The first edition of Effective Java by Joshua Bloch has quickly become one of the best rated and most popular Java books of all time. Now, the 2nd edition is out and I immediately bought it after it came out. I expected a very good Java book and was (of course!) not disappointed.
The 2nd edition […]

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VisualVM is a wonderful tool and should be part of the toolkit of any Java programmer.
With the latest version of Java, JDK 6 Update 7, VisualVM is now also part of the JDK distribution. If you are using an older version of Java, get it from it’s homepage.
VisualVM is build with the Netbeans RPC […]

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People have been waiting for new next version of JBoss Application Server for almost three years now. The new Version 5 will be close to a first release candidate now.
The new version promises improved performance and a much more flexible platform.
Together with new software like JBoss Messaging and more, JBoss probably will stay a […]

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Since Generics have been introduced to the Java language, there has been a lot of discussion about them. Many say they are too complicated.
Some say, Generics are the biggest problem in Java.
Many developers probably use Generics when using libraries like the Collections framework that comes with Java. But much less use them when designing their […]

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Groovy is one of the best things that happened in the Java world in the last years. It’s powerful, quite easy to use and just plain fun.
A couple of days ago, I met a guy in the train who saw me reading a Java book. He told me that he wanted to get into programming […]

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The new Groovy book by Venkat Subramaniam has been released recently. It’s called “Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer” and has the most detailed coverage of the Meta-Object Protocol (MOP), one of the coolest and most powerful features of Groovy.
Details about the book can be found here.
A first review can be found here.
Buy […]

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I’ve just read Billy Burke’s Dynamic Languages: Rationalizations and Myths. Very interesting read. Bill has many good points. I especially agree with him about the importance of great thread support. Java clearly is better here than current Ruby, PHP or Python implementations. (unless you use JRuby or Jython).
But I think Bill misses something.As I wrote […]

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I just came across this Guide to the Scala Community. After reading it I downloaded and installed Scala on my Linux machine. Recently I’ve read a lot about Scala on sites like artima.com (they also published the first book on Scala) or the Scala on Netbeans posts on this blog.
I am completely new to […]

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Language wars can be fun. But one should not take them too seriously.
Recently there has been a lot of discussion, especially about Ruby and Java. A couple of years ago, it was mostly Java vs. C++ or Python vs. Perl.
I’ve been working as a programmer for about 8 years and I’ve used many languages, including […]

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Recently I was listening to two programmers sitting close to me in a train. They were discussing the performance of String concatenation vs. StringBuilder. One said that it doesn’t matter anymore with new java versions. The other didn’t believe it. Neither did I and so I made a short and simple test.
Here are two methods:

[…]

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