Rick Hightower

Rick Hightower's Blog JSF did well in 2007. Let's put it this way: If job demand for the Struts framework and JSF were a stocks and you invested in it in April of 2005 by July of 2007 you would barely break even with Struts but with JSF your investment would have grown 700% as o... (more)

Time is a brutal enemy of youth and exuberance. Time makes cynics of us all. Time is the universal truth serum that reveals all authenticity. Time will tell, but the announcement at JavaOne 2006 by Google may change the face of AJAX development; strike that, Google's announcement... (more)

Time is a brutal enemy of youth and exuberance. Time makes cynics of us all. Time is the universal truth serum that reveals all authenticity. Time will tell, but the announcement yesterday by Google may change the faces of AJAX development, strike that, Google's announcement may ... (more)

Robert F. Kennedy once said, "There is a Chinese curse which says, 'May he live in interesting times.'" The enterprise Java space is "interesting." Not too long ago, folks like Bruce Tate, Gavin King, and Rod Johnson were pushing lightweight frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate... (more)

"JSF Good!" Says Rick Hightower If you have not looked into Spring yet, it is time. Here is why you should! Grady Booch once said that the great thing about objects is that they can be replaced. The great thing about Spring is it helps you replace them. With Spring, you simply inj... (more)

Related Links: Java Opinions: Geary vs Raible on JavaServer Faces I used AppFuse and Spring together extensibly on two projects earlier this year with a lot of success. I added Spring support before it was part of the AppFuse core (for my projects). I have a lot of respect for Matt... (more)

The past three articles in this series have highlighted the strengths of scripting languages. They're interactive and dynamic, and allow you to experiment, debug and prototype solutions quickly. However, the most common response when I speak to die-hard Java fanatics is, "Yeah, b... (more)

Part 4 of a series discussing the many languages that compile and/or run on the Java platform Do you remember the operating system religious wars? Mac OS versus Windows, Windows NT versus UNIX, OS/2 versus Windows NT. Or how about the text editor wars ­ VI versus Emacs? It may s... (more)

What This Series Is About This article is Part 3 of an interactive series that discusses the many languages that compile and/or run on the Java platform. Java Developer's Journal invites you to vote for your favorite non-Java programming language in the JDJ forum. Your vote will ... (more)

Interview...with Mike Cowlishaw Creator of NetRexx R. Hightower: Have you considered an open- source license? M. Cowlishaw: Until recently the licensing issues seemed something of a minefield with so many different ideas on what open source should be. Also, my translator/compiler ... (more)

What This Series Is About This article is Part 2 of a series that discusses the many languages that compile and/or run on the Java platform. This is an interactive series. Java Developer's Journal invites you to vote for your favorite non-Java programming language in the JDJ Foru... (more)

Back before Java became popular, I was a C++ bigot. I programmed in nothing but C++. I lived, ate and breathed C++. If it wasn't C++, it was rubbish. I thought C++ was the alpha and omega of object-oriented programming. I had "operator overloading" for breakfast, "templates" for ... (more)

Part One of this article appeared in the July issue of JDJ (Vol. 4, issue 7) How can Java classes be used as scriptable components? DCOM, like CORBA, provides both static and dynamic invocation of objects. DCOM uses type library to provide metadata to do the dynamic invocation and... (more)

Developing distributed components with Java and DCOM (distributed component object model) simplifies developing distributed applications. If you know CORBA or RMI, DCOM is easy to learn. Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine makes developing COM and DCOM components painless. DCOM curr... (more)