In his JavaOne talk this year, Josh Bloch gave some very useful tips about using enums in Java. Here is my take on enums, and how to use them to represent simple value lists which would otherwise be stored in code tables. This document is in two parts - Part one covers the basics of Java enums, and Part 2 goes into more advanced use cases such as using enums with Hibernate.

In the first part of this article, we looked at the basics of how to use enums in Java 5. In this part, we look at some more advanced use cases, including how to use enums with Hibernate.

Want to provide maps in your web application? The Google Maps API is straightforward to call from Java, and with an Ajax-ian approach, you can make it extra user-friendly. This article shows you how to combine these approaches.

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Jabber is a popular and widely supported XML-based API for exchanging instant messages. You could compose the messages by hand, but there's an alternative. This article introduces the Smack API, which makes it easy to use Jabber services from Java.

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There are plenty of good tools out there - the trick is to get them all to play together well. In this presentation, we go through the full process of setting up an automated software development infrastructure, from code changes and version control right through to automated deployment to staging and production.