Hendrik Schreiber

With J2SE Version 1.4, Java finally has a scalable I/O API. Not that the old API was an absolute failure (Java's tremendous success in the application server market refutes this), but some of the old API's properties led to drastic restrictions. The worst one was the blocking I/O. To write data over a socket, you have to call the write() method of an associated OutputStream. This call returns only after you've written all the necessary bytes. Given that the send buffers are full and the connection is slow, this might take a while. If your program operates only with a single thread, other connections have to wait, even if they're ready to process write() calls. To work around this problem, you have to associate a thread with each socket. This way one thread can work while another one is blocked due to I/O-related tasks. Threads aren't as heavyweight as real processes... (more)

Life Outside The Sphere: Building Palm Applications with WME

Debugging, profiling, packaging - whatever you want, WSDD can do it all. IBM's WebSphere Device Developer (WSDD) is a sophisticated development platform for IBM's WebSphere Micro Environment (WME, also known as J9). Based on Eclipse, it's just right for those who like to work with Eclipse. The problems start if you prefer to use some other IDE or you believe in automated, continuous integration. This article will show you how to master using WME without WSDD. WSDD uses Ant build scripts, but effectively hides the implementation of its special tasks for the SmartLinker jxelink an... (more)