Facelets fits JSF like a glove

Article by Richard Hightower, 17 pages, 30 minutes.
This article provides a fast readable introduction into using facelets in combination with JSF to speed up your development. The author is definitely a JSF believer, which he readily admits and showed in his previous article series. Although I indeed see how facelets help making JSF more usable, I'm still far from convinced of the ROI of JSF.
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Going dynamic with PHP

Article by Jack Herrington, 13 pages, 30 minutes.
A simple introduction to the reflective/dynamic objects that are possible in PHP5. Even without any PHP experience this article was quite easy to read and understand. A lot of the pages are filled with code. But given the amount of duplication between these code samples, they're very easy to digest.
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Data Binding in Windows Forms 2.0

Article by Wei-Meng Lee, 7 pages, 30 minutes.
An easy introduction to Data Binding in VB.Net. The many screenshots make it seem as if you're watching a screencast, instead of reading an article. Of course this also means that the article is rather light on content.
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Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance

Article by Bruce Tate, 5 pages, 15 minutes.
A very quick glance at four technologies that the author feels are better than Java for some situations: dynamic languages, continuation servers, convention over configuration and metaprogramming. Although all topics sound interesing, the article is way too brief to provide enough insight. As such it feels more like this article is meant to promote the new book by the author on the same subjects: Beyond Java. Given this article that book might indeed make it to my (seemingly ever growing) reading list.
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How Deep is Your Hierarchy?

Newsletter by Heinz Kabutz, 4 pages, 15 minutes.
As usual this is a very readable article that quickly gets down to the code. In this case the author tries to determine how many levels of inheritance you can use before either the compiler or the runtime breaks.
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Mastering Ajax, Part 3: Advanced requests and responses in Ajax

Article by Brett McLaughlin, 13 pages, 1 hour.
Although I didn't read the first two parts of this article, the third installment was readable on itself. It gives an introduction into the major properties of the XMLHttpRequest object and how you can use them in an Ajax application. The author sometimes repeats himself a bit too often, which is when it feels like he needs to fill a certain number of pages. But overall it a good read and gives some useful background information on Ajax technology.
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What is an MXBean?

Blog post by Eamonn McManus, 6 pages, 20 minutes.
An introduction to the new MXBean technology that's part of Java 6 (which has recently entered its beta phase) by one of the developers. MXBeans are supposed to simplify making your application manageable through JMX server (such as the JConsole application that comes with Java 5). Although the MXBean technology looks interesting, its too soon to start using it as Java 6 won't be upon is for more than half a year and it will take at least some more years to get into all application servers.
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Developing with Apache Derby

Article by Robert Brunner, 5 pages, 20 minutes.
This is the first article in a series that introduces its readers to the Apache Derby pure Java DBMS, which used to be known as Cloudscape. This article introduces the concepts of relational databases and their pervasive use in large web sites. It then goes to a short history of Cloudscape/Derby and ends with instructions on how to download and install Derby. I hope the next installment actually shows some code, because this one was rather light on content.
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Developing Ajax Applications That Preserve Standard Browser Functionality

Article by Marc Schiefelbein, 9 pages, 1 hour.
A nice and simple introduction into preserving the back/forward button and bookmarking functionality in Ajax applications. I like how the article first explains the basic functioning (with usable samples) and only then introduced the solution of the company for which the author works.
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J2EE Without the Application Server

Article by Guy Pardon, 15 pages.
This article illustrates how to replace a J2EE application server with Spring. This solves the problem of requiring an appserver during development, thus speeding up the edit-deploy-debug cycle. But it doesn't solve the complexity of configuring a J2EE app, it just replaces it with Swing's configuration files.
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Better File Uploads with AJAX and JavaServer Faces

Article by Jacobus Steenkamp, 9 pages.
There's three sides to this article: file uploads, AJAX and JSF. I admit to being only interested in the first two, since JSF seems way too complex for what it's accomplishing to my taste. The pages about uploading were interesting, but the actual upload handling is left to Apache Commons. Most interesting to me was the use of a servlet filter to handle the upload, which I hadn't thought of before. The AJAX and JSF parts were mingled, which seriously reduced the readability for me. Overall, this could have been better and aside from the servlet filter idea didn't teach me much.
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A Test-Driven Exploration of the Advanced Features of EJB 3.0

Article by Rod Coffin, 13 pages.
A very readable beginner level introduction of EJB3. The test driven approach is interesting, but gets less interesting fast. Basically it's seeing the EJB3-implementing and EJB3-using code that's interesting, the information on testing is not what I was interested in. But if you ignore the testing parts it's still a very readable introduction to some EJB3 features.
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Dependency injection in Apache Geronimo, Part 1: A new way to look at decoupling in J2EE applications

Article by Neal Ford, 8 pages.
This first part of the article doesn't yet have anything to do with Geronimo. Instead it is another introducion into DI/IoC using PicoContainer. I think Fowler's introduction is way more readable and educational. Let's hope that part 2 of the series will focus on DI in Geronimo.
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A story about FreeMarker and Velocity

Interesting personal story about migrating the Hibernate toolkit from Velocity templates to the (apparently much easier to debug) FreeMarker templates.
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Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern

A very interesting read on DI/IoC as is to be expected from Fowler. A good comparison of constructor, setter and interface injection with clear pros and cons for each. Fowlers personal opinion is clearly separated from the objective comparison. Some examples from PicoContainer and Spring make things even clearer and make this a must read for anyone interested in the subject.
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A beginners guide to dependency injection

A very simple introduction, but mostly this is a comparison of the approach taken by DI/IoC containers: Spring, PicoContainer, HiveMind and XWork.
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