The folks at FtpVoyager have done it again. First, they created the best interface for remote syncrhonization I've ever seen. Now they've come up with the best online support tool. It's even better than my design...something I've given a *lot* of thought.

When it comes to information reuse in multiple contexts, backpointers are critical. Doug Engelbart said so in 1968. I finally understand why...

A message-based design is fundamentally the right way to think about building a distributed system, as opposed to code sharing, remote procedure calls, and the like. This article explains why.

This article gives you a simple trick you can use to make your Java method calls more readable when the list of parameters contains booleans and numeric primitives.

This article is my end-of-show wrap up, with notes on a variety of announcements and things. It compares Groovy to BeanShell, describes great new announcements like AJAX and Hibernate, and takes a look at a radically new concept that was a major theme of the show--EASE OF USE enhancements coming up in J2EE, NetBeans, and Java Studio Creator.

Distributed development is a way of life anymore, especially for an open source project. But remote collaboration has been an essentially unsolved problem, most notably when it comes to specification and design. The upcoming release of NetBeans promises to tackle that problem in a very big way--and you'll benefit, even if you don't use NetBeans.

You go to JavaOne in hopes of hearing about realy cool things. Every once in a while, you get something extremely cool--elegant, even--something like Project Jackpot. If you need to clean up your source files en masse, do it elegantly, and do it quickly, then Jackpot is the tool you've been waiting for.

Groovy is a Java-compatible scripting language that blends features from Ruby, Python, and Smalltalk. If you need robust ANT scripts, super shell scripts, or want to write fast unit tests, you may want to try something Groovy, for a change.

After hunting around and comparing options, I finally settled on CityDesk to author my news weblog. After using it for a few months I was pretty pleased with it, and gave it a qualified recommendation. But after it committed the unforgivable sin of silently deleting 1,000 words of text, I can no longer recommend it in good conscience.

RSS feeds are great for news feeds. They're ALMOST great for online support forums and other ongoing dialogs. This post presents a wishlist of needed features, and points to recent developments in that space.

A GUI program can rapidly become an unholy mess of object interactions that is difficult to get working properly, and even more difficult to test. But with the right architecture, it should be possible to solve those problems.

The RADICAL systems presents an interesting possibility for designing a graphic user interface (GUI).

Arguably the most important tool in a developer's tool chest is the IDE they use -- if they can. In this post, I talk about my favorite -- CodeGuide.

The ability to design a system architecture is the most important and most powerful tool that a developer can possess. But it is a skill that is difficult to learn, and one that is almost impossible to teach. Allen Holub's design training workshop does a great job of doing just that.

What makes blogging cool, and what is the ultimate expression of that concept? In short, what defines "blogging heaven"? This blog post is the first in a series aimed at that question. Along the way, the idea is to rope in concepts of "knowledge sharing" and "collaboration" and see how they interplay with blogging.