Jon Strande

Almost every industry today has B2B exchanges that enable businesses to improve the efficiency of some process or communication with customers, partners, or suppliers. The open and public exchanges that exist today will be replaced tomorrow with Web services, which allow direct communication between two businesses. What these two communication methods have in common is that both receive and reply using XML. If you aren't writing these communication-enabling types of applications today, you very well may be in the future. This article demonstrates how to: Write a reusable tool for testing these types of applications. Authenticate with password-protected servers. Use the JDOM API. Extend the tool to make it more useful. Overview One of the problems you run into when you're writing communicative applications like these is that you need to know that you're sending and ... (more)

Jon's Weekly JSR Roundup Week 1 - JSR 94, Java Rule Engine API

Not so long ago I read a great article from a senior level developer, who wrote that as we mature we learn when to look for available libraries before we rush in and build our own. He was referring to the plentiful number of open source projects that exist. Well, there are certainly plenty of those around, but there are also a number of emerging APIs coming right from Sun and the Java Community Process (JCP) - these specifications are known as Java Specification Requests (JSRs). This column will focus on the as many of the JSRs as possible going through the JCP and strive to keep... (more)

JSR 159 and Defining a Component Specification

(October 25, 2002) - One area that I have taken a real interest in over the last year is component-based development. Currently, there is a JSR (# 159) named Java Process Component API. The status of this JSR has not reached Public Review yet. I recently had an e-mail thread with Mark Hapner from Sun, who is the spec lead for 159, and he explained that the expert group was still working on the direction that the spec was going to take. Here is the overview of the JPC API right from the JSR detail page: "The Java Process Component (JPC) model will allow developers to directly repres... (more)

Why the JCP and the Specification Requests Are Important

Jon's Weekly JSR Roundup - Week 1 - JSR 94, Java Rule Engine API (October 22, 2002) - Before we begin this week's column, I wanted to take a moment to set some expectations about what I will be writing about in this column. My goal is to keep you informed what is going on at the JCP and report on some of the JSRs. At times I will cover details about various specifications, other times I will just be providing updates and statuses. Over the last year or so the Java community has spent considerable time debating the technical merits of Java over .NET. This debate, I contend, consta... (more)