JavaWorld gets a new look

Welcome to the new and improved JavaWorld! Our longtime, loyal readers know that we’ve needed a makeover for a while. You might find JavaWorld more visually appealing, but more importantly, we hope you will find the Website much easier to navigate.

Java technology has of course evolved tremendously since JavaWorld‘s launch in February 1996, but many of our past tutorials are still valid — we can tell because you send us plenty of email about these older articles, and page views numbers confirm their popularity. Our archives are indeed very rich.

However, our former design kept our gems well hidden from you. No longer! I want to highlight three crucial elements in our left navigational bar that will help you locate all current and past articles more efficiently and effectively:

• Search engine: We know that the search function has been a source of frustration for our readers. Our new search engine, powered by Google, should offer much better search results.
• Archive: The former pull-down menu for our archive was barely visible at the bottom of our old home page. Now you will see the Archive link at the top of the left nav on every page. Clicking on it will bring up a page where you’ll be able to view articles by month and year or by specific column name.
• Topical Index: We’ve completely revamped our Topical Index. The old Topical Index mixed topics (Enterprise JavaBeans) with article categories (Java News). This was quite confusing. The new Topical Index is organized only by updated topics, and the five top-level topics cover five main areas of Java: Core Java, Enterprise Java, Micro Java, Applied Java (development tools, performance tuning, testing, security, etc.), and Java Community (certification and training, licensing, standards, etc.).

The left nav bar will help you quickly find the articles you need whether it be via the search engine, the archive, or the Topical Index.

I also want to point out elements of the top, horizontal nav that allow readers to find articles by article category. There are three main article categories: Features (mostly tutorials), Columns (monthly technical or opinion columns), and News and Reviews (including the subcategories Product Reviews, Book Reviews, Interviews, Product News, Industry News, and Commentary).

The home page will only feature new articles for a particular week under these categories. The second-level category pages will index all articles under those categories for the given month. Article category index pages are new to JavaWorld. Again, the goal is that our articles — both new and old — will be faster and easier to locate.

The top nav additionally offers links to other important index pages (Java Tips and Java Q&A) and reference pages (JW Resources and About JW).

This is the essence of the redesign: JavaWorld has so much to offer — information you can’t get anywhere else. And we’re bringing it all forward now.

The redesign is an ongoing development, and we want to hear from you. Please let us know what you think, and we’ll keep improving JavaWorld together.

Best regards,

Carolyn Wong

Editor in Chief