If Gartner's assessment of AJAX's position on the Hype Cycle is correct, then the days when AJAX is the only game in town are over. Enter the age of what Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group calls 'Fit Clients' - a hybrid of Thick Clients (a.k.a. Fat Clients) and Thin Clients (HTML an...

When talking about the 'web' what are we referring to? For most people it's what can be experienced through their web browser including HTML, audio and video streaming, Flash-based animation, or rich Internet Application (RIA) interfaces. The key to this perspective is the web browser,...

The computer desktop today is what the television was to people in the 1980s. It's the single most important channel for consumer entertainment and information. The computer desktop - as was the case with newspapers before there was radio and radio before there was television - has bec...

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys li...

If you design an application that runs on Windows but doesn't look exactly like Windows, so the old argument goes, the effect will be unsettling for users. But sticking to the native look and feel (L&F) should not be the end-goal of designers.

Desktop widgets have been around for a very long time. The first set of desktop widgets were introduced by Apple back in 1983 with their release of Apple Desktop Accessories. Obviously Apple was way ahead of the curve, but these early widgets were not Internet enabled - the popular Int...

For the past ten years application developers have been stuck with only two desktop client choices. Traditionally, they can choose either a very thin Web-client technology implemented in HTML and CSS, or a very heavyweight thick client experience implemented using traditional client/se...

Android is not bad like world hunger is bad, it's just not good for existing Java standards. My main thesis is this: If Android succeeds as it is currently defined then the entire Java platform, including Java SE, is in trouble. Android's success sends a clear message: Standardization ...

You won't hear Microsoft say this out loud, but secretly they are celebrating Google's contribution of the Android mobile phone platform to the Open Handset Alliance. At least they ought to be. Android is perhaps the best thing to happen to Microsoft since they won the browser wars in ...

The notion of guaranteed delivery of Java Message Service messages has been lightly touched on in other recently published articles on JMS. But what really makes a JMS message 'guaranteed'? Should you just take it on faith, or would you like to know what's behind it?

Design Patterns are blueprints that describe how to design class structures and object interactions to solve commonly encountered problems. A Design Pattern can be as simple as the practice of using an interface to achieve polymorphism and as complicated as designs used to solve intric...