April From the Pages Features
GUI JAVA
Creating Style Sheets for Java GUIs
Paul E. Cooley
Paul proves the value of using styles in your GUIs. While the styles shown—font, background and foreground colors—are very simplistic, many opportunities exist for formatting more complex controls. Using the concept of styles, extending both the
StyleDefinition and
StyleObject classes to handle other controls, allows the style sheet to format nearly any control.
JAVA PRIMER
Object Caching With the ThreadLocal Class
John Raley
Discussed here is how to use the ThreadLocal class in Java 2 for thread-safe, unsynchronized object caching. ThreadLocal is a reference class—it is used to access another object, known as its value. It has the special property that, for a single ThreadLocal instance, every thread will get access to a unique object. In other words, multiple threads can concurrently use a ThreadLocal's value, since each thread uses a different instance.
POWER JAVA
Getting Dynamic
Mike Mannion
Mike completes his two-part Dynamic Binder pattern description by providing a useful application to a GUI that has been constructed using Swing components. The example he provides demonstrates some of the power behind Java's reflection API.
SPECIAL SECTION
A Wireless Effort: Developing Java Applications for Embedded Devices
Dishan DeSilva and Susan Pearson
The computing industry has seen the development of an alternative computing environment that takes the functionality of the desktop computer off consumer's desktops and places it in their pockets. The widespread acceptance of the Internet coupled with an increasingly mobile workforce has accelerated the demand for a new breed of smart, connected devices.
An object database for embedded environments
David Jordan
POET software recently introduced a 100% pure-Java object database called Navajo targeted at the emerging market for small embedded devices. The goal was to develop a full-featured object database with a relatively small footprint.