Perhaps the most important aspect of continued success in JavaBeans programming is keeping up with the latest trends and related technologies. Fortunately, there are plenty of online resources to help you keep your bean programming skills up-to-date. This appendix points you to some of the more useful resources, which you should use as often as possible.
JavaSoft's official JavaBeans site on the Web contains all the latest JavaBeans
information and related tools. You'll definitely want to keep an eye on this site
because it is the central location for obtaining the latest version of the Beans
Development Kit (BDK). It also has an extensive set of online documentation. The
JavaSoft Web site is located at http://splash.javasoft.com/beans
(see Figure A.1).
Figure
A.1. JavaSoft's JavaBeans Web site.
Gamelan is the end-all Java resource directory and will be adding more JavaBeans
resources as they become available. Besides being possibly the official Java Web
site at JavaSoft, Gamelan is by far the most useful and comprehensive source of Java
information anywhere. It has Java conveniently divided into different categories,
each leading to a wealth of information, source code, and sample applets. Check out
Gamelan yourself and you'll see what I mean. It's located at http://www.gamelan.com
(see Figure A.2).
Figure
A.2. The Gamelan Web site.
The JavaWorld online journal is an excellent publication by IDG Communications
that always has some interesting Java programming articles, including coverage of
JavaBeans. You can even subscribe to JavaWorld and receive Java information by e-mail.
The JavaWorld Web site is located at http://www.javaworld.com
and is shown in Figure A.3.
Figure A.3. The JavaWorld online journal Web Site.
The ActiveXpress Web site serves as an information source for ActiveX users and
developers. Even though the site centers on ActiveX, it also contains a decent amount
of information on JavaBeans. The site is located at http://techweb3.web.cerf.net/activexpress
(see Figure A.4).
Figure A.4. The ActiveXpress Web Site.
Digital Espresso is an online weekly summary of the traffic appearing in the various
Java mailing lists and newsgroups. Digital Espresso is an excellent JavaBeans resource
because it pulls information from a variety of sources in-
to a single Web site. It is located at http://www.io.org/~mentor/DigitalEspresso.html
(see Figure A.5).
Figure
A.5. The Digital Espresso online summary
Web site.
The Java Developer Web site is a good Web site for sharing information and finding
answers to Java and JavaBeans programming questions. It has a section called "How
Do I..." that lists common (and some not-so-common) Java programming questions
and their corresponding answers, including sam-
ple source code. The Java Developer Web site is located at http://www.digitalfocus.com/faq
(see Figure A.6).
Figure
A.6. The Java Developer Web site.
The Nerdtalk Web site is a biweekly online column that deals with technology issues
in the world of distributed client/server computing. Topics include everything from
distributed objects to database access to transaction processing. Although Nerdtalk
admittedly isn't focused on JavaBeans, its current article as of this writing was
solely about JavaBeans. The Nerdtalk Web site is located at http://www.openenv.com/nerd/talk.htm
(see Figure A.7).
Figure A.7. The NerdTalk online column Web
site.
