The other day when I arrived at work my phone's voice mail light was lit up. Cool, except that after pressing the voice mail button I was asked to enter my password. Issac Asimov's first law of robotics states that 'A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm'. Around this time my office mate returns from lunch and inquires why I'm still there given it's such a nice day outside. The answer is that it was taken away from, me by a robotic system administrator and a fax machine who together, figuratively speaking, ate my lunch.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the Real-World Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code ?JUGgold' while registering

In Bernard J. Baar's book 'A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness,' he describes the brain as having a single conscious area that can be occupied by one thought at a time. The unconscious part of the brain stores memories and experiences and, like the conscious brain, is capable of performing tasks; however, it does so automatically, unlike the conscious area that requires the intervention of the 'self.' The first time we are given a new input, sensation, or experience to deal with, the conscious brain is responsible for analyzing it, comparing it to something that has occurred before, and dealing with the action accordingly. Repeated exposure to the same input drives the response into the unconscious area of the mind, so the next time the same experience is encountered, an automatic reply can be recalled without requiring conscious intervention.

The WebRenderer Swing Edition changes the face of Java Swing applications and the rendering of Web content within Java. Before we jump into that, let's take a look back at Web content display in Java desktop applications including the generational changes and Java's very own 'Browser Wars.'

At the moment there seems to be an extremely unhealthy obsession in software with the concept of architecture. A colleague of mine, a recent graduate, told me he wished to become a software architect. He was drawn to the glamour of being able to come up with grandiose ideas - sweeping generalized designs, creating presentations to audiences of acronym addicts, writing esoteric academic papers, speaking at conferences attended by headless engineers on company expense accounts hungrily seeking out this year's grail, and creating e-mails with huge cc lists from people whose signature footer is more interesting than the content.

At the annual Alan Turing memorial lecture given by Grady Booch in London last month, he chose as his subject, The promise, the limits, and the beauty of software. It was an excellent address in which one of the themes was that for each of the incredible advances that software has brought to our lives, there is an almost Newtonian opposite effect that is negative and destructive. One such example given was e-mail: while making us able to communicate instantly with our peers, allowing effective and immediate information sharing, it brings its own set of problems. Issues with information theft, virus attachments, phishing, worms, and privacy are well documented and are very real threats although, to a certain extent, these are merely mirrors of real-world phenomena that e-mail merely amplifies and concentrates. The question that interests me the most is whether e-mail actually increases or decreases communication effectiveness.

I am always in awe of people who develop hardware. They're the real engineers of our profession, the ones pushing forward the speeds at which things work, their size, and their connectivity. For example, in 2005 there were more computer chips produced worldwide than grains of rice harvested and at a lower unit cost. Tonight as I was watching a movie from the 1980s, instead of dating it by the big hair and shoulder pads, the tree rings were most visible by the size of the mobile phone the hero was using, the lack of a plasma or LCD wide-screen TV in an otherwise luxurious living room, and the absence of a satellite navigation device as the lead characters got lost following directions from a map.

The year 2006 marked the tenth anniversary of the Java language and for me is the most significant in its history. The most important event was the announcement that a GPL version of Java SE will be available sometime in the first half of 2007. If nothing else, all the back and forth 'will they, won't they' discussions over open source have been a distraction for the Java community.

Ted Nelson, inventor of, among other things, hypertext, once lamented that software development today is at the same evolutionary stage film making was at 100 years ago. Back in the 1900s, when the technology of film production was in its earliest stages, the cameraman was the person in charge because he was the one who understood the technology and could make it function correctly. The audience's sheer fascination with the magic of films was enough to captivate and hold their attention while the silent and blurred subjects grinned and gawked directly into the lens. Much has changed in the last hundred years though, and movie directors are now the ones in charge of making a film.

Abstraction, as defined on dictionary.com, is 'considering something as a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.' It's a powerful concept that underpins software reuse. When you implement a problem, if, instead of starting from scratch, the scenario can be thought of as being an example of an already-understood question, its solution can benefit from existing implementations.

In 1996, Sun created Java and the terms under which it is distributed. Since then, the Java Community Process (JCP) has emerged, allowing companies to participate in shaping language changes, but the ownership of trademarks, licensing agreements, branding, and other fundamental product issues remains unchanged. One is reminded of this fact every time the Sun MicrosystemsTM trademark appears alongside the Java coffee cup logo, or when one is greeted with the message 'brought to you by Sun Microsystems' at www.java.com. For anyone to use the Java-compatible logo on a product requires verification against the test compatibility kit (TCK), for which one has to enter into negotiations with Sun. Java, the technology, the trademark, and the language, are owned by Sun.

