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.

It is fairly easy to utilize the Apache POI API in Eclipse.

Download the most current version of POI from Apache and include the jars from the following directories in the Java Build Path in an Eclipse project's properties. "./" is the root directory of the downloaded API. 

  • ./lib
  • ./ooxml-lib
  • ./

After you have included all external libraries in the Java Build Path of your project, you can start using the API.

I developed the following class as a high level Wrapper around Apaches POI API for reading and writing Microsoft Excel files. It implements an interface, but you can ignore it.

Source Code

Whenever your software has to interact with users to display file system structures it would be helpful to do so using a visualization of a directory Tree.

When you use a JTree to display such tree structures you can provide its constructor with an implementation of an interface called TreeModel.

The TreeModel implementation below is running recursively through all sub directories in a provided root directory.

By implementing the method getChildCount to return a count greater than zero, it is indicating that each directory should be recursively searched for files (children) and more directories. Of course the other directories have to implemented accordingly.

I did not come up with this idea by myself, but found it on the internet. However, the versions I found on the internet have not been working properly, so I deceided to code one, that will work.

Enjoy.

Class FileTreeModel

Subcategories

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.

Groups articles regarding eclipse SWT.

A category to collect articles around Apache POI.

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.