Michael Lacy

Over the past decade the Internet has evolved from a research project living in the realms of academia and government to a global infrastructure for electronic commerce and digital communication that has sent the stock market on a roller-coaster ride to new highs (and lows). It's a digital world in which a Darwinian survival of the fittest is taking place right before our eyes as web sites and web applications compete for the right to live another day. Whether it's another site offering a better service/product or the latest computer virus, a web application faces many competitors that threaten its very existence. As in the biological world, only the fittest will survive. And the fittest are the ones capable of adapting to their environment faster than their competitors can. As developers of these digital organisms, our job is to ensure that we equip our web applica... (more)

Genetic Algorithms in Java

Starting about 3.5 billion years ago with bacteria, nature em- barked on the grandest of all algorithms: the evolution of highly complex and dynamic machines capable of interacting with and adapting to their environments in order to solve problems. We know these machines as plants and animals. One look at the genetic code of even the simplest living organism reveals a structure that's enormously complex and efficiently tuned, ensuring the survival of the organism in its environment. We might even use the terms fault-tolerant, highly parallel, high performance, and ubiquitous. Don'... (more)

Presentation Logic and EJBs

With the proliferation of Java-based application servers at the core of today's Web applications, the preferred Web architecture that has emerged places Java in the middle tier, gathering data from myriad sources, and HTML presenting that data through a Web browser. As developers, we have a number of options for merging the two (Java and HTML, that is): JavaServer Pages (JSP), JHTML, Java Servlets and other proprietary APIs specific to vendors' application servers. But whichever path we choose, we all eventually struggle with the same challenge: keeping the Java and HTML code se... (more)