Overall, the API is pretty straightforward to use, assuming that you are familiar with asynchronous processing in the first place. However, if you are not familiar with asynchronous processing, then this business of callbacks can be quite confusing and daunting. Additionally Tomcat 7 and Servlet API 3.0 make it easier to configure servlets using annotations. There are other cool features in 3.0 that I haven’t covered in this tutorial, like loading servlets programmatically.

I’ve been building web, mobile, desktop apps that are powered by the ScreamingToaster ONE Platform for the last 3 years. I’ve had to integrate with a lot of services, like weather, credit card payment processing gateways, GeoIP lookups, CellID lookups, etc. One of the easiest integrations I’ve had to perform is with Twitter . Twitter has a simple to use API that can be accessed using Java or just about any other language. There are some really good Java wrappers for this API, and I’m going to highlight a really good one in this tutorial. I’m also going to show you how to integrate with Twitpic using Java.

I’ve build payments and licensing infrastructure for my ScreamingToaster ONE Platform, that allows mobile, web, and desktop software to share the same payments and licensing services. For payments, I integrated with FirstData Global Gateway, using the LinkPoint API. The LinkPoint API is good and FirstData provides lots of documentation that shows you how to get started. However, there is one huge flaw in their API and support docs – they don’t show you how to connect to the LinkPoint TEST gateway. All the code and examples are geared to connect to the PRODUCTION/LIVE gateway. If you’re like me, you want to test your stuff before hooking up to the LIVE gateway . So this tutorial is dedicated to simply connecting to their TEST gateway, so that you can test your code before going live.

Given an IP address, this tutorial will show you how to get a Google Static Map from it. This is the third part of a 3 part series of tutorials on geocoding.

Given an IP address, this tutorial will show you how to get geographic location information from it. You can then use this location information for many different things, like looking up weather there, or perhaps displaying a pushpin on google maps, etc. This is the second part of a 3 part series of tutorials on geocoding.

Given an IP address, this tutorial will show you how to get geographic location information from it. You can then use this location information for many different things, like looking up weather there, or perhaps displaying a pushpin on google maps, etc. This is the first part of a 3 part series of tutorials on geocoding.

With web services, SOAP and XML RPC and sessionless RESTful protocols becoming popular over the last few years, this tutorial will take you through the steps of crafting a very lightweight RPC mechanism that uses Java’s object serialization and HTTP (URLConnection and Servlets).

“What is SOA?” This is a white paper on the definition of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and what ecosystem it fits in, and issues that are relevant to people at various stages of adopting this paradigm.

If you’ve ever want to incorporate web services into your graphical applications/applets/widgets written in Java, then there are some threading issues that you have to be mindful of, and design around. This tutorial will guide you though some of the important threading issues you have to keep in mind when building such applications. The strategies outlined in this tutorial apply to accessing more than just web services from Swing apps; it also applies to loading information from databases, and performing any other kind of time consuming process that has to happen in the desktop app and interact with it, but can’t make the user interface unresponsive.

If you’ve ever wanted to access weather reports from your desktop applications, widgets, or web applications, I’ve got some source code that will make it easier than ever to access this weather data from a Java API.