I have had an application running on Google App Engine written using the Java SDK for about 2 months now. The server side of the application is written in Groovy, and the client side is written in Flex. Although the Java SDK is early access, I have run into some problems that are making me [...]

3D support for Java is made particularly difficult because Java is cross platform and writing a library that abstracts away the differences of writing native 3D applications in Linux, OSX, Windows, etc. is not an easy task. One solution to this is JOGL, which uses Gluegen to generate JNI bindings for C libraries. In the [...]

I recently had the problem of internationalizing a hybrid Java Web Start / Java Applet thick client Swing application. Java internationalization is typically done by using ResourceBundle to load a property file containing key to value map whose keys are the names of the messages to be looked up in the file and values are [...]

I recently wrote a gift list management site for my family using Grails. Grails made it simple, the entire site was done in less than a week. That was version 1 of the site. In version 2 of the site, I rewrote the Ajax’d GSP’s using Flex 3, since I spent over 16 frustrating hours [...]

Groovy In Action is a perfect guide for Java developer’s wishing to move into the land of dynamic typing, closures, and scripting. Writing code in Groovy really does help bring the fun of programming back. Compared to Java, Groovy is easier to write, read, and test which means less time coding and more time focusing [...]

One frustrating aspect of being a Java developer is it’s lack of popularity in the web browser. There could be a number of causes for this. One is that installing Java, for most people, is not a very pleasant experience. The size of the JRE is much bigger than the size of a Macromedia Flash [...]

The Google Web Toolkit is a framework for creating web applications. It’s main goal is to allow you to develop/debug a Java application and then compile the client side to JavaScript upon deployment. The JavaScript produced behaves the same across browsers (IE, FireFox, Safari), and the server side can be any language used for server [...]

In case you haven’t heard yet, Sun has open sourced Java under a version of the GPL. This includes the Java HotSpot virtual machine. I checked out the code for the vm used in the jdk1.6.0 and the first thing that I noticed is that it is written in C++, not C. For some reason [...]