Leverage JMX technology and existing tools to boost the operations management capabilities of your business applications. More info

You have some plain ol' Java objects and you want to sort them. By what field? Well, by which ever one the user wants. But that implies different kinds of search logic, and how will you keep it straight? Olexiy Prohorenko shows how the Strategy design pattern is perfectly suited to solve this problem. More info

Learn about one of J2EE Core patterns and how to implement it in your project designs. From Sun's award winning book on Core J2EE Patterns. More info

JUnit lets you test software code units by making assertions that the intended requirements are met, but these assertions are limited to primitive operations. IBM Software Engineer Tony Morris fills the gap by introducing Assertion Extensions for JUnit, which provides a set of complex assertions that execute within the JUnit framework. Follow along as the author shows you how using this new package from alphaWorks can increase the reliability and robustness of your Java software. More info

The Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API has emerged as a key part of the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platforms. It is the primary standards-based mechanism for the Java language to programmatically access relational databases, so when a new version of the specification is released by the Java Community Process, developers are bound to be interested. Here we summarize the key new features as outlined in Sun Microsystems' recently released Proposed Final Draft 3.0 of the JDBC specification. More info

If you focus on refactoring the system under development, and do only the minimal amount of refactoring of tests, your system will be harder to change than it needs to be. You put a lot of effort into giving your system the best design you can; if you neglect to update your tests, it will leave your system harder to change, riskier to extend, more difficult to test, and less clear than it can be. More info

An article by contributing author Vikas Pandya explains how to use XDoclet to ease the development of Struts in Java. More info

Last week, Bill Venners and I gave the Designing Objects & Systems seminar. Each time we've given it, it has been unique, and one of the hard things about marketing the seminar is explaining just what kind of experience it is. More info

For the 4th edition of Thinking in Java, I've been experimenting with ways to take better control of JUnit testing. My primary interest is in automatically generating the JUnit code itself to minimize the effort of the programmer. More info

Black-box and white-box are test design methods. Black-box test design treats the system as a "black-box", so it doesn't explicitly use knowledge of the internal structure. Black-box test design is usually described as focusing on testing functional requirements. More info