Computers can generally be characterized into two types: ones that are designed to have more than one user attached and those intended for a single user. In the beginning almost all computing was done on large multi-user machines, partly due to their expense, which precluded their use to all but large institutions or wealthy corporations. Mainframes ruled this era and excelled at their role: providing a reliable computing platform for hosting databases, transaction servers, and centralized applications. The interaction was through character-based screens that, while providing fast and efficient green screen access, was to be their Achilles heel.

One of the phrases that has always puzzled me is 'business logic'. It seems to crop up a lot in presentations, articles, sales pitches and so forth. The one I saw it in most recently was a talk about how great web servers are because they keep all of the business logic on the server where it can be robust, secure, and logged. By analogy the client is a poor place for business logic because, while it can do richer things with the user interface, all of the core rules must be kept on the server.

Back in 1996, Java was originally hailed as a way of making the Web more appealing through applets, and, with its 'write one, run anywhere' philosophy, as the holy grail for desktop apps that would be truly cross platform. The truth is that both were oversold at the time. With the combination of low bandwidth Internet connections and early Swing releases not living up to user expectations occurring in the middle of the Microsoft vs. Sun 'pure Java' fight that resulted in JVMs being pulled from Internet Explorer, Java's attention moved off the desktop and onto the server.

Some of the words I dread most in a meeting are: 'What if ?' They're fine in the present tense of 'What if a user tries this option?' or 'What if the database read fails mid flight?', but as soon as the future tense is introduced I begin to worry. 'What if the database and middleware changes?' or 'What if sometime soon we don't just have to run on PCs but need to work on mobile phones?' There is also the future future tense such as 'What happens to the UI if the operating system is ported to run on a wrist watch?' or 'What if one day the company merges with another whose corporate standard is MAC and SNA?'

When someone in a corporate boardroom decides what their IT strategy is going to be, it isn't based on what language or software architecture they will use, but on how a system can provide value to their business. Very few organizations buy their hardware and OS first, and then tool up to write a bespoke solution that meets their business needs. In my first job I worked for a software house that built specialized insurance applications. Companies put out tenders for business that we responded to, and whether our products or a competitors' were chosen was based on the value proposition in the boardroom. The hardware, platform, and application server were dragged into the sale because they were required by the solution, but the app was always the endpoint that drove the purchase.

In Java's early years, the language received a lot of flak from its opponents over performance. Java turns its .class file bytecodes into machine instructions (MI) at runtime, something that costs cycles and is slower than a fully compiled language that creates the MI as part of the development stage. While to a certain extent this is true, the performance delta has all but been removed with the use of just-in-time (JIT) compilers that cache machine instructions in the VM and do other clever tricks to ensure the JVM runtime speed has very little slack. There was a time when JIT had to be switched off for debugging as it interfered with the ability to map stack and heap information back to the original source. However, even this is no longer true in the newer JVMs that can run in high-performance debug modes with no significant difference between having -Xdebug there or not.

I have just finished reviewing the book Open Source Development Tools for Java, which provides excellent coverage of such topics as log4J, CVS, Ant, and JUnit. There is a chapter on UML tools though in which the author almost apologizes for the lack of good open source design tools. There is a plethora of projects on SourceForge.net from J2EE runtime frameworks to IDE plugins, yet there is almost nothing that encroaches upward into the arena of analysis and design tools.

One way in which technology is adopted is when an existing process is automated and made more efficient, cheaper, or reliable. Another is when a technique or innovation is applied to an existing process to drastically alter the way it occurs. The disadvantage of the latter is that it requires the idea being sold to someone who has to change to adopt it, and thereby carries a risk of failure. Applying a technology to merely streamline an existing process is a simpler to adopt as the implementation merely involves oiling an existing solution.

Allowing extensibility of a rich Java GUI is a daunting task. Each user may require slightly different functionality - this one wants to be able to import data from an Excel spreadsheet, and another wants to generate custom XML reports of particular artifacts in the application. You want to make every user happy, but you very rapidly see yourself with multiple code branches trying to satisfy those custom requirements - every Java developer's configuration management nightmare.

'If Java is to remain at the forefront of technology for the next 10 years,' writes Joe Winchester in his Java Developer's Journal column, 'it needs to find a way of decoupling API calls between internal code and external blocks, perhaps even introducing soft typing calls across program boundaries or having flexible message transport across modules.

Paolo Massa is Web-famous for predicting AJAX Office would become a reality within a year. Now he considers the Sun-Google announcement and what it might mean for the prospects of OpenOffice and Google coming preinstalled on the PCs of the world.

Ask most people on the street what Java is and they might tell you it's an Indonesian island. If you happen to bump into some programmers, they'll probably tell you it's a language that reads like C++ but has garbage collection and a virtual machine to make it portable. The connection is reputedly the syllogism where the island gives name to its coffee, people drink coffee while surfing the Web, and Java is the computer language of the Web.

