Last minute shopping: The best gift we've found for this holiday season is fun, educational, and free. Note: this daily update includes a Bonus Track. » Read more

Role of filters in Architecture: Filters is an architectural concept that works hand in hand with factories. When factories create object or objects a filter provide an option to post-process these object or objects. This ability may not be as important in procedural and OO coding but place an important role in declarative programming. Because "declarative programming" when used as a supporting architecture for OO programming, postpones the need to program. In such a scenario filters provide another place to configure and reuse a given programming asset.  — Satya Komatineni

Progress or Constipation?: There are phases of "personal progress" that Jim Cushing didn't cover. — John D. Mitchell

Elementary Computer Graphics: Drawing with Pixels
Michael J Norton has been looking for simple explanations for his ten year old son on how to program video games. The result of his search is the MacDevcenter article Elementary Computer Graphics: Drawing with Pixels. You'll learn Graphics Coordinates with Tic-Tac-Toe, speak the computer's language using simple scripting with TCL, build on the basic TCL commands to perform simple math and to work with Windows and to fill in pixels. This is a great activity for adults or children.

QTJ Audio
Chris Adamson continues his tour of QuickTime Java, this time focusing on QTJ Audio . In his latest ONJava article, he builds an audio player that he calls QTBebop "that displays song metadata, band levels, and current time, all of which help introduce the useful audio-related tools provided by QuickTime to the Java developer."