Welcome to the second CUJ Java Solutions supplement, the place where good people can come to talk about Java and not have to whisper. This time we've got two new "Pure Java" articles for your reading pleasure.
Peter Meehan is back — some of you may remember the excellent article he wrote in our last supplement (December 1999) on Swing and multithreading. This time he gives us a whirlwind tour of the new Java2D library available with JDK 2.0. Someone at Sun must be taking graphics pretty seriously, because Java2D appears to be a fairly robust graphics package. Of course, Java2D also further confounds our attempts to view Java from a traditional frame of reference, where languages are languages, libraries are libraries, and never the two shall mix. You just can't talk about Java without bringing in the JVM, the JDK, and a host of other J's at the same time. Whether or not this represents a weakness in Java, I leave it to readers to decide.
Don Weiss introduces us to the wonderful world of JavaBeans, Java's answer to components. As Don shows us, beans aren't all that mysterious or complicated. If you can write a Java class, you can create a JavaBean. Yet for all their simplicity, JavaBeans represent a pretty nice component technology. Something about JavaBeans smacks of having been done right. See if you agree — I'd be interested to hear your opinion.
We've got another supplement scheduled for publication in a few months. If we're not careful, this thing could get to be a habit. As usual, we're making the entire contents of this supplement online. Go to http://www.cuj.com/java/index.html. Let us know if there are other Java topics you'd like to see covered. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the supplement.
Marc Briand
Editor-in-Chief
mbriand@mfi.com