By Xueming Shen

The UTF-8 charset implementation, which is available in all JDK/JRE releases from Sun, has been updated recently to reject non-shortest-form UTF-8 byte sequences. This is because the old implementation might be leveraged in security attacks. Since then I have been asked many times about what this "non-shortest-form" issue is and what the possible impact might be, so here are some answers.

The first question usually goes: "What is the non-shortest-form issue"?

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By Michael McMahon

Complex Java programs, such as application servers, sometimes create their own class loaders using the URLClassLoader type. With URLClassLoader, applications can load classes and resources from a search path of URLs. The following URL types are supported:

• file: (loads from file-system directories)
• jar: (loads from JAR files)
• http: (loads from http servers)

by Jennie Hall
Updated Jan. 23, 2009

In this tip, you'll learn how to use Swing's progress indicator support to monitor and report on the progress of long-running operations. It is a good practice to keep users informed as they interact with an application; one way to do this is with a progress bar. A progress bar is an animated image that indicates the degree of completion of a given task. The animation typically looks like a rectangular bar that fills in as the task becomes more complete.

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by Jennie Hall

In Exchanging Data With XML and JAXB, Part 1, we saw
how the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) expedites
the exchange of data between systems. With JAXB 2.0's annotation
support, generating XML data for a business partner is as easy as
annotating your existing object model. 

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by Jennie Hall

In this tip, you'll learn how to to use the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) in Java SE 6 to exchange XML data between systems without having to delve into the specifics of XML processing. Among other key improvements, JAXB 2.0 offers support for binding Java objects to XML via the use of annotations. This feature allows you to generate XML data from your application simply by annotating your existing object model.

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 from Tim Boudreau's Blog

 Where's the state? This is a small but useful question when
deciding how a problem domain gets carved up into objects:
What things have state? What things have values that
can change? When and how can they change? Can the changes be
observed? Who needs to observe changes in state?

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by Luan O'Carroll

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by Biswajit Sarkar

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by Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen

When you're trying to analyze why a program failed, a very valuable
piece of information is what the program was actually doing when it
failed. In many cases, this can be determined with a stack trace, but
frequently that information is not available, or perhaps what you
need is information about the data that was being processed at the
time of failure.

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by Seema Richard, Deepa Sobhana

By Ethan Nicholas

When the venerable Metal
look and feel for Swing first debuted, its main aesthetic
competition was the Windows
95 interface. Given the state of graphical user interfaces a decade
ago, Metal was an attractive and elegant alternative to the other common
interfaces of the time.

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by John Zukowsi

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By John Zukowski

One of the standard layout managers that come with the Java platform is
BoxLayout. This allows you to layout a single row or column of components
in a container. This may sound like a not-so-complicated layout manager,
but with the help of Box and its glue and struts, you'd think that would
be enough, but there is even more. The vertical and horizontal alignment
of the underlying components allows even more control of the positioning
of components within the container. Here, we'll look at all these aspects.

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by John Zukowski

Sorting strings with the Java platform can be thought of
as an easy task, but there is much more thought that should
be put into it when developing programs for an international
market. If you're stuck in the English-only mindset, and you
think your program works fine because it shows that the string
tomorrow comes after today, you might think all is great.

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