Sun’s Java 1.4 has quietly gone end-of-life since 30 October; see Sun’s Java SE 1.4.2 page:
J2SE 1.4.2 is in its Java Technology End of Life (EOL) transition period. The EOL transition period began Dec, 11 2006 and will complete October 30th, 2008, when J2SE 1.4.2 will have reached its End of Service Life (EOSL).
This doesn’t [...]

Popularity: 140 points

There’s a very good article on JavaWorld by Klaus Kreft and Angelika Langer (the latter is the author of the well-known Java Generics FAQ) with the title Understanding the closures debate. I heard about this article on JavaPosse episode 194, and it’s also being discussed on Artima.
I knew that there were proposals to add closures [...]

Popularity: 1522 points

The third and last day of the conference. The first session I went to this morning was a very interesting one, “The Busy Java Developer’s Guide to Scala” by Ted Neward. He explained the basics of the Scala programming language. Scala is a new and very interesting programming language that combines object oriented and [...]

Popularity: 565 points

The first keynote of today was “Language-Oriented Computing: Shifting Paradigms” by Neal Ford. It was a good presentation (with nice slides), mainly about domain-specific languages. See also Martin Fowler’s page on DSLs.
At 9:10 I went to “Spring 2.5 On the Way to 3.0″ by Jürgen Höller (one of the main committers on the Spring [...]

Popularity: 545 points

I am in Prague, at the TheServerSide Java Symposium Europe. It’s a conference much like other conferences about Java, but not as big (there are about 300 attendees) and with a focus on server-side Java technology (although non-Java stuff such as Adobe Flex and AIR, Groovy and JRuby also get some attention).
The first day started [...]

Popularity: 597 points

In my last blog I already mentioned the role of software metrics in my graduation assignment. Software metrics are indicators for the quality of the source of a program. For example, one of the most well known metrics is McCabe’s cyclomatic complexity. This metric gives an indication of the complexity of a method or module/class. [...]

Popularity: 410 points

Most java projects use a bunch of common classes for various things.
Because this functionality is so common, we tend to copy these common classes from one of our earlier projects.
Instead of just copying some ‘legacy’ snippets from previous projects, it might be a more sensibly thing to use the (Apache) Jakarta Commons libraries instead.
One of [...]

Popularity: 251 points

One of the major new features of Java 5.0 is generics. The main purpose of generics is to provide you with a way to make type safe collections, for example, you can specify that your List contains only String objects. The obvious advantages are that the compiler can check at compile time that nothing else [...]

Popularity: 1985 points

Some years ago I found out about this class being very usefull in your application. You never used a ThreadLocal? I’ll explain the concept and provide some examples.
So what’s the difference between a thread-local variable and a normal variable? When a thread accesses a thread-local variable it has its own independently initialized copy of the [...]

Popularity: 1787 points