You might get a thrill out of writing Ajax applications, but unit testing them is surely painful. In this article, Andrew Glover takes on the downside of Ajax (one of them, anyway), which is the inherent challenge of unit testing asynchronous Web applications. Fortunately, he finds it easier than expected to tame this particular code quality dragon, with the help of the Google Web Toolkit.... more »

One of the many useful utilities in Java EE is dependency injection - particularly for obtaining an EntityManager for your persistent classes. However, if your preference is still for the plain old Servlet stack with JPA, JSF and EL dropped in as jar files, that means no dependency injection for you! ... Or is there a better way?... more »

Use the code in this tip to find out how many drivers are in memory, along with other, useful driver information.... more »

Tools for developing semantically aware applications are rapidly growing more Java friendly. Take a closer look at Jena, an open source toolkit for processing and working with semantic web data.... more »

Ajax applications driven by asynchronous server-side events can be tricky to implement and difficult to scale. Returning to his popular series, Philip McCarthy shows an effective approach: The Comet pattern allows you to push data to clients, and Jetty 6's Continuations API lets your Comet application scale to a large number of clients. You can conveniently take advantage of both Comet and Continuations with the Reverse Ajax technology in Direct Web Remoting (DWR) 2.... more »

As a language grows by the addition of features, it necessarily gets more complex. After all, you can't remove existing language features because existing programs use those features, but each additional feature adds complexity. Right?... more »

One of the ideas for improving the Java Programming Language is "type inference" on variable declarations. The idea is to simplify a pattern of code that now appears in programs due to generics:... more »