Joe Winchester

Java serialization was initially used to support remote method invocation (RMI), allowing argument objects to be passed between two virtual machines. RMI works best when the two VMs contain compatible versions of the class being transmitted, and can reliably transmit a binary representation of the object based on its internal state. When an object is serialized, it must also serialize the objects to which its fields refer - resulting in what is commonly called an object graph of connected components. Although the transient keyword can be used to control the extent to which the serialization process penetrates the object graph, this level of control is seldom enough. Many have tried to use Java's serialization to achieve the so-called "long-term persistence" of data - where the serialized form of a Java data structure is written to a file for later use. One such area... (more)

Ship Happens! Insights From the Eclipse SWT Community

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is the GUI toolkit used by Eclipse. The same folks that worked on the Common Widget (CW) library for IBM/Smalltalk developed it, this time for Java. Now, it's maintained as part of the Eclipse Platform project and distributed under an open source license, the Eclipse Public License (EPL). One key design point of SWT is that it uses native functionality on each operating system and, at the same time, presents a common, portable API. Joe Winchester, Desktop Java Editor for Java Developer's Journal, asked Steve Northover (SWT Team Lead) recently whe... (more)

Where Are the High-Level Design Open Source Tools for Java?

I have just finished reviewing the book Open Source Development Tools for Java, which provides excellent coverage of such topics as log4J, CVS, Ant, and JUnit. There is a chapter on UML tools though in which the author almost apologizes for the lack of good open source design tools. There is a plethora of projects on SourceForge.net from J2EE runtime frameworks to IDE plugins, yet there is almost nothing that encroaches upward into the arena of analysis and design tools. One theory for this is that high-level design tools are the value-add that software vendors hold back from th... (more)

Devils, Demos, Details, and Demons

When a product a colleague worked on recently shipped its first generally available release, the event was accompanied by a marketing fanfare of podcasts, press releases, and conference trips to beautiful cities with boxes of presentation materials, branded lapel pins, and flashing fridge magnets. My colleague gave a hugely successful presentation to customers and was rather taken aback afterwards when she was approached by a member of her company's marking team who asked why it looked as though the development team hadn't done that much to the product since the last presentation... (more)

SWT - A Native Widget Toolkit for Java Part 1 of 2

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is a Java class library that allows you to create native user interfaces. It's designed to provide efficient, portable access to the underlying facilities of the operating system on which it's implemented. SWT uses native widgets wherever possible, giving an SWT program a native look and feel and a high level of integration with the desktop. In addition, SWT includes a rich set of controls such as tree, table, and tab folder. This article introduces SWT by describing some of the basic concepts and classes. Hello World: A Simple SWT Program The e... (more)