What Is a Portlet  The Portlet API establishes a standard for building a web page out of smaller constituent parts, all managed by a portlet container to create a portal page. In this introduction, Sunil Patil shows how to create a basic "Hello World" portlet and deploy it in the Apache Pluto portal server.   [ONJava.com]

A Backbase Ajax Front-end for J2EE Applications  Learn how Backbase Ajax software simplifies the development of Ajax-based front-ends for J2EE software.  [dev2dev]

Oracle BPEL Process Manager simplifies the orchestration of disparate web services that span applications and firewalls into business processes and service-oriented applications. With visual programming for JDeveloper and Eclipse, and simple installation on your choice of application server, you can get started in just 15 minutes. Download now.

How to Decide What Bugs to Fix When, Part 2  In part 1 of this two-part essay on making smart bug decisions, Scott Berkun covered triage and making smarter piles. In part 2, Scott covers establishing an exit criteria and early planning, as well as exceptions to all of the rules, frequently asked questions, and some bug-fixing resources. Scott is the author of The Art of Project Management.   [ONLamp.com]

Announcing the 2005 ONJava Reader Survey  The 2005 ONJava Reader Survey is underway. This is your opportunity to steer the site by helping us understand what you use, what you're interested in, and where you think Java is going.   [ONJava.com]

Building J2EE Projects with Maven  Vincent Massol offers some real-life experience building J2EE applications with Maven. Using the example of a Petstore app, Massol shows you how to generate J2EE artifacts (EJB JARs, WARs, EARs) with Maven. He is coauthor of Maven: A Developer's Notebook.   [ONJava.com]

An Introduction to Ajax  David Teare introduces Ajax, a methodology you can use to build dynamic and responsive Web applications. He shows that the key lies in the combination of browser-side JavaScript, DHTML, and asynchronous communication with the server.  [dev2dev.bea.com]

Configuring Eclipse for Remote Debugging  Debugging a server-side application? You probably don't want to dig through the log files and wonder what happened. Instead, you can run your server application in debug mode and attach to it with Eclipse, bringing the IDE's powerful debugger to bear on the remote application.   [ONJava.com]

IRC Text to Speech with Java  Paul Mutton creates a multi-platform IRC bot that uses the FreeTTS Java speech synthesizer library to convert IRC messages into audible speech. Why would you want to use an IRC text-to-speech system? By reading out messages as they arrive, you can keep working, diverting your attention to IRC only when necessary. Paul is the author of IRC Hacks.  [ONJava.com]

How to Decide What Bugs to Fix When, Part 1  There are two challenges to making smart bug decisions: first, understanding how to make good bug-fix decisions; and second, creating and following rules that makes it easy to stick to those decisions when the pressure is high. In this first installment of a two-part essay, Scott Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management, provides the core ideas you need to make your own bug-fixing rules.   [ONLamp.com]

Internationalization, Part 2  Having your Java apps run correctly both down the street and across the globe presents some hefty challenges. Part one of this two-part excerpt from Java Examples in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition covered the first two steps to internationalization in Java: using Unicode character encoding and handling local customs. This week deals with the third step in the process: localizing user-visible messages.  [ONJava.com]

Using Drools in Your Enterprise Java Application  Enterprise Java developers have many fine framework choices at the presentation and persistence levels, but what about the business logic that sits in the middle? Do you want to recompile a mass of if ... then spaghetti code every time a manager drops a new gotcha in your lap? In this article, Paul Browne suggests that a rule engine like Drools may be an ideal fit for this task.   [ONJava.com]

What Is NeoOffice/J (and Can It Replace MS Office)  NeoOffice/J is the long-awaited Mac-friendly version of OpenOffice. This open source project provides Mac users with most of the functionality of Microsoft Office, but for free. Is NeoOffice robust enough to serve as your only office suite in a Microsoft-dominated world? Matthew Russell explores. Plus, an in-depth interview with its lead developer, Patrick Luby.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Introduction to the ASM 2.0 Bytecode Framework  J2SE 5.0 made major changes to the language, and version 2.0 of the ASM bytecode manipulation toolkit is well-suited to handle them. In this article, Eugene Kuleshov shows how ASM 2.0 makes working with bytecode easier, and even offers an example of how to map the external dependencies in an arbitrary .jar file.   [ONJava.com]

Internationalization, Part 1  Writing software that is truly multilingual is not an easy task. In this excerpt from Chapter 8 of Java Examples in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition, author David Flanagan offers programming examples for the three steps to internationalization in Java: using Unicode character encoding, handling local customs, and localizing user-visible messages.   [ONJava.com]

JRockit JVM Support For AOP, Part 1  AOP is all the rage, but how do you implement it? In this article, Jonas, Alexandre, and Joakim show that the current approaches to implementing AOP suffer from many problems, making scalability an issue. Moreover, they indicate that the traditional approach to aspect weaving duplicates efforts that the JVM already performs.  [dev2dev]

iBatis DAO  The J2EE Data Access Object pattern calls for encapsulating access to a data source behind an API, giving you the freedom to change implementations or use different persistence strategies for different operations. As Sunil Patil shows, the Apache iBatis DAO framework helps you develop such a strategy.   [ONJava.com]

