Yakov Fain

During the last month my colleagues and I were immersing into the world of modern JavaScript frameworks. We didn’t start from scratch though. My business partners spent the first 5 years of this century porting PowerBuilder, a used-to-be-popular client server tool, to a JavaScript framework. That product was called XMLSP and you can still find its 5-year old version online. The word AJAX was not even invented back then. In 2006, a killer UI framework Adobe Flex 2 was released and we started using it. It was clearly better than any AJAX offering, and I was not shy in publishing blogs and articles explaining its superiority to any AJAX solution available at the time. Flex remains a great solution for developing UI for the enterprise Web applications, and our company,Farata Systems, is committed to support any client who decides to hire us for any Flex/AIR Web/Desktop... (more)

Enterprise Development: Flex or HTML5?

This article is a transcript from a recorded conversation I had with Anatole Tartakovsky and Victor Rasputnis – my business partners at Farata Systems. This conversation took place on the mountain after the day of skiing. Yakov. There are many ways of creating Web applications and creating them for the enterprises is not the same as developing a Web site for a pizzeria in your neighborhood. During the last five years we’ve been using mainly Adobe Flex for development of the front end of Web applications. Flex applications work in a well known and predictable run-time environment c... (more)

Secrets Of The Masters: Core Java Job Interview Questions

JDJ's Enterprise Editor, Yakov Fain (pictured) writes: If you are planning to hit the job market,  you may need to refresh some of the Java basic terms and techniques to prepare yourself for a technical interview. Let me offer you some of the core Java questions that you might expect during the interviews.  For  most questions  I’ve provided only  short  answers to encourage further research.  I have included only  questions for mid (*) and senior level (**) Java developers. These sample questions could also become handy for people who need to interview Java developers (see also ... (more)

Reading Data from the Internet

To read local file streams, a program has to specify the file's location, i.e. "c:\practice\training.html". The same procedure is valid for reading of the remote files: just open the stream over the network. Java has a class URL that will help you to connect to a remote computer on the Internet. At first, create an instance of the class URL: try{ URL xyz = new URL("http://www.xyz.com:80/training.html"); } catch(MalformedURLException e){ e.printStackTrace(); } The MalformedURLException could be thrown if a non-valid URL has been used, for example missed protocol if you forgot to sta... (more)

Java Basics: Introduction to Java Threads, Part 1

Java Basics: Introduction to Java Threads, Part 2 A program can perform its actions either in a sequence (one after another) or in parallel. In a sequential mode, if a program needs to call two methods of a class, the second method is called after the first one completes. In other words, such programs have only one thread of execution. In some cases, when a second method does not depend on the results of the first one, you can substantially speed up the processing by executing these methods at the same time in a multi-threaded mode. A good example of a program that creates multipl... (more)