Java Network Programming

This comprehensive guide shows you how to master the most important changes to Java since it was first released. Generics and the greatly expanded collection libraries have tremendously increased the power of Java 5 and Java 6. But they have also confused many developers who haven't known how to take advantage of these new features.

Java Generics and Collections covers everything from the most basic uses of generics to the strangest corner cases. It teaches you everything you need to know about the collections libraries, so you'll always know which collection is appropriate for any given task, and how to use it.

Topics covered include:

• Fundamentals of generics: type parameters and generic methods
• Other new features: boxing and unboxing, foreach loops, varargs
• Subtyping and wildcards
• Evolution not revolution: generic libraries with legacy clients and generic clients with legacy libraries
• Generics and reflection
• Design patterns for generics
• Sets, Queues, Lists, Maps, and their implementations
• Concurrent programming and thread safety with collections
• Performance implications of different collections

Generics and the new collection libraries they inspired take Java to a new level. If you want to take your software development practice to a new level, this book is essential reading.

Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, where his research focuses on the design of programming languages. He is a co-designer of GJ, work that became the basis for generics in Sun's Java 5.0.

Maurice Naftalin is Technical Director at Morningside Light Ltd., a software consultancy in the United Kingdom. He has most recently served as an architect and mentor at NSB Retail Systems plc, and as the leader of the client development team of a major UK government social service system.

"A brilliant exposition of generics. By far the best book on the topic, it provides a crystal clear tutorial that starts with the basics and ends leaving the reader with a deep understanding of both the use and design of generics."
Gilad Bracha, Java Generics Lead, Sun Microsystems

Is Ajax a new technology, or the same old stuff web developers have been using for years? Both, actually. This book demonstrates not only how tried-and-true web standards make Ajax possible, but how these older technologies allow you to give sites a decidedly modern Web 2.0 feel.

Ajax: The Definitive Guide explains how to use standards like JavaScript, XML, CSS, and XHTML, along with the XMLHttpRequest object, to build browser-based web applications that function like desktop programs. You get a complete background on what goes into today's web sites and applications, and learn to leverage these tools along with Ajax for advanced browser searching, web services, mashups, and more. You discover how to turn a web browser and web site into a true application, and why developing with Ajax is faster, easier and cheaper.

The book also explains:

• How to connect server-side backend components to user interfaces in the browser
• Loading and manipulating XML documents, and how to replace XML with JSON
• Manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM)
• Designing Ajax interfaces for usability, functionality, visualization, and accessibility
• Site navigation layout, including issues with Ajax and the browser's back button
• Adding life to tables & lists, navigation boxes and windows
• Animation creation, interactive forms, and data validation
• Search, web services and mash-ups
• Applying Ajax to business communications, and creating Internet games without plug-ins
• The advantages of modular coding, ways to optimize Ajax applications, and more

Native apps have distinct advantages, but the future belongs to mobile web apps that function on a broad range of smartphones and tablets. Get started with jQuery Mobile, the touch-optimized framework for creating apps that look and behave consistently across many devices. This concise book provides HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript code examples, screen shots, and step-by-step guidance to help you build a complete working app with jQuery Mobile.

If you're already familiar with the jQuery JavaScript library, you can use your existing skills to build cross-platform mobile web apps right now. This book shows you how.

• Get a high-level overview of jQuery Mobile: how it works and how to use it
• Learn about paging and navigation, including dialogs, Ajax content, and history
• Employ jQuery Mobile’s extensive event system to create rich interactions
• Work with toolbars, buttons, lists, forms, and other UI elements
• Create a variety of visual designs with jQuery Mobile’s sophisticated theming system
• Use the jQuery Mobile API for finer control over elements and interactions
• Put everything together and build a mobile app from start to finish

For too long, developers have worked on disorganized application projects, where every part seemed to have its own build system, and no common repository existed for information about the state of the project. Now there's help. The long-awaited official documentation to Maven is here.

Written by Maven creator Jason Van Zyl and his team at Sonatype, Maven: The Definitive Guide clearly explains how this tool can bring order to your software development projects. Maven is largely replacing Ant as the build tool of choice for large open source Java projects because, unlike Ant, Maven is also a project management tool that can run reports, generate a project website, and facilitate communication among members of a working team.

To use Maven, everything you need to know is in this guide. The first part demonstrates the tool's capabilities through the development, from ideation to deployment, of several sample applications -- a simple software development project, a simple web application, a multi-module project, and a multi-module enterprise project.

The second part offers a complete reference guide that includes:

• The POM and Project Relationships
• The Build Lifecycle
• Plugins
• Project website generation
• Advanced site generation
• Reporting
• Properties
• Build Profiles
• The Maven Repository
• Team Collaboration
• Writing Plugins
• IDEs such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, ands NetBeans
• Using and creating assemblies
• Developing with Maven Archetypes

Several sources for Maven have appeared online for some time, but nothing served as an introduction and comprehensive reference guide to this tool -- until now. Maven: The Definitive Guide is the ideal book to help you manage development projects for software, web applications, and enterprise applications. And it comes straight from the source.