Java SE

This category will hold articles for Java SE and Eclipse.

I think Java can be a lot of fun, since it already delivers a lot out of the box.

People who develop Java APIs usually give it a lot of thinking and work.

 

Java EE in comparison to Java SE can be described as a huge collection of Frameworks and API developed around Java SE.

Java EE is not a stand-alone programming language, but based on Java SE.

Hi there.

Recently I was sitting in a bad place again. I had to automate one process step in a workflow, which was entirely based on processing files of different type, layout and size.

I love automating things by developing software, but I hate doing so whenever it is based entirely on file systems.

To make matters worse, I had to process Excel files ... again! Being a very experienced VBA programmer, in which I do take shame, not pride, I knew it will give me trouble.

Since I do not want to code in VBA anymore, I decided to use Java and the Apache POI API.

Started to use the API and was happy. See the following articles for reference.

How to setup an eclipse project to use POI.

Identifying the last row in Excel files can be hard. Depends on what you define as last row ;0).

A high level wrapper class around POI for processing Excel files.

And here the problem ...

Hits: 21079

Recently I had to compare the contents of two directories on Windows.

Since I was not allowed to install new software on the machine and the workaround of using windows shell commands in combination with Excel and Regular Expressions was a bit annoying I deceided to implement a class in Java.

Source Code for comparing directories

Hits: 11463

When you are working with JAXB, you have three different entry points. Either you create a whole new project, you create an xml schema from existing classes in a normal Java project or vice versa.

In this article I describe how to create a new JAXB project in Eclipse.

If you have not installed the already prepared Eclipse version for Java EE, below you can find an article on how to install the needed software into a standard Java SE Eclipse version.

Setup Eclipse for JAXB

In Eclipse select File -> New -> Other and type "jaxb" into the filter field of the "New" wizard.

Hits: 14367
  1. Apache POI in Eclipse
  2. FileTreeModel - TreeModel to display file system directories and files
  3. Reading and writing MS Excel files using POI
  4. Create GridLayout / GridPane using JavaFX

Subcategories

JavaFX and e(fx)clipse Article Count:  5

This category provides articles regarding JavaFX as well as e(fx)clipse as this seems to be a good start to deal with JavaFX.

JavaFX has been around for some time now and Oracle is currently triying to enforce it as new standard for Java Rich Client Applications.

Regarding to a developer I know it has had some improvements over the years and it looks like it is going to be a try out worthy successor of AWT (Java), Swing (Java) and SWT (IBM).

However Oracle is trying to push this somewhat new technology into the market for some time now, it has not yet been accepted by the Java community.

Root cause for this seem to be the following reasons.

  • Companies are not asking for Rich Client Applications, but there is a trend for developing Web Applications. Therefore motivation to use anything like AWT, Swing, SWT or JavaFX is low except for private purposes. However JavaFX supports Mobile Applications, which is a big market. Since integration with mobiles is asked by companies as well for web applications and older technologies not supporting it, I can understand Oracle not wanting to provide support for it anymore.
  • Programmers are lazy. If you give them something completely new to learn, it takes quite an effort to get to a stage where you are as fast as using already known technologies. The standard platform for Java development, eclipse is still not providing the same comfortable "what you see is waht you get editors" for JavaFX as it is providing for the older technologies. Until eclipse is not deprecating support for Swing and older technologies like SWT and AWT they will be used by programmers.

I did some research one the internet regarding JavaFX so far but I will try to write more articles in the future about it as I intend to write little tools for myself in Java. For this I of course do not want the hustle of maintaining a JEE server all the time. Therefore JavaFX is intersting for me but I am far from beeing an expert, so try it yourself.

Eclipse SWT Article Count:  2

Groups articles regarding eclipse SWT.

Apache POI Article Count:  4

A category to collect articles around Apache POI.

Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) Article Count:  3

Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) provides a fast and convenient way to bind XML schemas and Java representations, making it easy for Java developers to incorporate XML data and processing functions in Java applications. As part of this process, JAXB provides methods for unmarshalling (reading) XML instance documents into Java content trees, and then marshalling (writing) Java content trees back into XML instance documents. JAXB also provides a way to generate XML schema from Java objects.