The open source Jakarta Struts framework is an immensely popular framework for building Web applications built around the Java 2 Enterprise Edition suite of technologies. Based on the Model-View-Controller pattern, Struts speeds up and simplifies development, letting you focus on business logic rather than infrastructure.

Think you know everything there is to know about Java? Well, here's your chance to prove it. Java personalities and experts Click and Hack Type-It present a pack of precocious Java puzzlers for your education and entertainment.

If your Java eats XML, consider XOM as your very own shark XOM, the XML Object Model for Java, is a new API for processing XML that strives to be simple to learn, easy to use, and uncompromising in its adherence to well-formed XML. Here's an introduction.

This month's issue of Linux Magazine is our second annual "Java" issue. As we did in March of last year, we've set aside the features of the magazine to explore new and emerging Java technology that you're likely to hear more about -- and if you're a Java programmer, probably code with -- in the months ahead.

Over the last several years, a small group of open source projects has evolved to become much more than just great software. One notable example is Mozilla. Long criticized for being bloated, bug-ridden, and behind schedule, Mozilla has evolved into a capable development platform. Other open source projects use Mozilla's core technology, such as the popular Gecko rendering engine, to build next-generation tools and applications. In many ways, Mozilla has become an umbrella for such projects, including this month's "Do It Yourself" software, the Phoenix Web browser.

A successful project depends on six things: smart people, smart planning, lots of hard work, and communication, communication, communication.

Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is an increasingly popular remote-access protocol. VNC is available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and others. (If you're unfamiliar with VNC or don't have VNC installed on your Linux system, see this month's "Tech Support" column on page 62 for instructions on how to install and use VNC.)

You're in Cape Town, but your data is in California. You're using a Sun system in your office, but your bleeding-edge Mozilla browser with the very cool theme and all of your favorite bookmarks is on your Linux box at home. How can you get bits from there to here without being there?

While building a Beowulf cluster presents some interesting technical challenges, the only reason to build such a cluster is to gain the "horsepower" required to solve some large computational problem or perform some repetitive processing task in a practical amount of time. As such, the requirements of your software and model should always dictate your choice of hardware, node interconnects, and hardware and software configuration. Indeed, the correct answer to nearly every cluster design question is, "It depends on your application."

In last month's column, I introduced the File::Find module that's included as part of the core Perl distribution. File::Find provides a framework to recursively catalog or manipulate directories and their contents.

VNC is short for Virtual Network Computing. First developed by Olivetti Research Laboratory (now called AT&T Laboratories Cambridge), VNC was originally designed to create and manage virtual network computers that could be added or deleted at will. However, what VNC turned into was a remote display system most similar to PC-Anywhere, the remote access application.