While the idea of mapping several names onto one Apache instance with VirtualHost directives is well known, what do you do when you're serving web apps with Tomcat? Satya Komatineni has both the code and the configs that you'll need to make this work....   Read Article.

Where do you start when building a Java desktop application? All Java gives you by default is public static void main (String[]); it's up to you from there. Eclipse's Rich Client Platform (RCP) offers a tested design, commonly-needed widgets, a standardized component model, pervasive extensibility, and more. Wayne Beaton has an introduction to...   Read Article.

Callisto, a bundle of optional plugins for Eclipse, now comes with a profiling tool called the Test Performance Tools Platform (TPTP). TPTP includes testing, tracing, performance monitoring, profiling, and static-code analysis tools. John Ferguson Smart offers this guided tour of how to use TPTP to speed up your apps....   Read Article.

Most Java developers use Ant to do builds and are familiar with its core tasks. But Ant's tasks tend toward an undesirable coupling: everything important had to be a core task because it was hard to distribute new plug-in tasks. Fortunately, Ant 1.7's new antlibs feature makes it much easier to distribute and use new Ant tasks. In this article,...   Read Article.

Java SE 6 (aka Mustang) brings with it a new set of improvements to the JDBC API for accessing databases. Improvements include support for the RowID interface, better exception handling, annotation-based queries, and (finally!) and end to the clumsy Class.forName() system of loading database drivers. In this article, Srini Penchikala tours the major...   Read Article.

If you have a need for generating or displaying reports, you may want to have a word with BIRT. The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project is an open source Eclipse effort to enable the creation and deployment of complex reports. Jason Weathersby shows you how to grind out reports and display them in web applications and RCP-based desktop...   Read Article.

Geronimo is Apache's open source, Java EE-compatible application server, based on a flexible system of interchangeable components. This makes it ideal for a wide range of enterprise deployments. In this article, Kunal Jaggi shows you how to get started with Geronimo....   Read Article.

Many eyes are on Sun, awaiting the promised eventual open-sourcing of its Java SE implementation. But Daniel Steinberg has another idea: instead of open-sourcing Java, Sun should outsource it, so that it can be developed by parties more attuned to the needs and opportunities of cross-platform development....   Read Article.

The popular Eclipse IDE's latest release, version 3.2, is the cornerstone of an ambitious release of ten Eclipse-branded projects on the same day. But what's in it for you? Ed Burnette takes a look at the new features in Eclipse's Java Development Tools and shows you how they'll make your development much easier....   Read Article.

Database to XML and back again. If everyone's doing some or all of this, then shouldn't we write it once, get it right, and standardize? JDBC 3.0's WebRowSet offers a profound increase in power over the old ResultSet. Sharad Acharya shows you what's possible....   Read Article.

Of course Tomcat is the first Java application server you think of, but is it the right tool for every job? The open source Jetty serves up JSPs and servlets in just a fraction of the memory needed by other app servers and is designed for easy embedding in other applications and non-traditional Java environments. Ethan McCallum takes a look at the big...   Read Article.

Eclipse RCP uses a popular plugin scheme for extending the capabilities of the core platform. Meanwhile, the Inversion of Control pattern is a popular means of having a runtime container provide an implementation of some needed service. Put them together and effectively, you're plugging in the implementation of your plugin. Riccardo Govoni shows...   Read Article.

The Google Web Toolkit was the talk of JavaOne 2006, offering developers a way to create Ajax applications by writing Java and having the toolkit generate the client-side JavaScript, which can call back to Java servlets through an RPC-like call. Robert Cooper offers an initial tutorial to get you up and running with GWT....   Read Article.

JavaOne 2006 left attendees with an incomplete answer to the big question: will Sun open source Java? The answer was better than a definite maybe, but not by much. Daniel Steinberg looks back at the conference, its mixed message, and its many successes outside of the general sessions....   Read Article.

Dissatisfaction with entity beans as an "official" means of persisting Java objects to databases has prompted a number of "unofficial" approaches, such as the very popular Hibernate. Now EJB3 seems to have learned its lesson: its new Java Persistence API allows you to persist plain old Java objects (POJOs) with a minimum of fuss and just a few annotations....   Read Article.

"Real-Time" Java doesn't mean "really fast," but it does mean "really predictable," and that's especially important in many fields where an unpredictable response time, usually caused by the Java Virtual Machine's garbage collector, can cost money or lives. Peter Mikhalenko looks at the Real-Time Specification for Java and Sun's first...   Read Article.

Does your enterprise Java application need to store not only complex objects or documents but a history of changes to them? Many developers try to solve this problem with database wizardry, but it's probably a better option to hand the job over to a configuration management system that is built for the task. In this article, Swaminathan Radhakrishnan...   Read Article.

Among Java SE 6's key features is the ability to mix scripting languages into Java code, thanks to the implementation of the JSR-223 spec. In this article, John Ferguson Smart takes a look at the spec and what it means for Java, and shows how to use Java 6's integrated Rhino implementation to call JavaScript from Java...and vice versa....   Read Article.

You know how to open and use database connections for each user, but what about optimizing for many concurrent users? Rather than creating and destroying connections over and over again, established practice calls for use of a pool of connections that can be reused. Kunal Jaggi shows how to implement this strategy in Tomcat....   Read Article.

Start with the idea of an object database, like db4o, which effortlessly persists arbitrary objects, even those with deep structures, into a database. Then mix in a little Hibernate. Now you can map objects to either the db4o database or a relational database. And as Jim Paterson shows, the db4o Replication System allows you to do some interesting things,...   Read Article.