Even with unit tests approaching 100% coverage, critical logic errors could be hiding in your code. It is impossible to test every possible condition, but with a little analysis of the potential paths and a plan to test them, you can be much more confident in the quality of your tests....   Read Article.

Hibernate is just about the defacto standard for Java database persistence. With Hibernate 3, it has become even easier to specify how your Java objects are stored in a database. In this article, John Smart shows how Java 5 annotations are used by Hibernate to simplify your code and make persisting your data even easier....   Read Article.

Derby is a popular choice for an all-Java open-source database, but like all databases, it requires thought and care to run at ideal efficiency. Dejan Bosanac shows techniques--many of them applicable to all JDBC databases--that will keep your Derby-backed application running at top speed....   Read Article.

Convention-over-configuration is the battle cry of popular web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, and Stripes brings the same kind of thinking to Java. In this article, Mark Eagle shows how to put together a basic Stripes framework and discusses the framework's integration with Ajax and Spring....   Read Article.

Weaving complex business logic into application code makes developers deeply responsible for understanding and maintaining that logic, and means that every change in a company's processes requires a recompile and redeploy. Using a rules engine like Drools offers an opportunity to split the rules into their own files, potentially editable by the subject-matter...   Read Article.

Java security manager policy files are powerful and flexible, but rather grueling and error-prone to write by hand. In this article Mark Petrovic employs a novel approach: a development-time SecurityManager that logs your applications' calls and builds a suitable policy file....   Read Article.

2006 will be remembered as the year that Sun open-sourced Java under the GPL, that EJB 3.0 finally shipped, and that Google surprised everyone with its Google Web Toolkit. But how will history record the results of these events? For the 2006 year-ender, ONJava editor Chris Adamson looks at the year's events through the lens of how they may play...   Read Article.

Sure, everyone's been talking up Spring for the last year or so, but what if your app already uses some other framework, or if you didn't even use a framework and instead rolled your own JDBC and DAOs? Ethan McCallum has a case study showing how he took a web application written for another article and converted it to Spring, highlighting what...   Read Article.

Sick of internationalizing by making your own code take responsibility for finding and using ResourceBundles? The i18nlog project offers an annotations-based way to simplify your internationalization tasks and even allow you to internationalize your logging. John Mazzitelli explains why this is a good idea....   Read Article.

In the second part of an excerpt from Java Generics and Collections, authors Maurice Naftalin and Philip Wadler continue their study of how to adopt Java 5.0 generics in a measured, sustainable fashion. Having shown how to genericize a library while leaving the library in legacy mode, they now present three approaches to the opposite scenario: genericizing...   Read Article.

In this excerpt from Java Generics and Collections, authors Maurice Naftalin and Philip Wadler show how to make the switch to Java 5.0 generics, not by expecting you to flip a switch across your whole code base, but by having you gradually work generics into your code while maintaining compatibility....   Read Article.

Why should the benefits of short iterations and a tight feedback loop be limited to the agile methodologies like Extreme Programming? In this article, Satya Komatineni explores the idea of Extreme Prototyping--the staged, ongoing development of a web app prototype that emerges into a final product. He shows how it can eliminate common design and project...   Read Article.

First presented in "What Is Java Content Repository," JSR-170 offers a standard means for content management systems to present their persistent data stores to Java applications. In this article, Sunil Patil explores some of JCR's optional features--namely, the very useful concepts of versioning and observability....   Read Article.

Today's enterprise server--indeed, the environment--isn't what it was when Java was born. Slow networked machines have been replaced by fast, 64-bit multi-core servers that can house all your tiers in one box or even virtualize servers within the server. This has a significant effect on the design and deployment of your Java enterprise application,...   Read Article.

In a second excerpt from JBoss at Work, authors Tom Marrs and Scott Davis continue working on a web service of the book's example application, showing how to automate and test its deployment, and creating a client to test the service....   Read Article.

"JBoss at Work," by Tom Marrs and Scott Davis, builds up a complete enterprise application, chapter-by-chapter. In this excerpt, the authors show how to take the application and expose it as a web service....   Read Article.

You might have heard of JSR-170, but what is a content repository, and what can you do with it? Well, do you want to manage documents with versioning, search, access control, and more? Content repositories offer these features, and JSR-170 codifies them into a single API. Sunil Patil shows how to use the reference implementation--Apache Jackrabbit--to...   Read Article.

Tapestry offers an open source framework for rapid development of web applications using Java. It offers high performance, good code re-use, line-precise error reporting, and more. Hemangini Kappla offers an introduction to this widely used framework....   Read Article.

Hibernate has one set of ideas about how to make something unique, such as using a database sequence number as an ID. But this clashes with Java's need for implementations of equals() and hashCode() that determine identity for objects, even those that haven't yet made a trip to the database and thus can't have a sequence number. James Brundege...   Read Article.

The principle of "separation of concerns" is much repeated in SOA circles... so why are transactional integrity, security, and business logic so often intermingled in SOA implementations? In this article, Tieu Luu shows how to use Spring to separate out security concerns in an Axis-based web service....   Read Article.