Jason R Briggs

The first thing you're likely to see, upon sitting down to learn a new language, is the ubiquitous "Hello..." application. My father bought me the TRS-80 Basic for Kids book when I was 8-years old, and I'm pretty sure that the first example was either "Hello World" or "Hello, my name is...." As the years progressed and I acquired different computers (BBC, Commodore, Macintosh, PC, etc.) and learned different languages (Assembler, Cobol, Pascal, Modula-2, C, C++), it's always been "Hello World" in some form that I've ended up writing for my first exercise with the language. If you're sitting down to Java for the very first time, I suggest you initially start with the excellent Java Tutorial (http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/), and then come back to this article. However, for the rest of us - and in the very best tradition of Hello World applets, applications, ... (more)

Reflections

JavaOne is over, and it's time to sit back and reflect...and to sift through the hundreds of press releases and announcements that ricochet around the Internet like balls around a pinball machine. While I couldn't be there myself, when I checked my e-mails each day, I felt as if I was there in spirit at least. For me, the most significant news to come out of JavaOne was talk of Monty - Sun's next-generation virtual machine for mobile devices. Monty is touted as being up to 10 times as fast as the current KVM, so it has great potential for multimedia applications and the like whe... (more)

Java Games Development - Part 1

I recently had a hankering to play an older (not ancient) PC game that I used to enjoy. Since I've moved my entire desktop over to Linux (for almost a year ago now) that meant stealing my wife's Windows laptop and trying to install the game on that. Two FDISKs and one Windows reinstall later the laptop's HDD is still woefully short of a game, and I'm back at square one. This isn't an isolated case ­ there's a whole backlist of games that in an occasional retro mood I've felt like having another go atSeven to the point of attempting to get some of them working in various DOS/Window... (more)

J2ME Editorial

Technology seems at times to proceed at a breakneck pace. The downside to this expectation for a consistently high rate of technological improvement is that at other times, progress comes at a more leisurely pace - analogous to watching paint dry or sloth racing. For example, announcements about chip-design developments and the associated higher CPU speeds seem to appear weekly. Intel, IBM, AMD, (name your company), are engaged in a constant competition to outdo the others as they increase speed, reduce power consumption, and introduce new manufacturing processes. However, waiti... (more)

Out of Nowhere

If you've ever spent time in the Middle East, you'll know that bargaining is a way of life. You haggle over everything, especially if you're a tourist - they automatically triple and quadruple the price if you're a foreigner. So it doesn't seem that unusual to be arguing over the price of a bus fare to the center of Turkey - a reduction, when converted to sterling, works out to around 50 pence. So, in the flush of pride at finally having outwitted the locals and arguing the price down to an "acceptable" amount (which is still probably 2 quid more than the locals pay), you should ... (more)