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. Things were so bad with the memory that the screen buffer was used to store program data.

For those involved in the maintenance and programming of databases, object-relational (O/R) mapping and TopLink have been almost synonymous for 10 years. An innovator in the ORM space for an entire decade, TopLink was started in 1994 as an independent company and was acquired by Oracle from the defunct WebGain in June of 2002.

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 Output data structures that were read or written to.

Oki Data is extending its professional-grade printing solutions to include support for Sun Java Desktop System, Release 2. Oki's C7000 and C9000 Series of color printers will include PPD files that are supported by Sun's most recent Java Desktop release. Both companies are moving forward with plans to grow mid-sized business customers.

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.

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.

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.

In the early days of Java, GUI forms were written, not drawn. They were created by writing code that instantiated components and added them to containers with various layout constraints. Then the program was run and the result could be admired. This way of working, WYGIWYG (what you get is what you get) was often quite fun, more often frustrating, and never very productive.

If you've ever written software to be used by business managers, you will no doubt have received requests for interoperability with the Microsoft Office Applications. 'Get me the report in Excel; HTML doesn't cut it and I need to run my own analysis on it'; 'Can you index the zillion word documents I have so that the whole organization can search on them?';

Despite the rather 'rushed' feel to Release 2, the Sun Java Desktop System is slowly shaping up into a serious corporate competitor to Microsoft Windows, reckons Jerason Banes. 'Many managers will probably decide that they wish to stick with their Windows laptops for the time being, but they'll probably drool at the opportunity to replace the rest of their very expensive Windows infrastructure,' he says.

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 computer defense system with a software virus. Doing so would deactivate the force field and allow Will Smith to jump into the pilot's seat and sneak back undetected to alien HQ, before loading the virus onto the mother ship and saving the planet.

Long lists of data present a problem for GUI development. This occurs when choosing records from large database tables or recipients from a long list of e-mail addresses, or any time a subset of data must be chosen from a long list or table. Two issues arise when choosing from long lists of data.

JDesktop Network Components (JDNC) has been released by Sun as an open source project, so that the technology is available to the community early enough to allow it to directly shape the vision, the feature set, and even the code. 'There is still a lot of work to do,' says Sun's Amy Fowler, 'the JDNC feature set is far from complete and there remain rough edges, especially in the API, which has not had extensive usage outside of unit testing and markup-driven use-cases. But, that is exactly why we need your involvement.'

You can never be too rich or too thin. That's what Wally Simpson might have quipped to her stock trading application had she lived to enjoy the blessings of the Internet. Indeed, Wally may have had a point there: today's mainstream approaches to end-user computing are lacking.

The Beanshell preprocessor, or BPP for short, is intended to be a convenient and powerful preprocessing tool for Java developers. It's convenient because the preprocessor is based on Beanshell, which is essentially interpreted Java. This means that Java or Beanshell programmers can quickly use all of BPP's features.