Joseph Ottinger

As I look over my choices for various tasks, I'm a little unsettled at how many choices I have, what they do, and how they interoperate. I'm not going to be the one to say that innovation is a bad thing, but too much innovation probably is a bad thing. In software design, it usua... (more)

It's with continued amusement that I constantly read about how Java should be defended from .NET, and how .NET will destroy Java. I understand the invective used by both sides, but the shine is starting to wear off; it's time to stop hurling insults, and examine what the future r... (more)

Lately it's been easy to dislike Sun. Their JVM is slow; Sun ONE is certainly nowhere near the fastest J2EE application server; Forte, while capable, is far from what coders actually want to use if they want to write code in a reasonable amount of time; MS's constant marketing an... (more)

I've been actively involved with Java development in one way or another since 1996, including working with some of the original issues of the servlet specification, the early adaptation of the EJB spec, and migration to JSP not long after it became an official part of the J2EE sp... (more)

Of course you can. .NET is a platform; Java is a platform. One convenient feature of .NET is that it uses SOAP internally for messaging; provided Microsoft sticks to the SOAP spec (that they helped write!) that means that Java will be able to leverage .NET services without even k... (more)

It depends on the SQL backend you're using, and how sincere you are. Basically, you'd want to convert every single quote to be double-single-quotes (i.e., O'Donnell becomes O''Donnell), which means writing a custom function. That's ugly, and unnecessary. (Aren't you glad?) If yo... (more)

If you already have your ResultSet, you have two choices, both bad: one is to keep a counter as you read the records in the ResultSet, and the other is to hope you have a compliant JDBC driver that supports the getRowCount() method. Both ways probably do the same thing: read the ... (more)