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Web 2.0 can be thought of as two concurrent and unrelated things: advances in technology and a new business model for web companies.

This article will examine the Web 2.0 movement and what it means for the end clients, what Web 2.0 means for the web UI, and which technologies enable the new features. In particular, it will talk about the new companies that joined the movement, and look at some of the technology that powers Web 2.0.

It will also discuss what it means to code in "web2.0 style" with some more advanced features of the Script.aculo.us framework and explore the Dojo toolkit.

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In this article, I will discuss the Direct Web Remoting (DWR) technology developed by Joe Walker and maintained by the small IT consultancy Getahead in UK. This technology is a unique way of Ajax-enabling existing Java server-side code by exposing it in JavaScript. This sounds complicated but, in reality, the technology is relatively straightforward. It has some limitations, such as exposing overloaded Java methods or marshaling of very complex Java Objects to JavaScript and will work only in a web application server. But overall, DWR is a very powerful concept that works with any existing Java web application and makes the process of web remoting easier.

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In this article, I will look at the latest and upcoming releases of the Spring Java framework. In one of my previous articles, "Spring: the Eclectic Framework," I discussed the Spring application framework. But since then, Interface21, the company responsible for development and support of the framework, implemented many new features and has released version 2.0 of Spring. The upcoming preview edition 2.1 is already underway, and I will discuss what has changed and improved in this new version over the previous one. Because the Spring framework is an aggregation of various components and modules, its parts have evolved differently, but overall version 2.1 is a major improvement over version 1.x and a sizable improvement over 2.0.

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Web pagination is something every web user takes for granted, but for developers a lot of consideration goes into implementing it. The web pagination mechanism will automatically improve responsiveness of the system, user experience, and may reduce clutter on the page. In this article, I will discuss different approaches and best practices to the pagination algorithms, and show what logic needs to be done for the actual link generation on the front end. For that, I will present a generic algorithm to implement page links on the result page.

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In this article, I will discuss the Direct Web Remoting (DWR) technology developed by Joe Walker and maintained by the small IT consultancy Getahead in UK. This technology is a unique way of Ajax-enabling existing Java server-side code by exposing it in JavaScript. This sounds complicated but, in reality, the technology is relatively straightforward. It has some limitations, such as exposing overloaded Java methods or marshaling of very complex Java Objects to JavaScript and will work only in a web application server. But overall, DWR is a very powerful concept that works with any existing Java web application and makes the process of web remoting easier.

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In this article I will talk about the BEA WebLogic 9.x server platform. In particular, I will focus on the new features, configuration tips for cluster enabled applications, tips on starting multiple instances of the WebLogic servers from within the development environment, and other configuration and maintenance gems, which I found very useful to know. In addition, I will cover some of the differences between WebLogic 9.x and 8.x servers.

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With the proliferation of the online picture sharing sites, such as flickr.com, snapfish.com, or kodakgallery.com, many developers are wondering how to achieve the same on their own. With the right, generally free, tools and a few clever Java algorithms, you can be hosting your own photo album in no time, without paying any subscription fees. In this article, I will teach you how to create a personal photo album that will be automatically sorted and ordered in correct chronological order, and independent from the file system names and locations. With the sample code, you will be able to drop the new folder of pictures into some directory and have them correctly show up in relation to the other picture folders you are sharing.

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Originally, I intended to discuss the Spring framework from the development perspective, but given the fact that there are numerous articles and publications about the topic, including the well documented reference manual, I decided to switch my focus to the usability of this technology. In this article, I will play the role of the devil’s advocate and will concentrate on the framework as a whole, its usefulness, and the problem space it is trying to address. I will still discuss the concepts and components of the framework in detail, and will assume the readers are familiar with Java Web development.

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