This is an introductory tutorial to the Ant build tool, a free tool under GNU License and is available at http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/. Ant allows the developer to automate the repeated process involved in the development of J2EE application. Developers can easily write the script to automate the build process like compilation, archiving and deployment. It is intended for people starting out with Ant and Java development, and aims to provide enough detail to get started.

In this tutorial we will have a complete walk through on Hibernate with a complete example .

As the J2EE platform has matured, it has opened up the opportunity to deploy commodity servers in networked cluster configurations for scaling of Web services and Web applications at the Web tier. These commodity servers, interconnected through commodity LAN hardware, can provide cost-effective clustering solutions. The last piece of the clustering puzzle is in the software. In this series, Sing Li examines three open source software substrates that can enable high-impact Web tier clustering, beginning with JavaGroups.

People who aren't familiar with XP are bothered by the concept of just-in-time (JIT) design -- designing and implementing what you know you need right now and not worrying about future design issues until absolutely necessary. While this approach might seem unwise or even reckless, XP advocate Roy Miller wraps up his series by showing you how safe and easy JIT design is -- and how it just might revolutionize the way you write code. Share your thoughts on this article with the author and other readers in the accompanying discussion forum. (You can also click Discuss at the top or bottom of the article to access the forum.)

Whether you're patching in code from one of the many open-source libraries on the Web or making calls to common operating system routines, you inevitably spend some part of your week crunching code that you didn't write, and for which you may not have the source. When it comes time to debug this code, you'll need access to a good Java decompiler and the know-how to use it properly. At the same time, you'll also want to know how to protect your own code from prying eyes. For that, you need to know about obfuscation. In this beginner's guide to opening up and locking down Java code, Greg Travis walks you through the essentials of disassembling, decompiling, and obfuscating Java code, using examples from popular tools such as Mocha, HoseMocha, jmangle, and JODE.

This article discusses incremental compaction, a new feature in the memory management component of IBM JDK 1.4.0. Incremental compaction is a way of spreading compaction work across different garbage collection cycles, thereby reducing pause times. The authors discuss the need for incremental compaction, the compaction phases at a high level, and some runtime parameters. They also explain how to interpret changes in the verbosegc output.

The ThreadLocal class appeared with little fanfare in version 1.2 of the Java platform. While support for thread-local variables has long been a part of many threading facilities, such as the Posix pthreads facility, the initial design of the Java Threads API lacked this useful feature. Further, the initial implementation was quite inefficient. For these reasons, ThreadLocal gets relatively little attention, but it can be very handy for simplifying the development of thread-safe concurrent programs. In this third installment of Threading lightly, Java software consultant Brian Goetz examines ThreadLocal and offers tips for exploiting its power. Participate in Brian's Multithreaded Java programming discussion forum for help with threading and concurrency issues in your projects.

When it was first introduced, it seemed that Java native compilation would surely topple the JVM, taking with it the Java platform's hard-fought platform independence. But even with its growing popularity and the increasing number of native compilers on the market, native compilation has a way to go before it poses a real threat to Java code's portability. Unfortunately, it also may be a while before the technology is mature enough to resolve the Java performance issues so many of us struggle with today. Share your thoughts on this article with the author and other readers in the discussion forum by clicking Discuss at the top or bottom of the article.

In this tutorial we will have a complete walk through on Struts

The addition of the java.util.prefs package to Java 1.4 (through JSR 10) lets you manipulate user preference data and configuration data by providing you with access to an implementation-specific registry (for example, the Windows Registry on Windows platforms). In this installment of Magic with Merlin, John Zukowski introduces you to the Preferences class and walks you through its use. He puts it all together with a sample program. Share your thoughts on this article with the author and other readers in the "Client-side Java programming" discussion forum by clicking Discuss at the top or bottom of the article.