Miscellaneous

SA4J is a technology that analyzes structural dependencies of Java applications in order to measure their stability. It detects structural "anti-patterns" (suspicious design elements) and provides dependency web browsing for detailed exploration of anti-patterns in the dependency web. SA4J also enables "what if" analysis in order to assess the impact of change on the functionality of the application; and it offers guidelines for package re-factoring.

Not only is logging an important element in development and testing cycles -- providing crucial debugging information -- it is also useful for detecting bugs once a system has been deployed in a production environment, providing precise context information to fix them. In this article, Ruth Zamorano and Rafael Luque, cofounders of Orange Soft, a Spain-based software company specializing in object-oriented technologies, server-side Java platform, and Web content accessibility, explain how to use the extension ability of log4j to enable your distributed Java applications to be monitored by instant messaging (IM).

Application Tools for Extension Services consist of WebSphere� Studio-based tools that support the development of Web applications targeted for the Extension Services for WebSphere Everyplace (ESWE) platform. These tools are based on the existing WebSphere Studio J2EE development tools and they are part of an emerging suite of tools for the ESWE platform.

JAR Class Finder is a WSAD/Eclipse plug-in utility for finding JAR files containing a given class for the Java build path of a project and for helping to fix NoClassDefFound exceptions. This utility helps users to quickly and easily resolve ClassDefNotFound exceptions, which commonly occur during run time. It can also be used to avoid getting such errors if used before run time.

Solution Enabler is a framework for creating and deploying solutions locally or to remote machines with different operating systems. The framework helps to simplify the creation and deployment of software solutions by capturing detailed knowledge of a solution package deployed through a common installer.

Jikes Bytecode Toolkit is a 100% Java class library that enables Java programs to create, read, and write binary Java class files and to query and update a single, high-level representation of the collection of them, including relationships among them. These features allow the development of tools that report on what APIs the classes use, reorder and change instructions, merge or extend classes, add customized instrumentation (similar to profilers), analyze control and data flow, etc.

JSR-109 facilitates the building of interoperable Web services in the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) environment. It standardizes the deployment of Web services in a J2EE container. This article discusses the server and client programming models defined by JSR-109 and provides code examples.

Data Wizard for Java is a tool for building a simple graphical user interface (GUI) that makes it easy to collect necessary data. This tool enables the building of data wizard applications using only a scripting scenario in an XML format. Data Wizard for Java can help to produce a GUI by using a simple script to describe the necessary input parameters and the required tools or utilities to be called.

Web Services for DB2 Cube Views provide access to multidimensional data stored in DB2. These Web services allow a client application to read data from the cubes and perform basic online analysis on multidimensional data and metadata through the Web, using XPath and XML.

Tutorial and sample codes to calculate the distance between two locations. Free sample source codes in PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, C/C++, C#, Java, Perl, Visual Basic and Javascript. Longitude and latitude for United States ZIP Code and Canadian Postal Code are available in database subscription.

JSP technology is well-known, supported by most application servers, and endorsed by the J2EE Blueprints. Why would you choose otherwise? In this first of a two-part series, learn about the Tea template language and how Tea can be a viable alternative to JSP technology.

This article takes a new look at UPC symbols and bar codes, and describes how you can use Java to read information from a UPC bar code. The authors explain how to expedite and organize your enterprise operations that revolve around an IBM DB2 database. The sample application described in the article includes downloadable code.

Add more versatility to your existing Java framework. The same framework supports file access, network access, character conversion, compression, encryption and so forth. This article presents a framework that lets an application efficiently read data from a source that only supports writing data to an output stream.

Examine the roots of the double-checked locking idiom, why it was developed, and why it doesn't work. The Java programming language contains several useful programming idioms. It also contains some that further study has shown should not be used. Double-checked locking is one such idiom that should never be used.

Ant, from Jakarta project at the Apache Foundation, has become a de facto standard for building Java projects. You may already be using it to create automatic builds. It's easy enough to tailor those builds to your needs by customizing the build files; but what if you want to wait until run time to set certain properties? This article shows you how to extend Ant to produce builds that are interactive at run time; users can follow prompts to change parameters each time they conduct a build without having to deal with unfamiliar build files. You can incorporate this functionality into your builds to provide a smoother and more flexible experience for your end users.

The Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) offers great tools for developers, porting the Java platform's network-centric and platform-agnostic worldview down to memory- and processor-limited devices. This article explains the basics of the J2ME world, showing you the building blocks of the platform and demonstrating a sample application.

Glass box extensibility refers to the ways in which a software system may be extended when the source code is available for viewing, but not for modifying -- it lies as the happy medium between black box design (in which extensions are built without viewing the original code) and open box design (extensions are coded directly into the base code). Because the new extensions are based directly on the original code but don't alter it, the glass box design is probably the most effective, and safest, method of extending a software system. This article expands on the topic of glass box extensibility touched on last month in this column. After reading this article, you'll know when to use the glass box and will have some tips on how to implement it.

Java 2D may be the most obvious solution for programming 2D graphs in Java programs, but it's not the only one. This article proposes an elegant alternative in the form of Java Objects for Science (JSci), an open-source package that lets you create 2D bar graphs, pie charts, and line graphs in Swing.

One of the strengths of the Java platform is its object-oriented nature; one of the benefits of object-oriented languages is that they aid code reuse. But what if you're a Java programmer and you want to reuse code that wasn't written in the Java language? With Bridge2Java, an IBM alphaWorks technology, Java developers can integrate COM objects into their applications. This article explains how it works.

Project Jxta is a community-run attempt to build a utility application substrate for peer-to-peer applications. The initial reference implementation of Jxta includes a command-line shell that allows experimentation with the core Jxta platform without programming. This article takes us through a hands-on tour of the <a href="http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-p2pint2?open&l=766,t=grj,p=Jxta2">Jxta shell</a>. You'll explore its command set and extend its capability by writing your own custom commands using the Java programming language.