Neal Ford

An unfortunate consequence of the pace of technological advancement is the lack of knowledge among new developers concerning the lore and tools of previous generations. While much of old technology is quaint and should be left behind (how many programmers do you know that miss PDP 11 Assembly language?), some good ideas were there as well. One of the not-so-old and not-completely-forgotten programmer utilities of the past is the make utility. I'm not suggesting that make isn't still used (especially in the UNIX world), but the percentage of programmers who know what a make utility is and what it does is pretty small. Yet the need for its functionality has never been greater, particularly for large-scale Java projects. I hope this article will return it to the forefront where it belongs. First, for the unenlightened, a little background on what a make utility does.... (more)

Borland AppServer 4.5

Let's start by getting the naming business out of the way! First there was a company named Borland. Then, for apparently no good reason, they changed their name to Inprise. The Inprise name was supposed to encompass the Enterprise products (such as VisiBroker, Entera, etc.) and the Borland name was kept for the tools (JBuilder, Delphi, C++Builder, etc.). Well, all the name change did was confuse everyone. No, they weren't bought out. Yes, it's the same company, with the same developers. No, I don't know why they changed their name. Late last year the name experiment ended, and t... (more)

Building Thread-Safe GUIs With Swing

Remember the old axiom, Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it? That's what happened with the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT), GUI controls, and threading. Developers were tired of always worrying about multithreaded access to GUI elements, so it sounded like a good idea to create an application framework that was always thread-safe. What do we mean by thread-safe? Two separate threads of execution can access the control at the same time without the developer having to worry about the threads interfering with one another. AWT made this possible...and was consequentl... (more)

Strutting your Stuff

In the beginning there were servlets, and it was good. They were much better than the alternatives, and allowed for scalable, robust Web development. But there was trouble in paradise. Web development partitioned itself into two camps: art school dropouts (invariably Macintosh users) who could create the beautiful look and feel for the Web application, and the Java developers who made it work. The guys in the basement handcrafted the beautiful HTML and passed it to the developers who had to incorporate it into the dynamic content of the Web site. For the developers, it was a tha... (more)

Rose JBuilder Link by Ensemble Systems

One of the most important but least used techniques in software development is proper design before implementation. Everyone knows this, but it seems that no one does it. Insane development schedules, pointy-haired manager types who believe that the only "real" artifact produced by a developer is source code, and a host of other events conspire to keep development as a nonengineering pursuit. However, those who have used good design (in the form of use cases, sequence diagrams, class diagrams, and so on) find that it reduces the number of required changes late in the project, cal... (more)