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Java's top guns

<em>JavaWorld</em> honors the leading Java technologies in the 2002 Editors' Choice Awards

By Jennifer Orr, JavaWorld.com, 03/26/02

Page 3 of 7

"Too often, products like JProbe are regarded as optional extras for development, when in truth they are crucial to building a successful Java-based system," says ECA judge Sheil.

Finalist: Optimizeit Suite 4.11, Borland Software

Borland's Optimizeit Suite, recently acquired from VMGear, features three products for performance tuning. The Optimizeit Profiler targets buggy code, faulty algorithms, and performance bottlenecks, and corrects memory leaks. The Optimizeit Thread Debugger displays thread and monitor status, reveals thread problems, and predicts dangerous deadlocks. And, while showing how often each code line executes, the Optimizeit Code Coverage identifies and removes dead code.

Best Java-XML Tool: Xerces Java Parser 1.4.4, the Apache XML Project

The XML parser has become a vital component in the Java-XML developer's toolbox; it's one of the first software pieces a Java programmer turns to when coding XML. And the Xerces Java Parser, an open source project, offers developers easy access to this valuable tool. With no licensing restrictions, developers have free reign with Xerces Java and can use it in whatever way they see fit.

For version 1.4.4, Xerces developers extended the parser's support for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XML Schema Language. In fact, the Xerces Java team prides itself on tracking and implementing the W3C recommendations as quickly as possible.

"Xerces was the first Java parser to have implementations of XML Schema and the proposed DOM (Document Object Model) Level 3," says Ted Leung, a Xerces developer. "We end up supporting the W3C recommendations before most parsers."

"The Xerces Java Parser is truly a superior parser with excellent DOM and SAX (Simple API for XML) support," says ECA judge Tarak Modi, senior software architect at North Highland. "It's very efficient."

DOM Level 3 was added to the latest version, Xerces Java 2, which also premieres the Xerces Native Interface (XNI), a framework that lets developers create more specialized parser components. For example, according to Leung, one developer has already created a customized HTML parser.

"Xerces 2 helps developers who need to do something with XML, but need additional flexibility," explains Leung.

Finalist: Java XML Pack Winter 01, Sun Microsystems

The Java XML Pack offers a one-stop shop for the technologies developers need to integrate XML into Java. The pack bundles the early-access versions of the Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM) 1.0.1, the Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) 1.2, the Java API for XML Registries (JAXR) 1.0, and the Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC) 1.0.

"The proliferation of XML toolsets is often bewildering," says Sheil. "Sun Microsystems has gone a long way towards easing some of that confusion with the release of the Winter 01 pack."

Finalist: Xalan-Java 2.2, the Apache XML Project

An XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) processor, Xalan-Java turns XML documents into HTML, text, or other XML document types. Developers can use the processor from the command line, in an applet or servlet, or as a module in other programs. Xalan-Java also implements the Transformation API for XML (TRAX) interfaces, which offer a framework and API for completing XML transformations.

 

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