Learn how to create digital-certificate chains to test your software. IBM Software Engineer, Paul H. Abbott, clarifies this seldom-documented process by showing you how to use the freely available OpenSSL toolkit to create a certificate chain of any length. He also describes common certificate attributes and shows you some sample Java code for reading the certificates you create into a Java keystore.

This article leads you into the gray zone between modeling and method, with a look at requirements gathering via use case modeling. In particular, this article focuses on the relationship between user interfaces, system interfaces, and use case descriptions.

If you're looking for a unique programming challenge, try your hand at building a management application for a distributed, cross-platform network. This article is the first in a three-part series that looks at how Sun Microsystems's Jiro technology and the Distributed Management Task Force's Web-Based Enterprise Management Initiative (WBEM) can simplify the creation of management applications for heterogeneous environments.

Add more versatility to your existing Java framework. The same framework supports file access, network access, character conversion, compression, encryption and so forth. This article presents a framework that lets an application efficiently read data from a source that only supports writing data to an output stream.

When Java was developed initially as OAK even its developers were not sure in which direction the technology will grow. And actually Java has taken an unexpected turn around as a development technology. It started its journey with embedded applications but people found it somewhat slow when compare to C++. Java made foray into web in the form of applets and ruled the world for sometime. But then came enterprise era with crusade of .NET and J2EE. In this article let us examine possible directions where there are chances Java will grow as development technology.

In the real world of everyday computing (and development), there are many situations where "whipping up a Java program" to perform a task is either impractical or too time consuming. This article takes you into the underground world of FESI (Free EcmaScript Interpreter), where deploying the Java language in a quick-and-dirty fashion is the norm rather than the exception. Article includes code snipets.

Web apps developed with the thin client computing model exhibit performance gaps and user interface limitations. As an alternative, the IBM FacesClient Components (formerly called the Odyssey Browser Framework) provides a more effective model for developing Web apps. FacesClient Components work inside a portlet programming environment to deliver exceptional value in the form of richer user interfaces and improved performance.

Application Tools for Extension Services consist of WebSphere® Studio-based tools that support the development of Web applications targeted for the Extension Services for WebSphere Everyplace (ESWE) platform. These tools are based on the existing WebSphere Studio J2EE development tools and they are part of an emerging suite of tools for the ESWE platform.

If you want to build and run faster Java applications on the IBM Developer Kit for Linux, version 1.3, roll up your sleeves and prepare to get dirty. This article provides hands-on instruction for profiling, monitoring, and performance tuning not only your IBM Developer Kit, but your hardware capacity, the Linux 2.2.x kernel, and your Java applications.

Web services and J2EE connectors promise to simplify the integration of heterogeneous enterprise information systems and provide a way for business partners to share their respective applications' functionality over the Internet. This article uses an insurance broker scenario, in which the programmatic functions from legacy transactions are incorporated into a Web application, to illustrate these capabilities.