The Design Forum, Java Answers Forum, and Jini Forum have moved. To participate in these forums, please visit them at their new location:

http://www.artima.com/forums/index.jsp

You can also browse the legacy postings of the Design Forum, Java Answers Forum, and Jini Forum, which were made from January, 1998 through February, 2002.

Browse the Legacy Forum Posts

Browse the legacy forum posts via these links:

• Legacy Design Forum - a place to discuss the Design Techniques column and object-oriented design in general.
• Legacy Java Answers Forum - a place where Java programmers ask and answer each other's questions
• Legacy Jini Forum - a place to discuss the Jiniology column and Jini in general.

To search the legacy forums, type what you're looking for into the edit box and press the "Go" button.

Match: All Any Boolean Format: Long Short Sort by: Score Time Title Reverse Score Reverse Time Reverse Title

Search For:

Examples of correct boolean expressions are: cat and dog, cat not dog, cat or (dog not nose).
Note that the operator not has the meaning of 'without'.

You can also:

• Search the live Artima Forums.
• Search non-forum content at Artima.com.

About the Legacy Forum Posts

From January 1998 through February 2002, I hosted three discussion forums at Artima.com. I created the Design Forum to accompany my Design Techniques column in JavaWorld, and to facilitate discussion about object-oriented design in general. I created the Jini Forum to accompany my Jiniology column in JavaWorld, and provide a space for general discussion about Jini. And I created the Java Answers Forum to serve as a place where Java programmers could ask and answer each other's questions.

These three forums were based on a CGI script written in Perl by Matt Wright, then a high school student, who made several Perl CGI scripts available for free on the web. I had to hack this script rather heavily to get it to look presentable. The script worked reasonably well, but had several problems.

The main problem was that instead of storing the forum data in a database, the script created a new HTML page for each post. This scheme made it rather difficult for me to make changes to the header, the footer, or the general look and feel of the pages, because to do so I had to process thousands of HTML files.

Another serious problem was that there was no easy way to delete posts. As a result, I usually did not risk breaking a forum topic by trying to remove off-topic posts. But search engines inevitably indexed the off-topic posts, which brought more people in looking for something off-topic and making more off-topic posts in reply to the first one. These off-topic posts grew like tumors on a few forum topics. For example, the forum topic that was supposed to be a discussion of my first Jiniology article ended up having over 3000 requests for sample Java Certification exams.

In February of 2002, I replaced the Perl CGI-based forums with one based on Java Servlets and JSPs. These forums are based on Jive Software's forum product, which uses a database to store forum data. You can participate in these forums at the URL specified above. Because the legacy forums had a lot of interesting material in them, I processed them to make them inactive and remove any off-topic posts, and placed them here.