Actually I would like to do something more, for instance, providing a toolbar for my application. First, I add three buttons with the same cut, copy, and paste icons (no text for them, according to the Look-and-Feel Design Guidelines), specifying the same tooltip text used for the menu items (note that I do exactly what I did before for the menubar). Then I link the buttons to the code that implements their functionalities (I repeat my actions again). At the end I write the code to disable and enable the buttons, following the same criteria used for the menu items.

The world's first office computer, known as LEO, was created in the 1950s by Lyons, the British teashop giant. Its aim was to replace the thousands of clerks who did the billing, invoicing, and stocktaking, and also tracked the supply and demand of sticky buns and cups of tea that the public were consuming. Its success lay not in the technology it employed, but because it made the company more efficient by streamlining what was previously a very labor-intensive business process. It benefited Lyons, which cut costs and had more control of corporate information, and it also benefited the thirsty public who had enough cakes, sandwiches, and cups of tea to see them through their seaside weekends, rain or shine.

This article presents a data model based on a Collection implementation that can be used with Swing components JList and JComboBox. It also discusses a method to use these same concepts in constructing the user interface of an application.

At a presentation a number of years ago given by Josh Bloch he made a comment that Java as a language hit the 'sweet spot' of programming. His metaphor was based around the fact that the language was straightforward to learn and that rather than containing many esoteric coding constructs, writing and understanding a Java program was a relatively easy task.

Experienced developers know many of the benefits of and motivations for using interface-based design principles. Interfaces provide for polymorphic behavior by hiding the implementation and only exposing the relevant public methods of the implementing class. What may be less appreciated is that the use of interfaces, when applied to an entire application, can provide for application isolation, while at the same time enhancing testing capabilities.

Java has been the springboard for some of the most successful open source projects today including JBoss, NetBeans, and Eclipse. Several folks though have felt the missing piece was an actual open source implementation of the runtime. Some view Sun's stewardship of Java and the JCP as being too controlling, while others believe it is an essential benign rule that preserves the integrity of the language.

This article presents a Java/Swing component implementation of a feature that is ubiquitous in nearly all desktop applications, particularly Windows applications - an area in the lower right portion of a window (Frame) that can be used to resize the window.

Property files are frequently used in systems built using Java whether it's a thick Java client, a servlet, or a business component. Java specifies the format for a property file and provides the Properties class to read from and write to these files. However, Java is silent on the aspects related to validations of a value entered in a property file, providing room for errors to creep into an application system. How many times have you started to debug a failure in an application only to realize that it's because of an incorrect value in a property file?

The problem with defects is that while they occur, the cost of finding and preventing them has a diminishing return, so the approach often taken is that once no more serious defects can be found in a test pass, all that remains must be minor and the programming is complete. The whole act of testing is an odd part of the software engineering process, because the expectation is that bugs will be found and then fixed before the next round of testing occurs.

I witnessed a recent BOF conversation in which the general feeling was that the browser GUI and its accompanying plethora of back-end frameworks had let people down by delivering a poor return on investment and a weak user-interface experience.

Tim'O Reilly, the eponymous publisher, kicked off EclipseCon 2005 in Burlinghame earlier this year with an excellent presentation titled 'Open source business models and design patterns.' As well as documenting various failures and successes in the computing world, one message that struck a chord was that to succeed in open source you must design for participation.

At a recent presentation given by a software engineer from a very large automotive company, I gleaned some remarkable facts:for a particular car model where the basic price goes up as the livery becomes lusher and the initials on the trunk longer, half of the increase in value comes purely from software. I had assumed that the extra greenbacks in the price came from fancier music systems combined with a cool retro steering wheel and dashboard fascia; apparently it just comes from good old lines of code.

Since Adobe released the first public PDF Reference in 1993, a number of PDF utilities and libraries, supporting all kinds of languages and platforms, have been made available to users and developers alike. However, support for Adobe's technology has lagged in Java application development.

Go fast, it runs too slow, you've got to make the number show. Diddle de bop, da la de doop, sitting around and feeling groovy.

Earthdate: October 15, 1997, and the Cassini spacecraft is launched. Mission: to boldly go and explore the planet Saturn.

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 to wait for the server to page the application back into memory, process the results of the display buffer, and prepare output, the PC is able to offload some of the validation and processing locally.

The java.util.TimeZone abstract class that represents a time zone is used to produce local time for a particular global time zone. A TimeZone comprises three basic pieces of information: an ID, a time zone offset, and the logic necessary to deal with DST (Daylight Savings Time).