Joo-Hwee Lim

Motivation One nice feature of the Java language is having many useful programming facilities (or APIs) built into its core language packages. To write a client/server application, one can use the socket classes in the java.net package by modifying from any existing client/server codes. For instance, David Flanagan's "Java in a Nutshell" book (pp.145 to 148) [1] provides sample codes for implementing client and server with multi-threading features. However, it depends on your application. You may need to replace the readLine() and println() methods of the DataInputStream and PrintStream classes respectively with appropriate I/O methods (e.g. readInt(), writeFloat() etc.) of the respective subclasses of the InputStream and OutputStream I/O classes in the java.io package. In this way, one can write client/server applications by manually modifying and extending Java c... (more)

A Multi-Agent Meeting Organizer

Almost every working professional has experienced the tedium and frustration that results from scheduling a meeting for multiple attendees with potentially conflicting schedules plus additional constraints imposed by the meeting rooms and other resources. This problem deserves serious attention as many people in typical organizations have to spend a large portion of their working time in scheduling and attending meetings. With autonomous agents [1], which can schedule meetings and manage calendars on behalf of their users, the savings in time and effort can be tremendous. Users c... (more)

Java-Based Gateway Middleware for the Web

Today, the Web has become an indispensable part of our lives. The Web is built based on client/server architecture. Traditionally, the client/server model refers to a two-tier relationship with a desktop client connected over the network to some form of server such as a database server. However, today's client/server applications are shifting from traditional two-tier to multi-tier architecture as shown in Figure 1. Multi-tier client/server architecture offers advantages such as extensibility, greater application scalability and increased reusability of components. In the multi-... (more)

Web Database Publishing

Today, Web database publishing is an important way to publish information electronically. It actually combines the advantages of two important technologies - database and the Web. Standard database interfaces such as ODBC[1] (Open Database Connectivity) are used to provide an abstraction layer so that application programs can access data in a uniform and vendor-neutral way. ODBC is a standard API interface introduced by Microsoft. Each database requires a driver that converts SQL calls into the respective database's native calls and then performs the database interactions. Curren... (more)