About This Book

The chapters in this book are, for the most part, independent of each other. You should be able to delve into whatever topic interests you the most and read the chapters in any order.

Chapter 1 covers multithreading, which enables you to program tasks to be done in parallel. (A thread is a flow of control within a program.) We show you how to set up threads and how to deal with thread synchronization. Multithreading has changed a great deal in JDK 5.0, and we tell you all about the new mechanisms.

The topic of Chapter 2 is the collections framework of the Java 2 platform. Whenever you want to collect multiple objects and retrieve them later, you will want to use a collection that is best suited for your circumstances, instead of just tossing the elements into a Vector.

This chapter shows you how to take advantage of the standard collections that are prebuilt for your use. The chapter has been completely revised for the generic collections of JDK 5.0.

Chapter 3 covers the networking API. Java makes it phenomenally easy to do complex network programming. We show you how to make network connections to servers, how to implement your own servers, and how to make HTTP connections. We finish the chapter with advanced issues such as half-close and interruptible channels.

Chapter 4 covers database programming. The main focus is on JDBC, the Java database connectivity API that lets Java programs connect to relational databases. We show you how to write useful programs to handle realistic database chores, using a core subset of the JDBC API. (A complete treatment of the JDBC API would require a book almost as long as this one.) We finish the chapter with a brief introduction into hierarchical databases and discuss JNDI (the Java Naming and Directory Interface) and LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol).

Chapter 5 covers distributed objects. We cover RMI (Remote Method Invocation) in detail. This API lets you work with Java objects that are distributed over multiple machines. We then briefly discuss CORBA (the Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and show you how objects written in C++ and Java can communicate. We finish the chapter with a discussion of SOAP (the Simple Object Access Protocol) and show you an example in which a Java program communicates with the Amazon Web Service.

Chapter 6 contains all the Swing material that didn't make it into Volume 1, especially the important but complex tree and table components. We show the basic uses of editor panes, the Java implementation of a "multiple document" interface, and the progress indicators that you use in multithreaded programs. Again, we focus on the most useful constructs that you are likely to encounter in practical programming, since an encyclopedic coverage of the entire Swing library would fill several volumes and would only be of interest to dedicated taxonomists.

Chapter 7 covers the Java 2D API that you can use to create realistic drawings. The chapter also covers some advanced features of the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) that seemed too specialized for coverage in Volume 1 but are, nonetheless, techniques that should be part of every programmer's toolkit. These features include printing and the APIs for cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop.

Chapter 8 shows you what you need to know about the component API for the Java platformJavaBeans. You will see how to write your own beans that other programmers can manipulate in integrated builder environments. We conclude this chapter by showing you how you can use JavaBeans persistence to store your own data in a format thatunlike object serializationis suitable for long-term storage.

Chapter 9 takes up the Java security model. The Java platform was designed from the ground up to be secure, and this chapter takes you under the hood to see how this design is implemented. We show you how to write your own class loaders and security managers for special-purpose applications. Then, we take up the security API that allows for such important features as message and code signing, authorization and authentication, and encryption. This chapter has been completely updated for JDK 5.0 to use the AES and RSA encryption algorithms.

Chapter 10 discusses a specialized feature that we believe can only grow in importance: internationalization. The Java programming language is one of the few languages designed from the start to handle Unicode, but the internationalization support in the Java platform goes much further. As a result, you can internationalize Java applications so that they not only cross platforms but cross country boundaries as well. For example, we show you how to write a retirement calculator applet that uses either English, German, or Chinesedepending on the locale of the browser.

Chapter 11 takes up native methods, which let you call methods written for a specific machine such as the Microsoft Windows API. Obviously, this feature is controversial: Use native methods, and the cross-platform nature of the Java platform vanishes. Nonetheless, every serious programmer writing Java applications for specific platforms needs to know these techniques. There will be times when you need to turn to the operating system's API for your target platform when you are writing a serious application. We illustrate this by showing you how to access the registry API in Windows from a Java program.

Chapter 12 covers XML. We show you how to parse XML files, how to generate XML, and how to use XSL transformations. As a useful example, we show you how to specify the layout of a Swing form in XML. This chapter has been updated to include the XPath API that makes "finding needles in XML haystacks" much easier.

Chapter 13 is new to this edition. It discusses annotations and metadata, features that were added to JDK 5.0. Annotations allow you to add arbitrary information (the metadata) to a Java program. We show you how annotation processors can harvest these annotations at the source or class file level, and how annotations can be used to influence the behavior of classes at runtime. Annotations are only useful with tools, and we hope that our discussion will help you select useful annotation processing tools for your needs.