Recently released Java SE (Standard Edition) 6 brings greater convenience and greater usability to several portions of the Java programming language and platform. In particular, Java SE 6 makes it easier for Java developers to apply JAXB (Java Architecture for XML Binding) and annotations processing to their development efforts, including Java Persistence API (JPA). In this article, you will learn how to take advantage of Java SE 6 support for JAXB and annotations processing to make deployment of JPA-based applications easier, especially for application deployers who may lack familiarity with the underlying Java code. Along the way, a few additional new Java SE 6 features will be demonstrated as well.

Apache Hadoop is currently the premier tool used for analyzing distributed data, and like most Java™ 2.0 technologies, it's built to scale. Get started with Hadoop's MapReduce programming model and learn how to use it to analyze data for both big and small business information needs.

Manipulating XML data easily and efficiently in Java remains an important problem. Numerous approaches to XML binding exist in the industry, including DOM, JAXB, XML Beans, Castor, SDO and so on. In this article we will explore how the Eclipse Modeling Framework, EMF, solves the XML binding problem in a number of interesting ways, and we'll compare that to the alternatives.

Part 2 in this series discusses how to integrate PHP and Java with two other methods. The first method—bridging—allows you to use Java objects from PHP, exposing another method of placing messages on JMS queues from PHP through Java. The second method of integration is using Streaming Text Orientated Messaging Protocol (STOMP), another protocol you can use to communicate with the ActiveMQ implementation of JMS. When ActiveMQ receives the message, it places it on the JMS queue, and the Adobe Flex application receives the message.

This article discusses the differences between internal and external software quality and how to perform the software quality assessment using Sonar and JaCoCo tools.

This article shows you how to use GWT Tree widgets to display an organizational structure of a company, and how to implement an RPC proxy to integrate with RESTful Web services that provide organizational data and employee data. The article also discusses a lazy loading strategy to ensure a faster start up, to reduce the data download time, and to minimize memory usage.

Representational state transfer (REST) was introduced in early 2000 by Roy Fielding's doctoral dissertation. However, in the Java™ community, it was not standardized until the JSR 311(JAX-RS) specification was finalized in 2008. The first release of its reference implementation is even later. In this article, I introduce Jersey, which is the reference implementation of JSR 311, by describing its essential APIs and annotations. I'll also show you how you can smoothly transfer from servlet-style services to RESTful services by integrating Jersey into Apache Tomcat.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a major step forward in the creation of dynamic Java™Script applications that run in users' Web browsers. Using GWT, developers can design the user interface (UI) and event model using familiar Java techniques while GWT does the hard work of making the code friendly for all the major browsers. Learn the basics of GWT in this first article in a series, including how GWT lets you create an Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) application and still write your code in the Java language. Discover how to create and run a small sample GWT application -- a hot new Web 2.0 business called Slicr, which sells pizza online.

In the last two articles in this series, you've discovered how to create a simple Web application using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and the Apache Derby relational database. Part 1 focused on using GWT to build the front end for a pizza delivery system called Slicr. In Part 2, you got a demonstration of the creation of a relational database using Derby, and a bare-bones demonstration of a mechanism for converting the database rows to Java™ objects. Now it gets interesting! In this third article, find out how to get the client and server talking to each other. You'll use the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework within GWT to make getting data off the server almost as simple as making a Java method call.

In the past three articles in this series, you've built a simple but functional Web application using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). In this article, you'll use Apache Tomcat as your example servlet container, because it's both widely used and available at no cost. Other servlet containers will behave similarly. You'll often be deploying to an existing server; but if not, the links in the Resources section at the end of this article point you to the Tomcat download location. If you're running the Microsoft® Windows® operating system, Tomcat has a binary installer for Windows that's relatively simple to use. If you're on a Mac or a UNIX® system, there's a compiled version that you can extract and place in a convenient location (/usr/local is common); after setting a few environment variables, you're good to go.