Nice recap of the JDK 7 language changes with examples

Reflections on how the nature of programming and development have changed over the last 10 years.

Not long ago i came across this cool Java framework for building your own web applications. Actually I think someone posted it at Twitter ( @playframework ). At first i saw the invitational presentation which you can find here or at the framework’s page.

JPA has standardized the interfaces for persistence frameworks. However how much is standardized regarding the runtime behaviour of frameworks. These small code samples show different uses cases to test with your JPA framworks. Additionally hints on the actual framework behaviour, will help to improve usage.

At Devoxx 2009, Mark Reinhold from Sun announced that it was time for closures in Java. This was a big surprise to everyone, and there was a bit of a vacuum as to what was announced. Firstly, Sun, via Mark, have chosen to accept the basic case for including closures in Java. By doing so, the debate now changes from whether to go ahead, to how to proceed. This is an important step. Secondly, what did Mark consider to be in and what out? Well, he indicated that non-local returns and the control-invocation statement were out of scope. There was also some indication that access to non-final variables may be out of scope (this is mainly because it raises nasty multi-threading Java Memory Model issues with local variables).

There was some activity on the JSR 294 mailing list this morning. The Jigsaw team came down from the mountains and has informed us that…

A new document from the European Network and Information Security Agency shows the primary risks of cloud computing and a new chart of smartphone requests by OS shows Android is growing significantly in popularity. CA might be getting more popular with a prize offering for developer ideas.

Are there cases where a scripting language is more advisable than using Java for both speed of development and performance? How can you identify them? What are the performance implications?

JBoss' Manik Surtani provides an overview of the scope and capabilities of the Infinispan open source data grid platform, along with usage examples and a brief tour of the APIs. An upcoming second part will take a deep-dive into the architecture, more advanced APIs and extending Infinispan.

The very latest in Java desktop news from the last week, covering Swing, JavaFX and Griffon.

Nice review of logging frameworks for Java.

Test-Driven Development, or TDD, is often quoted as an essential Agile best practice, and so it is. It works wonders on green-fields projects and new code bases where you can start afresh and ensure that all your code is both easily testable and well tested. But what about legacy code? (By legacy code, I mean any code that does not have a comprehensive set of automated tests, so you might be writing legacy code as we speak).

The following is a list of the language features I miss most when programming Java, the list includes descriptions about Closures, Modules, and so on.

Java VM embodies continuations now (not in production, in a hacking mode :), This post shows how to write a non-blocking server with continuations.

Synthetica V2.9 (Swing Look and Feel) comes along with a new theme called Synthetica BlackEye Look and Feel. Below you'll find a short summary of the most important highlights: rounded toplevel windows, smart background images, translucent disabled icons ... and more.

Demonstration of a few of the different ways to dynamically invoke Groovy code within a Java environment.

As part of the Eclipse Gemini project, Spring Dynamic Modules will be moving to Eclipse.org where it will continue to be developed and to track ongoing enhancements to the Blueprint Service specification. The Spring Dynamic Modules code base will be dual-licensed under both the EPL and Apache License at Eclipse.org.

Before giving structures, we need to notice a little detail about making database connections in Java. All database connections must be stated in try and catch statements, because there is a possibility of getting an exception. That’s way, we try to make our connection in try statement. If our connection attempt fails, that means there is an exception, and the exceptions must be catched.

This article specifies the steps to create the commonly used charts in a JSF application with the use of Primefaces.

The iterators of the Collection implementations of the Java runtime throw a ConcurrentModificationException[1] when they detect that another thread has modified the Collection while a thread is iterating over it. Such iterators are generally called fail-fast iterators.

One question that has been repeatedly asked is why JSR-310 wasn't simply the same as Joda-Time. I hope to expain some reasons here. Joda-Time as JSR-310? At its heart, JSR-310 is an effort to add a quality date and time library to the JDK. So, since most people consider Joda-Time to be a quality library, why not include it directly in the JDK? Well, there is one key reason - Joda-Time has design flaws. Now before everyone panics and abuses that line as a tweet, I need to say that Joda-Time is by far the best option curently available, and that most users won't appreciate the design flaws. But, I do want to document them, so the basis for the changes in JSR-310 is clear.

This is a free eclipse plugin designed to help write code faster in spring based applications. This also has a junit generator part. One can have different junit tests for different kind of classes.

This text compares Java's two stream oriented XML parsers, SAX and StAX, and explains the difference in a "push" model and "pull" model. It also lists other differences in these two API's. If you have ever wondered which of these two API's to use, this text may help you decide.

db4o Maven snapshot repository is now available. Responding to a frequent request from the community, the db4o team now supplies Maven snapshots of both the stable and the trunk (continous) db4o builds. The repository is available at the following URL: https://source.db4o.com/maven The artifact layout corresponds to the structure you find in the regular downloads. It has changed between versions 7.4 and 7.12: In 7.12 they factored out the optional and cs (Client/Server) modules to become separate jars and supply a full (no dependency) jar that contains the full db4o distribution including all required and optional modules.

db4o Deep Prefetching for C/S mode is examined via runtime statistics (a facility that allow you to track db4o behavior). (Even if you don't use db4o in C/S mode, it may still be worthwhile to keep on reading, since some of the observations made apply to db4o configuration optimization in general - or actually even more, to performance tweaking in general)