The buzziest of buzz words these days is XML, the acronym for the eXtensible Markup Language. But it's more than buzz. Follow along as columnist Mark Johnson describes XML, defines his own custom markup language, and creates a class that converts XML files to JavaBeans running in memory. Sometimes it's necessary to issue requests to objects without knowing anything about the operation being requested or the receiver of the request.
Commands are the object-oriented equivalent of callbacks and encapsulate the callback function.
In this tip, Bala Paranj demonstrates how to make use of the Command pattern in Java. Increasingly, Java is becoming the first language computer science students learn. In response to this, many books designed to teach nonprogrammers how to program, and to do so with Java, have popped up lately. This month's book review compares 7 Java books designed to help students who are new to programming learn Java. The balance between the performance of software and the resources it consumes has been an issue since the birth of computers.