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.

If you are a Java developer, and you want to write software for mobile devices, Android is without a doubt the most accessible mobile development platform out there. The reason for this is simple: you write your applications in Java, using tools that you are already familiar with (notably Eclipse). Because of this, the the learning curve is a lot gentler than learning to develop on IOS for the iPhone or iPad, which involves also learning a whole new language. And, as we will see, you can also benefit from all the great tools and techniques (unit testing, automated builds, Continuous Integration and so forth) that you are used to in a Java development environment.

This article is not about writing Android applications, though that is a fun topic too! This article is about integrating an Android process into the broader automated build infrastructure. It is the first of two-part series - this article will look at how to automate your Android build process with Maven. The second part will look at automated testing and Continuous Integration on the Android platform.

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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