Joe Winchester

Paul Simon sings, "Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts." Each person who attempts to conquer the highly fickle music or fashion market frequently does so by merely rehashing old ideas. Trends are repeated and what was once passe becomes fashionable again, as the defi... (more)

The key to building a distributed application successfully lies in a sensible partition of work across the different boundaries and devices. With a client/server program, one of the advantages it offers over a more traditional thin client is that for each task, instead of having ... (more)

While at lunch with colleagues recently I overheard four very able Java developers swapping horror stories of the kit they'd cut their teeth on as junior programmers. One had used a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of RAM and a black and white TV and a tape recorder in lieu of a hard drive... (more)

My first programming job was done using Report Generator Language (RPG) on the IBM System 36. The hardware was green screen, the tape decks reel-to-reel, and the printers large and noisy. The language itself was very data-centric with each program declaring formatted Input or Out... (more)

One of the principles of any OO language such as Java is an object's ability to encapsulate its data and provide clients with a specific and well-defined API. This is done through the visibility keywords public, protected, and private. The use of these is one of the first things ... (more)

On a recent trip to Turkey to meet with a customer, I heard a comment that one of the reasons Java is being held back in that country is because of an almost ubiquitous local bug. In the Turkish alphabet there are two letters for "i," dotless and dotted. The problem is that the ... (more)

Sun has made two significant announcements recently in the Java desktop space: Java Desktop Integration Components (JDIC) (jdic.dev.java.net) and Java Desktop Network Components (JDNC) (jdnc.dev.java.net), both of which are open sourced under an LGPL. JDIC JDIC is essentially ab... (more)

Several years back I was watching Independence Day, a fairly decent movie about aliens invading earth. It was an enjoyable film with some pretty neat special effects, except my suspension of disbelief broke down when Jeff Goldblum decided he would infect an alien spaceship's comp... (more)

While software frameworks are always created with the best intentions, I believe that many of them fail for the same reason that any other software project does: a lack of clear understanding by the programmers of who their users are and what scenarios they are trying to solve. ... (more)

Among geneticists there is an ongoing argument about which species is superior: humans or bacteria. Both are the end product of millions of years of evolutionary refinement; they just took separate routes on the road to survival. Humans represent the pinnacle of animal developmen... (more)

Recently I was having a discussion with a colleague about traditional versus Web clients. Instead of hearing the usual defense about how much easier it is to deploy and manage a thin client application, his point was that client/server fails because fine-grained transactions don'... (more)

Other initiatives like JSR 198, whose goal is to describe a common API for extending IDEs, will benefit from interoperability. I hope I've seen the last newsgroup fan war between people who fight about which toolkit is superior. For those of you who are still arguing, Figure 1 sh... (more)

Java Web Start (JWS) was created as part of JSR 56 and is included with JRE 1.4. The idea was to provide a way to distribute a Java application that would run in a JVM on the client, but avoid the problems associated with traditional applets. JWS does this by incorporating the fe... (more)

Java is enjoying a renaissance on the desktop. There are several reasons for this The issues that plagued early client/server projects or Java desktop applications have largely been solved. Swing 1.4.2 delivered great performance improvements and good fidelity XP and GTK look and... (more)

Recently I was giving a demo of Java Web Start (JWS) to a customer and while they appreciated that systems management issues had been addressed, someone in the audience said "it's just client/client all over again - not really client/server." Her point was that true client/server... (more)

A problem encountered by any GUI is - if the user resizes the application window at runtime, how should this be handled? The most desirable effect is that the controls flow into the new space to make the best use of it (lists and trees grow while buttons remain a fixed size), and... (more)

Reports of Java's death on the desktop may be somewhat premature. A recent Giga group report, "Return of the Rich Clients", predicts that in the next three years browser-rich clients will grow by 350%, stand-alone clients by 250%, while HTML will decline by 50%. Two major facts a... (more)

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 repr... (more)

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 arbitraril... (more)

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a Java class library that allows you to create native user interfaces. It's designed to provide efficient, portable access to the underlying facilities of the operating system on which it's implemented. SWT uses native widgets wherever possibl... (more)