Version 1.5 of the Java platform, code named "Tiger," adds seven new features to the Java programming language. The unifying theme of these features is ease of development: make programs clearer, shorter, and safer, without sacrificing compatibility or compromising the spirit of the language.

Metadata is information that cannot be expressed in Java, but is nevertheless important for your Java application to work properly. Currently, metadata is expressed in separate text, Java properties, and XML files, but that poses a serious problem: code is disconnected from configuration, making development, deployment, and maintenance that much more difficult. JDK 1.5 addresses this disparity, capturing critical information where it belongs: right in your code.

Aspect-oriented programming has been gaining a wider audience of late, as enterprise application developers discover that AOP provides for more intuitive, extensible, and flexible middleware. With JBoss AOP, provided in JBoss 4, developers can write plain old Java objects (POJOS) and request complex services like transactions, security, and caching with just a few simple annotations. Sound too good to be true? Read on.

Riffing on "free as in speech, not free as in beer," critics often quip that Open Source is "free, as in puppy."

In the old days, disk space cost a pretty penny, so saving space was essential. But now that disk space costs about $0.50 per gigabyte, a lot of folks never worry about deleting files, let alone compressing them. However, if you're administering a large, shared server (such as for email), it seems that you can never have too much space.

If recent events are any indication, open source advocates may be the best informed people in the country about software copyright law (outside of the legal profession). But as a foundation for future discussions, let's take some time this month to review the basics of United States copyright law, discuss the GNU General Public License (GPL), explore how various legal attacks on the GPL might play out, and see how those attacks might be thwarted.

Forbes magazine founder Bertie Charles Forbes once famously said, "If you don't drive your business, you'll be driven out of business." Indeed, many small and medium-sized businesses have floundered not because they offer a poor product or service, but because they're eventually unable to manage their business processes well enough to flourish in often highly competitive industries.

While the title of this month's "Power Tools" is "Execution and Redirection," it's not about about dying and going to heaven. Instead, controlling execution and redirecting input and output is an important part of managing Linux processes.

Suffering eyestrain from looking at a flickering monitor? Can't quite fit everything you want in your display? Ordinarily, problems like these call for a new monitor, or at least switching to a different standard resolution -- say, going down in resolution if the problem is flicker, or going up from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 to get more screen real estate.

Kernel 2.6 is finally here, and it touts several enhancements over the 2.4 series. The press has highlighted changes relevant to systems architects and managers, but there's plenty in 2.6 for application developers, too.

In some of my past columns, I've mentioned that my template system of choice is the aptly named Template Toolkit, a marvelous work by Andy Wardley. Although I've demonstrated how I've used the Template Toolkit (TT), I haven't really talked enough about what makes it so wonderfully useful. So, this month, let's take a more in-depth look at the wonders of TT.

April's "API Spy" introduced Python's C API and showed how a Python interpreter can be embedded in a C program. For many tasks where you need to run a Python script from within C code, last month's technique is sufficient. However, as your C programs and Python scripts evolve, you may want or need more advanced interaction between the two languages.

Whether you're an independent web site operator or the manager of a large web serving farm, you must constantly look for ways to optimize your environment to keep costs low and boost overall performance. Indeed, optimization has recently become something of a crusade for businesses, as many search for ways to yield even the slightest improvements in profit.