In this interview, Pat Niemeyer, creator of BeanShell and lead of the BeanShell JSR's expert group, discusses the role of scripting languages in Java, BeanShell's dynamic programming features, how BeanShell compares with Groovy and other Java scripting efforts, and how the JCP helps or hinders language design.

Jini has a new licensing model. Sun originally released Jini under the Sun Community Source License (SCSL), but recently opened the licensing model and began releasing their specifications and implementations under Apache 2. In this interview, Bill Venners discusses this change with Jini team members Jim Hurley and Bob Scheifler.

In this interview, Erich Gamma, co-author of the landmark book, Design Patterns, talks with Bill Venners about two design principles: program to an interface, not an implementation; and favor object composition over class inheritance.

The Java Content Repository API (JCR) promises to greatly simplify Java database programming. Content repositories extend databases with versioning, rich references, workspaces, extensible information models, and other features. This article reviews the JCR API and its open-source implementation, Apache Jackrabbit, from a developer's perspective.

Developers are often faced with decisions about how much flexibility to design into their software. In this interview, Erich Gamma, co-author of the landmark book, Design Patterns, talks with Bill Venners about the attitude he believes developers should adopt towards flexibility and reuse.

Among developers, design patterns are popular way to think about design, but what is the proper way to think about design patterns? In this interview, Erich Gamma, co-author of the landmark book, Design Patterns, talks with Bill Venners about the right way to think about and use design patterns.

This short tutorial on writing a Java Web service with the next-generation JAX-RPC 2.0 API demonstrates how Java annotations simplify Web service development.

The Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC) 2.0, currently in early draft review in the JCP as JSR 224, promises to vastly simplify RPC-based Web service development. This article reviews key JAX-RPC 2.0 features, and highlights how taking advantage of recent additions to Java make JAX-RPC 2.0 a more flexible API.

In this short editorial, Bill Venners explains the context and motivation behind Artima's new online magazine, Leading-Edge Java, and describes the focus and flavor of the articles it will publish.