, Vol. 8, issue 4) introduced the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), and showed how graphical user interfaces can be created using some of the basic widgets found in SWT. In addition, layout classes were described that allow widgets to be arbitrarily positioned and sized within their parent. In Part 2, we continue where the previous article left off, describ... (more)

User Interface Generation Tools: Silver Bullet or Fool's Gold?

User interface generation tools are something that has always been dear to my heart. I've enjoyed using them and have been fortunate enough to work on developing them. However, there's a huge tar pit to be avoided when using them on projects that I see people heading towards over and over again. The problem crops up when one tries to automatically generate GUIs from a model. It doesn't ma... (more)

SpringLayout: A Powerful & Extensible Layout Manager

The task of a layout manager is to position and size each component based on the size of its container. Each component has a preferred size that can be used to determine the real estate it wishes to occupy, as well as a minimum and maximum size. The preferred size is especially useful for components that contain user-visible strings whose size can change between development and deploymen... (more)