Tony Loton

The Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA) provides a standard set of protocols and APIs at three levels that facilitate the development of a new breed of debugging and profiling tools. The inclusion of JPDA in the Java 2 SDK enables individual developers as well as commercial vendors to find novel ways of analyzing Java applications as they run even remotely across a network. In this article I provide a quick-start guide to developing with the new APIs, with my own novel use of the JPDA as an example. Hopefully, this pragmatic approach will help you build your first debugger application quickly, making the prospect of wading through the comprehensive JPDA documentation less daunting. The Example Object systems are not static; however, judging from the limited reverse-engineering capabilities offered by leading UML CASE tools, you'd think they were. In most ca... (more)

Enterprise Java

The choices can be overwhelming for a development team embarking on an Enterprise Java project. You've read the books, attended the classes, and now know the individual Java technologies pretty well, but how do you choose between them? Should your project be based on servlets, applets, EJBs, any two, or all three? In this series I try to show how each technology can be used as part of an enterprise application to fit the pieces into the Enterprise Java jigsaw. For a practical perspective, I'll present an example that starts with a single Java servlet and finishes with a small wo... (more)

Fitting The Pieces Into The Enterprise Java Jigsaw

In Part 1 of this series (JDJ Vol. 6, issue 4) I developed a simple access control mechanism for my application using HTTP authentication and servlets. In my view, servlets have always been underrated as a technology. Their use has sometimes been limited to replacing traditional CGI scripts for the processing of HTML form submissions. However, the fact that you can send and receive serialized Java objects to and from servlets means they can be combined with applets as part of simple distributed object architecture, competing with RMI, CORBA, and EJB. No tunneling is required, and ... (more)

Fitting the Pieces into the Enterprise Java Puzzle

The story so far: In Part 1 (JDJ Vol. 6, issue 4), I covered servlets and gave a practical demonstration of how a basic access control mechanism for intranet applications could be built using Servlet Session Tracking and HTTP Authentication. In Part 2 (Vol. 6, issue 5), I introduced a couple of applets into the architecture and showed how a communication channel could be established between the applets and servlets that comprised the application. The next version of my application will include the ability for an engineer to transfer tasks to another engineer when he goes on vacati... (more)