• HP uses technology tools in Java development and on its websites.computer image by Hao Wang from Fotolia.com
  
  Hewlett-Packard (HP) is an American international company that specializes in information technology (IT) products and services, including computers, servers and software. HP, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, started in 1939. The company uses certain technology tools to enhance its Java development efforts and web services. These are free to use and usually function as command line tools, which means they run from the command prompt.
  
  

RMI

• The Remote Method Invocation (RMI) Tools are a set of Java tools used by HP that help create interactive web applications. Four tools are included: serialver, rmic, rmid and rmiregistry. Serialver returns the serial version user identifier (UID) class and rmic allows you to create skeletons and stubs when working with remote objects. Stubs are located on your local server and basically mimic the remote object's interface. Skeletons are also on your server. They send calls to the remote object. The serial version user identifier is a unique name or qualifier for a class that can be serialized: a Java class that uses the java.io.Serializable interface. Rmid activates the Java remote method invocation (RMI) daemon, which offers a simple model to use with Java objects. The rmiregistry tool is the service for your remote object's registry.
  
  

Gathering

• The Information-gather tools are used on HP websites to collect information about users. Rather than using cookies or Web beacons, they only record how users interact with the website. These tools help HP troubleshoot problems and only store this information for a short period of time. The HP server stores this information and allows HP to replay customer sessions. The company cannot, however, accomplish this in all countries.
  
  

Security

• The Security tools are for developers, to help them create applications that work with the security policies at remote sites. You can use these tools to create the security policies for your site. The three tools in this set are the policytool, keytool and jarsigner. The policytool uses a graphical user interface (GUI) and helps you maintain policy files. The keytool keeps track of your certificates and keystores, while the jarsigner creates and verifies the Java ARchive (JAR) signatures. The keystore contains your public and private keys, as well as your certificates. JAR signatures are part of the manifest file, while signatures validate files. When Java loads, it will check the signature on files to determine if these files are valid. If not, it will not load them. JAR signatures are found on checksums within the file, which are data blocks of a fixed size. Checksums check for errors.
  
  

Web Beacon

• HP Web beacons usually work in with cookies to obtain information about how you use websites and emails. These tools determine how well HP and third-party partner sites are performing. The web beacon is a type of electronic image with only one pixel. HP uses this tool on its websites. The web beacon is often a completely transparent GIF image. These tools report information to HP about the time and date you visited the page, as well as the page cookies. It also reports on the location of the beacon.