Home Page: www.eisolution.com

Matthew Ramuta sent us a pointer to TSS, just after Swing Sightings #13 was announced. This web-started application is used for "Enterprise Transportation Management", in other words, for scheduling trucks and warehouse deliveries. More about that in the TSS brochure here.

The folks at EI Solutions had many kind words for Java in the TSS press release and they sent us this note about how Java technology was used:

"TSS is built entirely in the Java programming language and uses JFC/Swing for a rich client GUI and Java Web Start for dynamic deployment. JDBC permits use with virtually any enterprise class database. The unique Dispatching screen uses Swing Drag-and-drop features to greatly simplify dispatching freight to the appropriate truck. The document rendering and OCR features uses Java 2D API and our Scanning and Imaging subsystem uses the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) API."

There's also a J2ME based wireless client that allows TSS to "dispatch pickup information to truck drivers while they are en-route to other stops via a Motorola Phone on the Nextel wireless network."

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Home Page: www.jinspired.com

William Louth the Product Architect at jinspired.com ("Java Inspired"), sent us this description of JDBInsight:

"JDBInsight is an innovative enterprise development product, aimed at simplifying the performance tuning and testing of J2EE applications, which access data through the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API. JDBInsight analyzes the access of enterprise data by J2EE client, web, and bean containers. The analysis can encompass transaction executions, spanning multiple J2EE containers. JDBInsight captures timing and execution information for enterprise data accessed by Servlets, JavaServer Pages, Session and Entity Beans using JDBC or an Entity Bean using a container's persistence engine. JDBInsight provides the ability to quickly detect performance bottlenecks within a J2EE system, reducing the need to hire expensive performance-tuning consultants, allocating valuable development resources, or purchasing further hardware to compensate for lack of tuning. It aids testing by providing the ability to create snapshots of the database interaction during test runs."

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Home Page: www.2mgames.com/tetrix.htm

Here's a collection of 20 Tetris games from Bertrand Vauthier at 2M Games. The games are based on Java 1.4 and can be run full screen. There's a free download, and I can say from personal experience that Tetris is still very addictive!

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Home Page: www.sferyx.com

Here's a full featured HTML editor that's available as a J2SE 1.4 applet, or a wing component, or a desktop application (try the evaluation version here. Mr Vassil Boyadjiev at Sferyx Srl in Italy was kind enough to let us know about this product. He sent us a list of features, such as support for tables, images, search and replace, and more. The list was so long we'll have to send you to their web site to see the complete list.

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Home Page: home2.inet.tele.dk/larsdam/jvc.html

Lars Dam sent us a note about his Java VGA-planets client (JVC). JVC is a client for the PBEM game VGA-Planets, created by Tim Wisseman. According to the VGA Planets home page "VGA Planets is a graphical, multi-player, play-by-electronic-mail, space war game". There are tens of thousands of players and the game has been around for more than a decade. And there's a theme song! Now, how cool is that!

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Home Page: http://www.jadcentral.com/codecentral/code_profile.jsp?category_ID=16&code_ID=311

Here's an unusual application that's designed to help teach Java programming by visualizing what the VM is doing at a high level as it processes classes. The JVM simulator was created by Shakeel Ahmad — a teacher at the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Engineering & Technology, Lahore Pakistan..

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Home Page: www.mindiq.com

Chris Smith, the Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer at MindIQ Corporation, sent us a pointer to their new app. It's called Design-a-Course and it's for "quickly and easily building Web-based training courseware without the need for complicated programming or scripting". The idea that one can create courseware without "complicated programming" is a little worrying, however we're confident that there are still plenty of opportunities for us hackers in other fields :-).

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Home: www.davidcampaign.net/dczip.html

David Campaign has created a zippy little alternative to WinZip called dcZip. His site describes the app like this: "dcZip is a freeware archiving program for creating, updating, and extracting zip, tar, gzip, and bzip2 files and all of their variants (war, tgz, etc.)." Quite a lot of functionality for a jar file that's not much more than 300K bytes!

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Home Page:

We last visited the fledgling JGraph project back in Swing Sightings #3. The JGraph graphing component and the JGraphPad diagram editor were well underway and being used as the basis for several applications. Since then the open source project has been very busy — this week it's rated number 5 in activity on sourceforge — pretty impressive considering that sourceforge hosts thousands of projects. The JGraph home page now has a showcase with 16 applications and projects that are based on JGraph/JGraphPad!

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Home Page: www.scheduleworld.com

The scheduleworld web site describes this free application wonderfully concisely: "ScheduleWorld is a free open standards-based calendar compatible with programs like Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes. ScheduleWorld is written in 100% Java and works with Microsoft, Linux, and Apple OS/X". ScheduleWorld is still a work in progress, however we thought our readers would like to hear about it, and we couldn't help noticing a little border artwork from our own calendar demo in scheduleworld. We're glad to see it! :-)

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Home: www.harmonicagame.com

Joel Trunick send us a pointer to his creation — the first Java application we're aware of for training budding harmonica players. We don't get to try all of the apps published in this column, however my 12-year-old son broke out an old Hohner and gave both Bendometer and RockOn a whirl. They turned out to be loads of fun and very easy to use. Bendometer is a pitch detection app that helps you practice bending notes. RockOn is a hilarious combination of Bendometer and Asteroids. Blow up asteroids by blowing on the harmonica!

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