Why do individuals and companies still say things like “We can't use Grails because we are a Java shop”? Do “Java shops” use Spring? Spring beans can be written in Groovy. Do “Java shops” use JSF? JSF backing beans can be written in Groovy. Contrariwise, most Grails artifacts can be written in Java. Grails is a Java framework, just like Spring, JSF, etc. It just happens to be the first one out with Groovy support.

If you’re one of those hipster programmers who loves Clojure, Ruby, Scala, Erlang, or whatever, you probably deeply loathe Java and all of its giant configuration files and bloated APIs of AbstractFactoryFactoryInterfaces. I used to hate all that stuff too. But you know what? After working for all these months on these huge pieces of Twitter infrastructure I’ve started to love the AbstractFactoryFactories.

This is a follow-up of my last post, where I compared the runtimes of the quicksort algorithm implemented in Java, Scala, Groovy and Groovy++. Groovy++ came up with a significant improvement over Groovy. But there was a comment by ait (Thanks ait) on how to improve the performance of the Groovy++ implementation even further, by changing a single line. In fact, this improved the performance dramatically.

With more than 275 fixed Bugzilla issues, Ant 1.8 flaunts some new performance improvements. A large directory scan, which would have taken 14 minutes in Ant 1.7.1, now takes as little as 22 seconds with Ant 1.8. The new version also scans smaller directory trees faster, going roughly from quadratic time to linear time when scanning directories.

Continuing our series of articles, taking each design pattern one by one, we move onto the Adapter pattern. This pattern is used a lot in Eclipse, allowing plug-ins to be loosely coupled, yet still be integrated into the Eclipse runtime.

An updated guide to integrating Quartz into j2ee applications

The latest version of the JavaFX SDK is out and available from the usual JavaFX.com downloads page. Looking at the release notes it's a bug fix release with a couple of tweaks for performance that include: * Smaller JavaFX runtime download * Faster startup times for JavaFX applications * Improved reliability of JavaFX applications in Safari and Firefox on the Mac OS X * Improved error handling

My previous article A sneak peek into Groovy++ covered what Groovy++ is, what are the pros and cons of using it, where it fits compared to Groovy and Java and some high level differences between them. The purpose of this article is to go a bit deeper and try out a few more basic examples and see how things differ in various areas.

Sean Corfield talks about the the ColdFusion specification and explains the ways in which they hope to resolve code portability issues. Corfield is a strong proponent of open source and he has worked on open source projects for about fifteen years. The For ColdFusion Foundation, Corfield explains, is intended to make ColdFusion more open and to provide a central location for key projects. The foundation is in its early stages, but Corfield says that they already have a partnership with JBoss. Finally, Corfield talks about what's on the horizon for the ColdFusion ecosystem.

One of Java's most heard flaws (verbosity) isn't really tied to the language - it is rooted in a more deeply source: it comes from the way we use it.

Two weeks ago Oracle announced that it would be shutting down Project Kenai for public use and moving it inside the company for continued internal use. Oracle said that the project was not achieving the expected usage levels, but they also said that they would look for other avenues to advance the project and possibly re-open it to the public if it could be improved. It appears the plan has changed. In a letter, Ted Farrell, the Chief Architect and VP of Tools and Middleware, announced that Oracle plans to merge Kenai and Java.net:

Think you can't learn anything useful from a video game for development? Well, spend a few hundred hours on Diablo II and you might learn some of these lessons.

So you want Distributed, Scalable and Highly Available Cache? If yes, then this is the right place for you. The Terracotta Ehcache release has these features inbuilt. The Express Installation mode has simplified Terracotta integration in your application

We are currently in the final phases of testing the version of our platform that will form the basis of our commercial offering. Our acceptance testing work flow involves consuming services provided by other organisations to best simulate a real-world usage scenario for our platform. The primary third party service we use is hosted version control. In fact, it is only reasonable to state that Mike has a strong dependency on the existence of such services. It is the first link in the chain of what we here at Mike HQ refer to as the ‘hosted ALM continuum’ – the suite of co-operating and complementary hosted services that provide agile teams with a full outsourced, web-enabled, development ‘stack’.

I’ve been following Scala off and on for about two years now. Mostly in spurts. I liked the language, but due to the workload and other priorities I never had the time to take it for a full ride. Well, over the last 2 weeks, I decided to take the full plunge. I’m taking a highly concurrent production application, where power is a very critical component of our application, and rewriting it in Scala. I’m doing this for more than just fun.

Today, Terracotta and Eucalyptus are announcing a partnership in which the two open source companies will provide tighter integration between Terracotta's data management solution and Eucalyptus' cloud solution. The two companies will also engage in joint sales and marketing activities, says Jeff Hartley the VP of Marketing and Products at Terracotta. DZone spoke with Hartley about the benefits of the deal. Generally, he says, technology on the compute side (virtualization, cloud) has advanced more quickly in recent years than technology on the data management side. He says many applications today are over-reliant on databases, which is causing bottlenecks and inefficiencies on cloud deployments.

Adam Leggett talks about how he has been using Codesion for their hosted subversion service.

Traditionally a Java servlet container has a fixed session time, a flood of traffic can potentially cause JVM OOM errors if the session time is set too high. I wanted a smart session container that can hold onto sessions for as long as possible and expire sessions only when absolutely necessary; a Memcached store would be perfect for this.

DbUnit is one of those invaluable frameworks in my toolbox. The only thing I don’t like are the XML dataset formats. Having played around with JSON for the last couple of weeks, I decided a nice exercise would be to create a JSON-based dataset.

Step by step how-to on how to analyse Out Of Memory problems on Android. Includes lessons learned/tips.

Jonathan Schwartz internal memo to employees and his resignation from Sun.

This weeks Refcard, written by Craig Walls, covers the Spring WebFlow framework. I spoke with Craig to find out more about Spring WebFlow, it's relationship to Spring and how to get started using WebFlow.

More stuff on how you can use 'Theories', one of the new features of JUnit

Perhaps every programmer working with Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) comes to the point when he/she recognizes that java.io.Input/OutputStream classes do not implement java.io.Serializable interface - so that they cannot be used as remote methods' arguments or return values. I/O streams are usually tightly bound to a file descriptor or a network connection so its reasonable that they should not be used outside the local JVM.

This month not much changed in the index. Objective-C and Go are still scoring all time highs, while staying close to each other. There are 4 programming languages that have a realistic chance of entering the top 20 next month. These are educational language Scratch, functional language Erlang and JVM languages Scala and JavaFX Script.