In a recent blog post, Elliotte Rusty Harold suggests you should design your URLs from the client's perspective, and figure out how to implement them later.

In a recent developerWorks article, Brian Goetz illustrates using the Java 5.0 concurrency package to implement non-blocking algorithms. He compares the complexity of blocking and non-blocking algorithms, and the performance implications.

A Javaworld tutorial describes how to write and integrate your own script engine with Java SE 6, using the "Scripting for the Java Platform" JSR (223). The article sets up an example scripting language, and proceeds to enable Java applications to use this new language via the JSR 223 API.

Database schema evolution can be made simpler with the help of tools, but what do you do if a problem is discovered after deployment and you need to roll back to an earlier schema?

In a recent XML.com article, Bruce Perry describes Prototype, an open source JavaScript library that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. Prototype is one of many available JavaScript libraries. How is one to choose?

The new open-source rich-client components include autocomplete, Google and Yahoo Maps mashups, a live progress bar, a PayPal buy-it-now component, a progress bar-enabled file upload, and dynamic text and validators. These components can be used with any JSF 1.2-compatible Web container.

In a recent EWeek.com interview, James Gosling pointed to the difficulty of testing AJAX components to ensure they work as expected in different browsers.

The Aquarium is a blog about Java EE 5, Open Source, Web Services, SOA and more.

J2SE 5 sports a new set of monitoring and management tools, centered around the java.lang.management package. A recent tutorial shows how to collect vital statistics about an application's performance inside the JVM with MXbeans, or Java platform management beans.

AjaxTags is a JSP tag library that provides a set of AJAX-enabled widgets, such as autocomplete form fields, pop-up call-out balloons, HTML content replacement, a tabbed panel, and a portlet tag. The most recent beta adds new functions and properties to tags introduced in prior releases.

A recent article by Jeff Brown provides a hands-on overview of the EJB 3 persistence model. His examples use Hibernate as the EJB 3 persistence provider, and illustrate how Java 5 annotations alleviate the need for XML mapping files.

Direct Web Remoting (DWR) allows browser-based JavaScript to interact with Java classes on the server, and to control page content with results from the server, making it easy to AJAX-enable a Java Web app. The biggest new feature of 2.0 is "reverse Ajax," allowing the server to send asynchronous calls back to the client.

In a letter to the jini-users mailing list, Jim Hurley recently announced Sun's intention to propose its Jini starter kit as an Apache Software Foundation incubator project. It is our intention at Artima to include ServiceUI as part of this proposed project.

Java applications adhering to standards rightly pride themselves as independent not only of operating system platforms, but also of specific vendor products. Yet, stored procedures, a product-specific feature of many DBMSs, play an increasingly important role in highly performant enterprise applications.

JSR 223, Scripting for the Java Platform, defines a way to integrate Java and scripting languages. The first implementation this JSR is already a part of JDK 1.6 "Mustang" beta. A recent article looks at some of the key JSR 223 features, including how to make a Java program scriptable, and how to invoke scripts from a Java application.