Hacking Swing with Undocumented Classes and Properties  Joshua Marinacci, coauthor of Swing Hacks, shows you six undocumented features, classes, and properties that let you hack into Swing. From how to hide a frame from the Windows task bar to how to make Mac OS X windows truly transparent, these undocumented hacks can add a level of polish that will make your apps stand out from the rest.   [ONJava.com]

How to End Wars Between Testers and Programmers  There's a natural conflict between testers and programmers because of the difference in perspective each role has. The best way to end struggles is to redefine the goals of the work so that their roles can be collaborative, not adversarial. In this article, Scott Berkun draws upon his years of project-leading experience to provide some inside tips for managing your development team.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Important Notice for ONJava Readers About O'Reilly RSS and Atom Feeds  O'Reilly Media, Inc. is rolling out a new syndication mechanism that provides greater control over the content we publish online. Here's information to help you update your existing RSS and Atom feeds to O'Reilly content.  [ONJava.com]

Give Your Business Logic a Framework with Drools  It's almost too easy to express your business logic as a spaghetti-code fiasco. The result is hard to test, hard to maintain, and hard to update. Rule engines offer an alternative: express your business logic as rules, outside of your Java code, in a format even the business side of the office can understand. Paul Browne uses the open source Drools framework to introduce the idea.   [ONJava.com]

Hibernate 3 Formulas  Hibernate's formula element has been limited in previous versions of the popular object-relational mapping framework, but in Hibernate 3, your formulas can be used in many new ways that will simplify and empower your programming. Dai Yifan shows you what's new.   [ONJava.com]

Composition  In his latest XML-Deviant column, Micah Dubinko suggests that composing independent specifications is trickier than it seems.   [XML.com]

Eclipse Plugins Exposed, Part 3: Customizing a Wizard  Emmanuel Proulx's series on Eclipse plugin development continues by showing how to put together a useful data model and a wizard GUI.   [ONJava.com]

Web Services Messaging with Apache Axis2: Concepts and Techniques  The messaging strategies needed for web services vary, and Apache Axis2 has addressed this problem by creating basic building blocks from which many messaging schemes can be built. Srinath Perera and Ajith Ranabahu show how it works.   [ONJava.com]

Implementing Transaction Suspension in Spring  Juergen Hoeller discusses the Spring Framework's declarative transaction facility, and how it integrates with WebLogic Server's JTA implementation.  [dev2dev]

Bean-Managed Transaction Suspension in J2EE  Container-managed transactions seem more capable than bean-managed transactions in the EJB spec, with the latter unable to, for example, suspend and resume transactions. But what looks like a limitation isn't necessarily so, according to Dmitry Maximovich, who shows you how to get to the underlying TransactionManager, making BMT as powerful as CMT.   [ONJava.com]

What Is Business Process Modeling?  Business Process Modeling (BPM) is a set of technologies and standards for the design, execution, administration, and monitoring of business processes. In this article, Mike Havey, author of Essential Business Process Modeling, briefly describes the state of BPM today and the BPM standards, then builds an ideal BPM architecture using the example of a retailer process.   [ONJava.com]

Memory Leaks, Be Gone  This article by Staffan Larsen introduces memory leaks, their associated causes, and how to find them using BEA WebLogic JRockit and the JRockit Memory Leak Detector.  [dev2dev]

Upload Files with JSF and MyFaces  Want to support uploading of files from the user's browser to your web application? You could parse the multipart form data yourself--or you could let Java do it for you. JSF doesn't support this out of the box, but, as Andrei Cioroianu shows, several JSF-based frameworks do.   [ONJava.com]

Taking JUnit Out of the Box  JUnit is practically ubiquitous among Java developers as a way to test code, but it's somewhat limited by the fact that it's only meant to run in one JVM on one box, hampering its usefulness when developing distributed applications. In this article, Amir Shevat shows how the open source JUnit extension Pisces helps JUnit overcome this limitation.   [ONJava.com]

Features: The Evolution of JAXP  Rahul Srivastava provides an introduction and update to the latest release of JAXP, a Java XML API.  [XML.com]

Generics in J2SE 5.0  Generics are one of the most prominent language features in J2SE 5.0, but are you using them yet? Properly used, they allow greater flexibility, compile-time type safety, and fewer annoying and potentially unsafe casts. In this article, Budi Kurniawan shows how they work.   [ONJava.com]

Getting Started with Maven  In this excerpt from Maven: A Developer's Notebook, authors Vincent Massol and Timothy M. O'Brien show you how to install and start working with Maven, the do-it-all Java project builder/manager.   [ONJava.com]

XML as a Bridge Between SQL and Web Applications  Have you ever wanted to treat data returned from an SQL query as XML? In this tutorial, Alexander and Olexiy Prokhorenko present a technique for doing just this.  [dev2dev]

JavaOne 2005: Participate in the Future of Java  JavaOne 2005 is touting the successes of Java, charting the next versions of Java's standard and enterprise editions, and calling on members of the Java community to participate in Java's future.   [ONJava.com]

POJO Application Frameworks: Spring Vs. EJB 3.0  Spring and EJB 3.0 are both reactions, in their own ways, to the complexity of EJB 2.1 and the complaints piled upon it. Both support developing with Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) and give the framework responsibility for handling transactions, security, persistence, etc. But the two use substantially different approaches. In this article, Michael Yuan puts the two frameworks up against one another to see how they stack up.   [ONJava.com]