Ajit Sagar

I'll never buy a Casio watch again. Not just because they break down - that's just the luck of the draw - but because of their extremely poor service. I've spent months trying to get my $200 watch back from their service center, but to no avail. It isn't the money that matters; it's the principle of the thing. For a couple of months it was nearly impossible to get anyone on the phone, and there was no advertised Web address for contacting the service center. Customer service and relationship management is the cornerstone of a successful business. Today's software industry is a lot like other industries - it's service-driven and highly competitive. With the three-month Internet-year release cycle, vendors work hard to keep their service offerings at an acceptable level and to keep up with the rapid changes to the baseline products. They struggle with the same issues... (more)

It's A New World Out There

Folks, before I tell you about the exciting events that are taking place in the SYS-CON-XML community, I'd like to take a moment to introduce the new editorial board for XML-J. These well-known leaders and experts in the XML industry are going to take this already fine publication to even greater heights. Simeon Simeonov is our Web Services editor. He is chief architect at Macromedia, Inc., where he's leading work on XML, Web Services, and platform integration. Coco Jaenicke is our B2B editor and has been with us since the first issue of XML-J. She played a key role in the succ... (more)

Book Review: Enterprise Search

Enterprise Search provides a concise summary of the whys of implementing search in large organizations.The book is 168 pages and is really light, both literally and figuratively. Yet, it covers some key aspects of structuring search initiatives in enterprise organizations. I found Chapter 4 particularly insightful and it covers an area that is often missed, or buried under mountains of technology. "Planning Search" addresses search planning from the aspect of the stakeholders involved, starting with a stakeholder analysis, and ending with what to consider in a search strategy. M... (more)

JT Router: Let Your Clients Tunnel Their Way Across The Internet

Consider an Internet client that wants to connect to a site which allows access only to trusted clients. Consider a trusted client that has access to the site. Wouldn't it be great if the trusted client could relay the Internet client's data to the restricted-access site? In other words, it could act as a "channel", or a "router", for a restricted site. This article describes JTRouter - a multi-threaded Java program that acts as a tunnel for socket communication between an Internet client and a remote server. JTRouter allows a machine to initiate as well as accept Internet conne... (more)

Electronic Java

Hello, and welcome to electronic Java! In this column we'll examine the role of Java in the fast-growing world of electronic commerce. We'll also look at how the different components of the Java 2 Platform fit together to create complete enterprise-level e-commerce applications. This column will also focus on how these technologies relate to the world of Java and vice versa. Before we get into the specifics of how Java contributes to the world of e-commerce, I'd like to set the stage by briefly introducing e-commerce and how it relates to the Internet. Of course, once we get to the... (more)