Early Stages of a Program: Test first. Use RAD tools. Don't optimize early. There's lots of advice for the early stages of a program. » Read more

RAD Tool Let-down: Rapid application development tools let you put together a great-looking mock-up of your app in no time, but often are of little use for the production version of your system. Visual GUI builders and data-aware controls are two such culprits. — Philip Brittan

Switched... then switched back... and then switched again: About a year ago, I jumped on the Mac OS X bandwagon, threw my resources into a TiBook and later into a nifty desktop, and thought I was quite trendy. About 4 months ago, I got annoyed at all the things that I was used to acting just slightly off, and went back to my trusty PC laptop. I was pretty happy, and on familiar ground, until last week's editors meeting at O'Reilly. Since then, I've run screaming back to my TiBook, and am (for now) thrilled... — Brett McLaughlin

Using the TransferHandler
In James Gosling's java.net blog entry URLs are your friend he explained that he prefers to convert to URLs when using drag and drop. This was the trigger for the latest Java Tech Tip Using the TransferHandler . The tip shows you how to customize the drop portion of drag and drop by creating your own TransferHandler.

Make your Java Data More Useful with Treemap Visualization
Making sense of complicated data can be difficult. In Laurence Moroney's devX article Make your Java Data More Useful with Treemap Visualization he starts with a simple data set and displays it in a table and then in a pie chart. He points out that more complicated data sets are not as easily displayed and understood and shows examples of tree maps before introducing you to the JTreemap project.