As mentioned here, there are numerous Free software from Microsoft
This wiki page on java.net site has very good collection of application frameworks and utility libraries.
Architecture section of IBM Developerworks offers a complimentary kit for IT architects, which provides a collection of materials that can help based on IBM Tools. This kit includes several podcasts from Grady Booch, an webcast on SOA, several demos, Developerworks articles and whitepapers.
It covers
You can find the architecture kit here
Factbites
is another search tool with specialized focus area. Search with this engine gives better results on specific subject or event.
Omgili beta is one of the tool specialised in searching web based discussion forums. The service offers special commands to search for information on a discussion thread’s different aspects such as topic (intopic) and reply (inreply).
With tens of hundreds of online tutorials and other training materials, it requires some specialized tools to search / find relevant information.
Pixel2life is a tutorial search engine. The service has a database of more than 15,000 tutorials on different computing related subjects such as JavaScript, Perl, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and so on. Pixel2life is quite dynamic and to help you easily track the latest additions to its index, the service features a RSS feed also.
My definition would be “Art of transforming a business requirement into efficient IT Solutions”.
Lets us see how others define the term “Architecture”
Merriam-Webster:
the manner in which the components of a computer or computer system are organized and integrated
Oxford English Dictionary:
Computing. The conceptual structure and overall logical organization of a computer or computer-based system from the point of view of its use or design; a particular realization of this.
In today’s scenario, every Java applications come with its own copy of Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Amoung many reasons for supplying own copy of JRE, the main one is version compatability and to reduce runtime issues and debug time :-/. And every machine would be crowded with numerous copies JRE (sometimes multiple copies of same version).
I think in java world no one cares now about how many JREs installed on single machine. And taking Java as a platform, all these applications are bundled with their own platform for running it. So where is platform independance ? If the same thing had happend with Microsoft .Net platform, I could imagine people would be ready to beat them up with Standards flag.
I was looking out some simple way to identify installed JREs on my machine and come across a tool called JRView – a freeware utility which lists all installed JREs for windows environment. But many of these applications never register their JRE with windows registry. With latest version of Eclipse – 3.2 M4 (I guess its there from version 3.0 and above), there is an option to search available JREs on the system and when I tried there were 23 JREs on my machine of 4 different versions.
Why can’t there be a specific location for each operating systems to install JREs? And these applications just need to check those location if required version is available if not get that version from specified vendor’s website.
Google had come up with a free collection of essential software pack called “Google Pack”, which includes
An interesting thing about this pack is its customizable and comes with a software updater.
Java Firefox extension provides simple demo for invoking Java application from Firefox / XUL. I am configuring to see how it works in reality. Yet to complete configuration and setup.
But this simple step would open up a new possible avenue of Rich Client Platform to Java Technology.
