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JRuby combines the object-oriented strength of Smalltalk, the expressiveness of Perl, and the flexibility of the Java class libraries into a single, efficient rapid development framework for the Java platform. In this third installment in the alt.lang.jre series, Michael Squillace and Barry Feigenbaum introduce JRuby, a sophisticated addition to your Java development toolbox.

The On Demand Operating Environment is based upon the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA views every application or resource as a service implementing a specific, identifiable set of (business) functions. In addition to the business functions, services in an on demand environment might also implement management interfaces to participate in the broader configuration, operation, and monitoring of the environment. This article provides an introduction to the On Demand Operating Environment.

Learn how to create digital-certificate chains to test your software. IBM Software Engineer, Paul H. Abbott, clarifies this seldom-documented process by showing you how to use the freely available OpenSSL toolkit to create a certificate chain of any length. He also describes common certificate attributes and shows you some sample Java code for reading the certificates you create into a Java keystore.

Privacy monitoring technology in information technology systems is now necessary in order to ensure compliance with stated privacy policies, especially in the customer information management systems in enterprises such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Privacy policies allow organizations to control the use of personally identifiable information (PII) according to individual choices. The IBM Tivoli Privacy Manager (TPM) provides server support for creating, deploying, and administering privacy policies as well as for checking conformance to policies and for logging auditable data on data accesses. However, applications using TPM must use an agent that is able to intercept each access of PII and interact with a TPM server for auditing and enforcement. This is the function of a privacy monitor.

The Reference Monitor's purpose is to simplify the task of developing new privacy monitors, which are integration points between an application and the Privacy Manager server. IBM Tivoli Privacy Manager provides a way for businesses to meet various privacy regulations. It incorporates a privacy management middleware system that applies privacy rules to existing applications while minimizing the impact to the environment.

SA4J is a technology that analyzes structural dependencies of Java applications in order to measure their stability. It detects structural "anti-patterns" (suspicious design elements) and provides dependency web browsing for detailed exploration of anti-patterns in the dependency web. SA4J also enables "what if" analysis in order to assess the impact of change on the functionality of the application; and it offers guidelines for package re-factoring.

Application Tools for Extension Services consist of WebSphere� Studio-based tools that support the development of Web applications targeted for the Extension Services for WebSphere Everyplace (ESWE) platform. These tools are based on the existing WebSphere Studio J2EE development tools and they are part of an emerging suite of tools for the ESWE platform.

Jikes Bytecode Toolkit is a 100% Java class library that enables Java programs to create, read, and write binary Java class files and to query and update a single, high-level representation of the collection of them, including relationships among them. These features allow the development of tools that report on what APIs the classes use, reorder and change instructions, merge or extend classes, add customized instrumentation (similar to profilers), analyze control and data flow, etc.

Solution Enabler is a framework for creating and deploying solutions locally or to remote machines with different operating systems. The framework helps to simplify the creation and deployment of software solutions by capturing detailed knowledge of a solution package deployed through a common installer.

JSR-109 facilitates the building of interoperable Web services in the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) environment. It standardizes the deployment of Web services in a J2EE container. This article discusses the server and client programming models defined by JSR-109 and provides code examples.

Data Wizard for Java is a tool for building a simple graphical user interface (GUI) that makes it easy to collect necessary data. This tool enables the building of data wizard applications using only a scripting scenario in an XML format. Data Wizard for Java can help to produce a GUI by using a simple script to describe the necessary input parameters and the required tools or utilities to be called.

Web Services for DB2 Cube Views provide access to multidimensional data stored in DB2. These Web services allow a client application to read data from the cubes and perform basic online analysis on multidimensional data and metadata through the Web, using XPath and XML.

JSP technology is well-known, supported by most application servers, and endorsed by the J2EE Blueprints. Why would you choose otherwise? In this first of a two-part series, learn about the Tea template language and how Tea can be a viable alternative to JSP technology.

This article takes a new look at UPC symbols and bar codes, and describes how you can use Java to read information from a UPC bar code. The authors explain how to expedite and organize your enterprise operations that revolve around an IBM DB2 database. The sample application described in the article includes downloadable code.

Add more versatility to your existing Java framework. The same framework supports file access, network access, character conversion, compression, encryption and so forth. This article presents a framework that lets an application efficiently read data from a source that only supports writing data to an output stream.

Examine the roots of the double-checked locking idiom, why it was developed, and why it doesn't work. The Java programming language contains several useful programming idioms. It also contains some that further study has shown should not be used. Double-checked locking is one such idiom that should never be used.

Ant, from Jakarta project at the Apache Foundation, has become a de facto standard for building Java projects. You may already be using it to create automatic builds. It's easy enough to tailor those builds to your needs by customizing the build files; but what if you want to wait until run time to set certain properties? This article shows you how to extend Ant to produce builds that are interactive at run time; users can follow prompts to change parameters each time they conduct a build without having to deal with unfamiliar build files. You can incorporate this functionality into your builds to provide a smoother and more flexible experience for your end users.

The Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) offers great tools for developers, porting the Java platform's network-centric and platform-agnostic worldview down to memory- and processor-limited devices. This article explains the basics of the J2ME world, showing you the building blocks of the platform and demonstrating a sample application.

Glass box extensibility refers to the ways in which a software system may be extended when the source code is available for viewing, but not for modifying -- it lies as the happy medium between black box design (in which extensions are built without viewing the original code) and open box design (extensions are coded directly into the base code). Because the new extensions are based directly on the original code but don't alter it, the glass box design is probably the most effective, and safest, method of extending a software system. This article expands on the topic of glass box extensibility touched on last month in this column. After reading this article, you'll know when to use the glass box and will have some tips on how to implement it.

One of the strengths of the Java platform is its object-oriented nature; one of the benefits of object-oriented languages is that they aid code reuse. But what if you're a Java programmer and you want to reuse code that wasn't written in the Java language? With Bridge2Java, an IBM alphaWorks technology, Java developers can integrate COM objects into their applications. This article explains how it works.