Welcome to the Java BluePrints project, the open development site for the Java BluePrints program from Sun Microsystems. The Java BluePrints projects presents the programming model, guidelines and examples for designing enterprise quality applications and web services using Java technologies. Some of the areas covered are Ajax-enabled Web 2.0 applications, Persistence, JavaServer Faces, SOA with BPEL, and WS-Security.

Opensourcetesting.org aims to boost the profile of open source testing tools within the testing industry, principally by providing users with an easy to use gateway to information on the wide range of open source testing tools available. The site was started in March 2003 with what amounted to a personal list of about 50 tools. The ball started rolling quickly and the first month saw 1,500 unique users, a number which has risen steadily over the years to hit 100,000 unique users per month in August 2007. The trend steadily continues ever upwards. Today the site features over 360 tools in 20 categories, news items aggregated from over 125 RSS feeds, a discussion forum with 800 members, an RSS feed with 35,000 monthly page views, and 100,000 unique users per month from 160 countries.

While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines this most frequently deployed of software architectures: the BIG BALL OF MUD. A BIG BALL OF MUD is a casually, even haphazardly, structured system. Its organization, if one can call it that, is dictated more by expediency than design. Yet, its enduring popularity cannot merely be indicative of a general disregard for architecture.

In the Java community there's been a rush of lightweight containers that help to assemble components from different projects into a cohesive application. Underlying these containers is a common pattern to how they perform the wiring, a concept they refer under the very generic name of "Inversion of Control". In this article I dig into how this pattern works, under the more specific name of "Dependency Injection", and contrast it with the Service Locator alternative. The choice between them is less important than the principle of separating configuration from use.